Little pictures for little patrons

30 March 2015

EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK

In Tate Britain's new exhibition devoted to the painters of Camden Town early in the 20th century, I sense the consequences of a long-lived but very quiet conspiracy to elevate to undue importance a group who, in the great cat's cradle of art history, matter not a jot.

More than half a century ago, one of my tutors at the Courtauld Institute, Michael Kitson - who should have become the institute's director after Anthony Blunt - suggested that I should look at Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore and other painters who had briefly gathered at the knee of Sickert; and look I did, with amusement and enthusiasm, for in their various hesitant ways they seemed a tentative, reflective link with much that had happened in Paris since 1870.

In the good old days, long before it became the victim of BP's damaging merry-go-round patronage, when the original Tate Gallery thought that its responsibility was to demonstrate in its hanging the whole history of British art, their pictures were constantly on view, and in the autumn of 1957 I was asked to lecture on them there, joining the conspirators.

A little later, Blunt and I hatched a plan to buy their paintings for the institute and plug an obvious gap in its collections, a plan aborted by the would-be donor not because of Blunt's disgrace but because of the institute's pusillanimous failure to defend him.

Throughout the Sixties a handful of minor dealers began to show a scholarly interest in the field, a handful of academics too, and with shrewdly constructed auctions, Christie's and Sotheby's frequently provoked the patronage of collectors whose pockets were not deep enough for major names, but who sought paintings of interest and quality within their own parameters - better a good Sickert or good Ginner than sweepings from the studios of Gauguin and Degas.

That Tate Britain is now exhibiting the Camden Town Group in what it claims to be "the most comprehensive critical survey ... for over 50 years" shows how neglectful and far behind it is in its response to two generations of addiction by all these.

In 1911, the general weariness with the Royal Academy that had led to the rebellious founding of the New English Art Club in 1886 applied to that institution too.

On a Saturday night, probably in April ( the precise date was not recorded), the rumblings of dissatisfaction came to a head over a customary dinner attended by Ginner, Bevan, Gore, Gilman and Sickert, with their determination to form another group - "We have just made history," Sickert declared.

Lists were made, invitations to join issued, and, because so many members lived and worked or were within easy reach of it, the rebels dubbed themselves the Camden Town Group - as Sickert, ever the spokesman, put it, a district much "watered with his tears".

Looking now at the 16 members, it is evident that the seeds of self-destruction were immediately sown: what had ebullient Augustus John in common with Sickert, dry old Lucien Pissarro with young Duncan Grant, the haplessly weak Walter Bayes with Wyndham Lewis, the fiery intellectual? There was some coherence in the work and intellectual attitudes of Ginner, Gilman and Gore, but these had to be stretched to find kinship in the work of Bevan and Sickert and, among the others, only Malcolm Drummond and William Ratcliffe shared their spirit.

With so little unity, cliques formed among the members and by the beginning of 1914, riven by disaffection and dissent, the Camden Town Group simply petered out. Most of its members were absorbed into the newly formed London Group (another once bright-eyed association of painters fallen into long-drawn-out desuetude), but Bevan, Ginner and Gore established another, much smaller band of painters named the Cumberland Market Group, after the hay and fodder market that was then to the north of Regent's Park; it held only one exhibition, was much disrupted by the First World War and lapsed within five years.

The Camden Town painters had no greater ambition than to provide "little pictures for little patrons" at low prices. They were modern painters in that they developed individual ways of handling paint, all of which suggest a modest flowering of French Impressionism 40 years after the event, some slight awareness of Seurat but no understanding of Pointillism, some knowledge of the self-conscious simplicities of Gauguin, and, in the case of Ginner, surrender to the influence and touch of Van Gogh.

Their subjects were informal portraits of their friends, wives, servants and themselves, cluttered and casual still lives that seem devoid of composition, the backstreets and garden squares of a London gone to seed, the shabby interiors of an impoverished bedsit society, and the uncomely nakedness of any woman who could be cajoled into undressing or paid five bob to show her fanny.

All these were observed with disarming honesty, even when the painters were overwhelmed with influence and their works with obtrusive mannerisms, and occasionally, as with Gilman's Eating House (as much a Cumberland Market picture as of Camden Town), an eye for the abstract values of the commonplace.

Late in 1914, Lucien Pissarro wrote of the London Group: "... there is only one thing to consider, that is our ideal in Art. Others with different ideas may fight their battle, that is not our business, we must fight for ours ..." He believed that the London Group should be a church broad enough "to permit all individual developments and at the same time to allow us all to join together ..." This had not been the case with the Camden Town Group and it ended with frank abuse.

Sickert dubbed Gilman and Ginner "the thickest painters in London" - thick as evidently a personal insult as a description of their paint - and went on to argue that "rugged impasto ... is a manner of shouting and gesticulating and does not make for expressiveness or lucidity".

