Augustus John (68 page)

He also picks out ‘three old gentlemen’, Bonnard, Jean-Louis Forain and Georges Rouault, as being above competition – ‘individual and isolated
examples of the glory of French painting’. And among the younger ones he chooses Marc Chagall for ‘his admirable handling of paint’, Othon Friesz and, above all, André Segonzac, who ‘conceived the landscape in its fundamental unity and basic rhythm… setting free its deep burden of emotion in low and thrilling chords of colour’.

His criticism of British painters is more complicated since it sews together paragraphs of interrupted friendship with passages of tentative appreciation – the two someti mes embroidered with double entendre:

‘With Mr Henry Lamb we have another type of mind, more self-conscious but less free [than Matthew Smith’s]. He seeks, with an almost mathematical ingenuity, to invent new harmonies of colour in combination with a most searching analysis of character. This passionately serious painter, for whom any intellectual concession is an impossibility, remains still insufficiently recognised. For so many amateurs, an easy and comforting facility is more attractive than Mr Lamb’s
intransigence
and the almost moral integrity of his art.’

The theme which emerges from this art criticism is a belief in individual accomplishment independent of art trends. Augustus comforted himself with the notion that posterity amends the injustices of contemporary neglect and that no effort of creative merit could fail to be recognized in the course of time: but he did not really believe it. There was no sign, for instance, that the work of Paul Maitland or W. E. Osborn would be revived. Yet there was a certain luxury in protesting against the inevitable.

His protest lay against Paris: not as a symbol and repository of the great French tradition of painting by which he himself had profited, but as a forcing house of the international picture bourse. Paris had become the world’s greatest stock-exchange for art, the Mecca of the amateur, the student, and above all the dealer. A great machinery for the encouragement of the young was centred there and people arrived from all over the world in search of revelation. That a great tradition had made Paris famous was taken to imply that it was Paris which had made the tradition. Yet many painters had had a bitter struggle to establish themselves in the city of which, after their deaths, they were the pride. Constantin Guys had been, in Baudelaire’s words, ‘le peintre inconnu’; Honoré Daumier a political suspect and journalist-illustrator to the end of his life. The Post-Impressionists found it no easier. Biographies of Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh all told a similar story of derision, lack of understanding. Henri Rousseau ‘le Douanier’ and Modigliani, whom in great poverty Augustus visited a few years before his death, were two recent victims of incomprehension on the part of ‘the great art city of the world’. By the late 1920s
their pictures all fetched enormous prices, and Paris, on their posthumous behalf, did herself great honour. The huge combination of studio and dealer’s shop that had been constructed there was an empty shell: the goddess of art had paused – and now moved on.

There is a danger of the individual and national voice being lost in an international lingua franca.’ This became the basis of Augustus’s complaint against Roger Fry and his Omega Workshops which, full of bright ‘rhombuses, rhomboids, lozenges, diamonds, triangles and parallelograms’,
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had been set up shortly before the Great War to give young artists the chance to earn money from many sorts of commissions – for murals, painted furniture, rugs and carpets, mosaics, pottery or stained glass. Augustus came to believe that the gifts of the Bloomsbury painters were misappropriated by Fry (though he did not see that this might also be partly true with regard to himself). Duncan Grant, for instance, had ‘an innate sense of decoration [and]… exhibits a natural lyricism in his work which appears to owe less to definite calculation than to irrepressible instinct for rhythmical self-expression’. But his talent was misdirected by Fry’s critical ideology, so that his versatile temperament absorbed ‘with an ease nearly related to genius the most disconcerting manifestations of the modern spirit’.

A better course, Augustus believed, was exemplified by an artist whose work had something in common with Duncan Grant’s, Matthew Smith. He too was influenced by the modern spirit, but had taken from it only what was useful:

‘French influences are inevitably to be noted in his work, but the fulness of form which characterises so many of his figures has a distinct relationship with Indian and Persian drawings. With a cataract of emotional sensibility he casts upon the canvas a pageant of grandiose and voluptuous form and sumptuous colour, which are none the less controlled by an ordered design and a thoroughly learned command of technique. This makes him one of the most brilliant figures in modern English painting. Aloof and deliberately detached from the appeals of ordinary life, he sits apart and converts what to other men are the ever-partial triumphs of passion into permanent monuments of profound sensory emotion. In flowers, fruit and women he finds the necessary material for his self-expression, and from them he has evolved a kind of formula which represents his artist’s inner-consciousness. And he has never risked the danger which threatens those who make bargains with society by attempting the almost impossible task of combining fine painting with satisfactory portraiture.’

