Augustus John (66 page)

By 1910 the Americans were discovering Augustus. His flamboyant portrait of William Nicholson was seen to be one of the strongest paintings at the International Exhibition held by the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh in 1910. When Quinn sent him a batch of notices from Philadelphia for Dorelia’s ‘scrapbook’, Augustus replied (4 January 1910) that ‘she don’t keep one – when she
does
read my notices, it’s with a smile.’ She had begun, he added, to complain that they were no longer rude enough, and
therefore not fun. ‘I’ve never kept any of my press notices yet,’ he told Quinn (23 May 1910), ‘ – doubt if I could find storing room for them, but I have a habit of sending some of them to my father, who likes it; reserving the scornful and abusive ones for my own delectation till I light my pipe or otherwise utilize them… The only ones who count are the inspired critic-clairvoyant and fearless – and the conscientious and equally fearless Philistine – and praise and blame from either are equally welcome and stimulating.’

By 1910 Augustus John dominated the New English Art Club to an extent where his failure to send in work to their exhibitions itself became headline news. Though still assailed by critics for his wilful distortion – an opinion that seems extraordinary today – he was generally considered the most avant-garde artist in the country.

‘There are two artistic camps in England just now,’ W. B. Yeats advised Quinn in 1909, ‘the Ricketts and Shannon camp which carries on the tradition of Watts and the romantic painters, and the camp of Augustus John which is always shouting its defiance at the other. I sometimes feel I am divided between them as Coleridge was between Christianity and the philosophers when he said “My intellect is with Spinoza but my whole heart with Paul and the Apostles”.’

Quinn’s intellect too, supported by his purse, was with Augustus. At the famous Armory Show in 1913, the equivalent in the United States of the two Post-Impressionist shows in Britain, there were fourteen drawings, three works in tempera, and twenty oil paintings (including fifteen Provençal studies) by John. The American critic James Huneker declared that the three biggest talents among living European artists were Matisse, Epstein and Augustus John.

‘It was not until 1911–12 that the gap widened considerably between the conservative New English and the committed progressives,’ wrote the art historian Richard Shone.
27
Many critics who up to the autumn of 1910 had supported progressive art now found themselves agreeing with Wilfrid Blunt that the Post-Impressionist daubs at the Grafton Gallery were like ‘indecencies scrawled upon the walls of a privy’. In retrospect it may appear that, in the last weeks of that year, the enlightened élite of Britain were reduced to half a dozen Bloomsbury intellectuals drawn up about the frail defiant figure of Roger Fry, while Augustus John fell away as a Little Englander. But it was not exactly so. Augustus’s fifty Provençal studies at the Chenil Gallery seemed to many people more eccentric than those of ‘the Frenchmen at the Grafton’. Reviewing his show, which he summed up as being ‘a mystery’,
The Times
critic asked (5 December 1910): ‘What does it all mean? Is there really a widespread demand for these queer, clever, forcible, but ugly and uncanny notes of form and
dashes of colour?… For our part we see neither nature nor art in many of these strangely-formed heads, these long and too rapidly tapering necks, and these blobs of heavy paint that sometimes do duty for eyes.’

These controversial pictures included primitive portrait-busts of his children which recall Tuscan work of the late fifteenth century; small rapid sketches in oil which suddenly made the British palette brilliant with blues and greens and crushed strawberry pinks before Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman began similar experiments with the Camden Town Group; glowing figures in landscapes that tell no story but simply show them bathing in or walking by the Étang de Berre, sitting in the sun or on the shaded steps of the Villa Ste-Anne. They were drawn on the wood in pencil and sometimes redefined over a thin skin of pigment, which produced a jewelled and painterly effect in the relation of the figures to their background of trees and sky, sand and water.

In notice after notice, critics linked these exquisite panels to the concurrent show of Post-Impressionists at the Grafton, and their tone is almost as hostile. ‘At his worst he can outdo Gauguin,’ wrote a critic in the
Queen
(10 December 1910), ‘…uncouth and grotesque… It is unfortunate that Mr John should go on filling public exhibitions with these inchoate studies, instead of manfully bracing to produce some complete piece of work.’ Two years later, when the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition coincided with the showing of Augustus’s vast schematic decoration, ‘Mumpers’ at the NEAC, it was the latter which was seen by many critics to be the significant masterpiece in British painting. The
Sunday Times
and the
Daily Chronicle
both compared it to ‘The Dance’ by Matisse; the
Spectator
described it as a ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’ ‘more startling than Manet’; the
Manchester Guardian
stated it had won ‘a new freedom for the artist’; the
Daily Mail
called it ‘one of the greatest decorative works of our age’; the
Observer
declared it to be ‘the first mature masterpiece of Post-Impressionism’; and
The Times,
in a leader, announced that it marked ‘a turning-point in English painting’.
28