Ginner, a gentle creature to whom shouting and gesticulating were utterly foreign and whose work was scrupulously meticulous, responded with "I shall paint as thick as I damn well please" and then muddied the clarity of that short statement with a long and tedious essay on what he called Neo-Realism, in which his arguments were so incoherent and haphazard that Pissarro, admitting that he could not understand the term, opined that "they don't quite know where they are going".

They were going nowhere. Gilman painted his two halfway masterpieces evoking the life of the London lodger, Tea with Mrs Mounter (his landlady) and Tea in the Bedsitter (his own quarters in her house), with a child's-eye perspective and an uncertain grasp of space, the colour and tone of both pictures determined by her wonderfully Whistlerian wallpaper, blues, pinks and lavenders gentled by a glaucous veil, his own room a particularly haunted image in flat reflected light, conjuring absent presences, every inch of both canvases equally worked with equal emphasis.

Then, having turned largely to landscapes that denied so much of his inventiveness, he died in the influenza pandemic of 1919.

Ginner had nowhere to go because he had already arrived. By 1914 he had refined the technique and mannerism of his work in both oil and watercolour, had digested the influence of Van Gogh and distanced himself from it, and he developed no further.

Until his dying day in 1952 he diligently painted both in quantity and in qualities of draughtsmanship and handling so consistent that it is possible, without some clue in the internal evidence of the subject, to mistake a work of 1912 for one of those painted in gratitude for Francis Wormald, the Anglo-Saxon palaeographer who cared for him in his last penniless years.

This very sameness has proved to be the bog that has worn down the very few art historians who have paid attention to Ginner, not for lack of dates and documents (he recorded almost everything he did in immaculately neat notebooks), but of excitements, for there are as many dull and drab Ginners (always honest to the core) as there are bright and beautiful, as many incompetent compositions as felicitous (but these are Nature's fault), and as many of worthy dreariness as those that excite cupidity with colour hot and cold in close proximity.

With Ginner there was no graph curve of quality, no falling away with age, no sudden second wind, and in every decade some dismal picture unredeemed by his persistent integrity was succeeded by another in which design, colour and handling have a sparkling, even hallucinatory, brilliance. He is a painter about whom no sane man could write a book and retain his sanity.

The surprise of this exhibition lies in its demonstration of the pervasive influence of Ginner's uniquely heavy handling of paint - Ratcliffe, Drummond, Gilman and even, to some small extent, plodding Bevan fell under its spell.

His trick of trailing from slim, long-haired brushes paint that was fluid, elastic and slow-drying, constructing a dense and even tapestry of impastose strokes in which no craquelure has yet developed (he made his paint himself), remained unique, but the others tried occasionally to match its depth and density without his seemingly mechanical application.

His dingiest pictures were painted in the north of England, and of these I am certain that L S Lowry was aware. It is easy to see why Sickert, grand old man of the group and at this stage an impetuous and immediate painter, was so contemptuous.

The exhibition builds on the foundations laid last year in the Courtauld Institute's survey of Sickert's nudes, including some of the same pictures supported by memorabilia of the Camden Town murders, but without its sexual intensity.

It attempts too to give a wider impression of the period - the poverty, the social sinking of the area, women's suffrage and other political issues, the entertainment of public events - amusing, diligent, but aesthetically irrelevant.

Sickert was, of course, the oldest, wisest, most experienced and most articulate of the group, the most European too, its one heir to Degas, though even he, when over-ambitious, as in Ennui, could not make of this stiflingly quotidian non-subject even a hint of the startling grandeur with which his French master had invested his La Coiffure (National Gallery) some two decades earlier; these two canvases are within millimetres of equal size, both fit the notions of Baudelaire as modern subjects drawn from daily life, yet the one, unfinished, is a work of lively genius and the other died miserably on Sickert's easel.

Camden Town painters occupied no more than a moment in the long dull history of English art, and not even that in wider European terms - when Paris gave us the Fauves we responded with Camden Town, when Paris gave us views of the Thames by Monet and Derain we turned our eyes to Mornington Crescent and Hampstead Garden Suburb - but it is worth a moment's contemplation, for the conspiracy has at last borne fruit.

A century on, these paintings are (with the exception of Ennui and a ludicrous attempt at history painting on an historic scale by Walter Bayes, far the weakest of the group) still what they set out to be - little pictures for little patrons, but the prices are no longer low.

Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group is at Tate Britain, SW1 (020 7887 8888), until 5 May. Open daily 10am-5.40pm (to 10pm on the last Friday of each month). Admission £9 (concs available). www.tate.org.uk

Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group
Tate Britain
Millbank, SW1P 4RG

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