Of all living British painters Matthew Smith was the one whose abilities Augustus most admired. The nature of his admiration, as revealed here, was partly a stick with which to beat himself. The source of Augustus’s own inspiration was South Wales, but he felt he was denied access there by the presence of his father. He had found in Provence, and very soon would find in North Wales too, landscapes that through a mysterious process of self-identification and self-abandonment liberated his imagination. He had found also an artist, another Welshman, with whom he now entered a brief period of mutual apprenticeship, radiant, and unique in his career.

‘When shall I come to Wales again?’

Augustus John to John Sampson (undated,
c.
May 1910)

‘Since I left it I find myself to be very much of a Welshman and would like to be back.’

J. D. Innes to Augustus John (4 August 1913)

During 1910, the first of Augustus’s Slade contemporaries, William Orpen, quietly joined the Royal Academy. This appeared the dull side of Virginia Woolf’s brilliant Post-Impressionist symbol. With extraordinary precision art history was repeating itself and the
enfants terribles
of a decade ago were starting on their journey to become respectable Old Men. Their rebel headquarters, the New English Art Club, was now twenty-four years old. French-built to withstand the assaults of British Academicism, it now stood, a British fortress against the advance of French Post-Impressionism. What was needed, apparently, was a newer Salon des Refusés to oppose the old Salon des Refusés, whose tyrannical rule was felt by younger artists far more acutely than the remote indifference of Burlington House.

The first expression of this need had been Frank Rutter’s Allied Artists’ Association, a self-supporting concern modelled on the Parisian Société des Artistes Indépendants. All artists, by paying an annual subscription, could exhibit what works they pleased without submitting them to a censorious jury. Founded in 1908, in July of which year it held its first mammoth show at the Albert Hall, it soon gave birth to the ‘Camden Town Group’ and the ‘London Group’, which in 1914 was to swallow them both. Augustus was a founder member of the Allied Artists’ Association,
though he seldom exhibited. ‘John never does exhibit anywhere unless you go and fetch his pictures yourself,’ Rutter explained. ‘…He joined because, like the good fellow he is, he thoroughly approved of the principles of the A.A.A., and knew it would help others though he had no need of it himself.’
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The ideals of the Allied Artists’ Association were soon immersed in combative art politics. On Saturday nights its members – usually Augustus, Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, Lucien Pissarro, Rutter himself and Sickert – would meet at a little hotel in Golden Square, then go on afterwards to the Café Royal. And almost always the talk would turn, and return, to the question of whether they should capture the New English Art Club or secede and set up a rival society. Augustus was what Rutter called ‘consistently loyal’ to the NEAC. In several respects his position was closest to the Protean figure of Sickert. Both were opposed to ‘capturing’ the New English, and Augustus believed furthermore that any other group they might found must be truly independent rather than a rival. Only in that way could it faithfully represent their ideal of exhibiting freely, and plot a course of tolerance and diversity between the various rocks of art fashion. The result of these talks was the formation in 1911 of the Camden Town Group, dominated by Gilman, Ginner, Bevan and Gore, and watched over by the benevolent eye of Sickert. Though unconnected with Camden Town, Augustus was admitted to this group, which marked an important defection from the New English Art Club whose original aims it nevertheless almost exactly reproduced. He exhibited only once with them, though he liked to look in on their weekly meetings at 21 Fitzroy Street, and surreptitiously buy pictures both for himself and for Quinn.