Public opinion in these two years was turning towards Post-Impressionism, but not in its placing of Augustus’s work as more ‘advanced’ and, in some cases, more incomprehensible than that of the Post-Impressionists. For many he was the last word in modernity. ‘After Picasso,’ wrote one critic, ‘Mr John.’
29

It was to be the war, galvanizing
avant-garde
art among British artists, that finally detached John’s work from the modernist movement. The younger artists had formed up behind him, but he had had nowhere to lead them and they clocked in instead at Fry’s Omega Workshops. Contemporary art critics, such as D. S. MacColl, had celebrated his bravura feats of draughtsmanship for the liberating effects they brought
from Whistlerian ‘daintiness’ and their power to recapture the tradition of Rubens. Then art critics towards the end of the twentieth century, such as Simon Watney in his
English Post-Impressionism
(1980), reacted against this assessment and identified John as the victim of ‘a highly exclusive connoisseur-orientated approach to art education’,
30
which between 1910 and 1912 showed younger artists into what doldrums such acclaimed graphic dexterity led. But these critical assessments were confined to John’s drawing and by default undervalued his early panels in oil as simply ‘brilliant historicism’. Critics were in part influenced by two facts and a misinterpretation of those facts. The first of these was Augustus’s description of ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ as ‘a bloody show’; the second was his refusal in 1912 to send in any pictures to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which included work by Epstein, Gilman, Gore and Nevinson.

The very time when he had begun to fulfil his much-trumpeted promise was the year that contemporary critics renewed their hostility to him and art historians have removed him from the forefront of British art. But in 1910, working independently in France and taking his inspiration from Italy, he had launched a private revolution of his own.

‘Since the advent of Post-Impressionism Mr John has been almost forgotten… Many of his erstwhile champions have been so eager to uphold the fantastic banner of Matisse and Picasso’s Falstaffian regiment that they have neglected the old leader who led them into unknown paths of danger… “Where is he? What is he doing?” At last he himself has answered in decisive fashion.’

Morning Post
(23 November 1912)

‘Is it that the atmosphere of England is oppressive?’ Augustus asked Quinn (25 May 1910). ‘Stendhal said a man lost 50% of his genius on setting foot on that island.’ Almost fifty per cent of Augustus’s post-Slade work had been done in France. He had met Picasso, seen the work of Cézanne in Provence and of Matisse in Paris. He had even read the novels of Dostoevsky before they had been put into English. Yet in two respects the Slade had held him back. He had been trained in a climate so regulated that it admitted only two schools of rival art; the academic art taught by Tonks and Brown based on classical and Renaissance models; and the
academizing process carried on by the Royal Academy ‘by which’, Harold Rosenberg has written, ‘all styles are in time tamed and made to perform in the circus of public taste.’
31
Augustus had learnt his lessons well and it had taken him time to ‘see’ a non-academic form of art that matched his talent.

Despite the time he had spent there, Augustus remained something of a foreigner in Paris. But in Provence he had come home. There was something of Wales here, he felt, something to which he responded instinctively. The country was rooted in a past to which he belonged and with which he could connect the work of Puvis de Chavannes and the great Italian masters he had been studying. He suddenly saw himself as being part of a tradition in painting, as being able to add to that tradition; and this feeling of belonging steadied him. Everything fell into place; what he had seen, where he worked, who he was.

‘I am certain I have profited greatly by my visit to Italy,’ he told Quinn on reaching Martigues (3 March 1910).

‘My imagination and sense of reality seems to me just twice as strong as it was before – and no exaggeration… I tell you frankly and sincerely, I feel
nobody
dead or alive is so near the guts of things as I am at present…
What is surprising,
together with this infallible
realism
my sense of beauty seems to:
has
,
grown simultaneously. All this remains to be proved of course. I give myself till the end of the year to prove it up to the hilt. And this comes, it seems to me, from being suddenly
alone
for some months, and seeing – and rubbing against (without committing myself too far) new people and also seeing certain pictures which crystallize the overwhelming and triumphant energy of dead men – like Signorelli for instance.’