Then, in 1912, two things happened: he turned down Clive Bell’s invitation to show work at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition; and, leaving the Camden Town Group, he ‘flew back to the New English’. When, in 1914, the London Group emerged as the spearhead of modernity, Augustus’s name was, for the first time, not among Britain’s avant-garde.
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It is easy to draw from these two acts a false conclusion. Augustus was prolific; he had a wealthy American patron, and the use of a London gallery where he could show his pictures. With his large family, he needed more money than many other artists, but his work was now fetching good prices – the small oil panels at the Chenil had sold for forty pounds (equivalent to £1,800 in 1996) each and some of them were soon changing hands for seventy and eighty pounds. He was deeply uninterested in art politics. What he wanted was as many alternatives as were practicable – all sorts of exhibitions where, irrespective of style, artists could display
and sell their paintings. But the Camden Town Group – named, in deference to Sickert, after the working-class area which provided subject matter for many of its members’ pictures – though it contained better painters, seemed narrower than the New English. Besides, John’s vibrant landscapes were quite out of place in a Camden show. The decision to show nothing at its two exhibitions in 1910 had not been one of art policy: no one could ‘go and fetch his pictures’ while he was abroad that year. The year had ended with his one-man show at the Chenil for which he reserved all his recent work; but in 1911 he was again exhibiting with the NEAC. Nevertheless he had not quarrelled with the Camden Town painters, whose work he continued recommending to Quinn.

Yet behind his decision to withhold work from the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition there lay Augustus’s involuntary involvement in a sudden clash between Roger Fry and Will Rothenstein. The enmity which flared up between these two didactic painter-politicians seems partly to have arisen from Rothenstein’s attitude to the new power Fry was exercising on behalf of the younger contemporary artists. Fry had been given temporary control of the Grafton Gallery which, he innocently told Rothenstein, ‘seemed to me a real acquisition of power’. He planned to stage there a large exhibition by living British artists and, very late in the day, invited Rothenstein to submit – adding by way of inducement: ‘John has promised to send.’
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This invitation, however, was not only delayed but also restricted to Rothenstein’s recent Indian work, which Will knew in his heart was far from being his best. Worse still, he himself had been pondering upon a similar plan; but while he pondered Fry had gone ahead with his own arrangements without benefit of Rothenstein’s collaboration. Many years later (27 July 1920) Fry admitted to Virginia Woolf that ‘I used to be jealous of Prof. Rothenstein, who came along about four years after me and at once got a great reputation, but’, he added triumphantly, ‘I wouldn’t change places with him now.’
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From all sorts of people Rothenstein was picking up rumours of Fry’s schemes. He felt offended. ‘I have heard no details of your Grafton schemes at all and was waiting to hear what it is you propose,’ he pointed out to Fry (30 March 1911). ‘…You have been too busy to tell me of a thing which is of some importance.’ Fry, however, seems to have been anxious to establish his Grafton Group to a point where Rothenstein, once admitted, could not alter it. ‘Do let us, however, get rid of misunderstandings,’ Rothenstein pleaded, under the threat of being left out altogether (4 April 1911): ‘we are both of us working for the same thing and it seems absurd that there should be anything of the kind… But I don’t think you realise how ignorant I am of your intentions and of your powers.’

It was this fact of their ‘working for the same thing’ that divided them.
Rothenstein felt that if Bloomsbury was sponsoring the Grafton Group, he would be at a disadvantage. He therefore sought to discover a point of principle with which to misunderstand Fry’s intentions. Since Steer and Tonks had already refused to let their pictures be shown in company with those of younger artists, there seemed a good chance that Fry’s scheme could be halted. The particular point of principle that Rothenstein turned up concerned the selection of the show, which apparently was to be made by Fry alone. In place of such dictatorship, Rothenstein suggested an ‘advisory committee of artists’, and recommended the sort of people – Augustus, Epstein, Eric Gill, Ambrose McEvoy – who might sit on it. These were all artists, friendly to Rothenstein, whose work Fry wanted to include. By refusing this suggestion Fry ran the risk of alienating them. In his reply to Rothenstein (13 April 1911) he insisted that it was ‘inevitable that I should appeal to various artists to trust me with large powers since I have the actual control and responsibility on behalf of the Grafton Galleries. Now you know me well enough to know that I am not unlikely to listen to advice from you and that I should give every consideration to any suggestions which you or John or McEvoy might make and I should be delighted if you would co-operate; at the same time I could hardly go to the other groups of younger artists, who are quite willing to trust me personally, and say to them that their work must come before such a committee as you suggest for judgement; nor can I possibly get rid of my responsibilities to the Grafton Galleries.’