There had been plenty of happenings to interrupt this stern programme, and the mood of confidence and resolution that supported it: drunken days with gypsies; irrelevant sorties with his bird-like neighbour and the air-machines; that distressing ambush of hospitality prepared for him by Frank Harris; Dorelia’s illness and family complications. Yet this season there was more optimism, more resolve to say the word ‘no’. He admits to ‘floundering’ at times, but returns stubbornly to his work and makes genuine progress. ‘I wish to God I was born with more method in my madness – but it’s coming,’ he tells Arthur Symons. And, he confides to Quinn, ‘I’m beginning to take a really miser’s interest in my own value.’ One of his problems is that, in periods of enthusiasm, he is inclined to turn away from his past to pursue anything new. ‘I think little of my etchings so far,’ he informed Quinn (28 May 1910), who had bought
almost all of them, ‘ – but I’m keen to do a set of dry-points soon.’ Temptation came to him in the form of an invitation to South Africa, where he was asked to found a school, decorate Parliament and paint ten portraits of South African celebrities for one thousand pounds (equivalent to £47,000 in 1996). These offers he turned down.

He was helped in his resolution by a book that Quinn had sent him early in May: James Huneker’s
Promenades of an Impressionist.
He had been prepared to dislike it. At first sight there appeared too many Parisian anecdotes, too many picturesque phrases, and eulogies of bad artists such as Fortuny and Sorolla. But it was characteristic of his new seriousness this year to get beyond first sight. He persevered with the book and found it useful. ‘He [Huneker] reminded me of many a thing I used to know but had, to my shame, forgotten,’ he explained to Quinn (25 May 1910).

‘His fresh and unfailing enthusiasm for a crowd of merits lesser minds think mutually destructive, is splendid… it is the gesture of a generous and hearty man – who seems to overflow with intellectual energy and does not husband it like poorer men… This book gives me the courage and humility of my boyhood. It is strong crude air after the finicking intellectuality of London which drives a sensitive spirit into subterranean caverns where thoughts grow pale like mushrooms. I have been assailed with manifold doubts and have taken refuge in dreams when I should have sharpened my pencil and returned to the charge. An artist has no business to think except brush in hand.’

‘I am keen on a good show in the autumn,’ Augustus had told Quinn (19 May 1910). The show which opened at the Chenil in December contained thirty-five drawings and etchings in the upper rooms, and downstairs fifty small ‘Provençal Studies’ in oils. It was the drawings upstairs that tempered the hostility of critics with a tone of regretful wonder; but it was the oils that represented his new achievement. Sometimes he saw these panels as preliminary studies for a set of complete fresco works on a magnificent scale, for he had been fired by Roger Fry’s call in the
Burlington Magazine
the previous year for him to be given a great wall in some public building and a great theme to illustrate it. ‘In Watts we sacrificed to our incurable individualism, our national incapacity of co-operating for ideal ends, a great monumental designer,’ Fry had written. ‘A generous fate has given us another chance in Mr John, and I suppose we shall waste him likewise. What would not the Germans do for a man of his genius if they ever had the chance to produce him?’
32
Such stirring words rang sweetly in John’s ears; but they took no account of his lack of consistency, the fact that he painted best when in the
grip of some intense but fleeting mood – the intensity arising from its very transitoriness. Fry, in many ways the greatest and most influential critic of his age, had little sense of individual talent in relation to particular theories. John was an unlikely person to co-operate, publicly and for any length of time, for civic ends. But Fry’s commendation had a heroic tone that went on echoing in Augustus’s imagination. Besides, it came on top of the big ambitions of Will Rothenstein and the immeasurable hopes of Hugh Lane on his behalf, as well as Charles Conder’s view that large decorations were John’s forte. In 1939, when opening an exhibition of photographs of contemporary British wall paintings at the Tate Gallery, he remarked: ‘When one thinks of painting on great expanses of wall, painting of other kinds seems hardly worth doing.’ Shortly afterwards, in a restaurant, he asked: ‘I suppose they’d charge a lot to let Matt Smith and me paint decorations on these walls.’
33
Later still Joyce Cary was to use this frustrated longing to be a painter on a monumental scale in the creation of Gulley Jimson, the ebullient artist of his novel
The Horse’s Mouth
(1944).