David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Counter Blast
‘Counter Blast’, a review of the ’Futurism’ exhibition
at Tate Modern, The
New Statesman,
6 August 2009.
By 1912, the London art scene was in uproar, awash with a competing array of ‘isms’.
To Mark Gertler, one of the most promising of the Slade School’s recent
crop of outstanding young graduates, it was almost enough to drive a man mad.
Eying a room filled with gossiping artists and writers – probably the fashionable
bohemians of the Café Royal on Regent Street – he despaired: ‘I
looked at them talking art, Ancient art, Modern art, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism,
Neo-Impressionism, Cubists, Spottists, Futurists, Cave-dwelling, Wyndham Lewis,
Duncan Grant, [Frederick] Etchells, Roger Fry! I looked on and laughed to myself
... and I walked home disgusted with them all’.
If a young British artist was to choose from this almost burdensome list, he
(or indeed she) could do worse than latch on to Futurism. This radical new
movement, brainchild of the Italian writer Fillipo Marinetti, had first reached
England
in 1909 – an event currently being marked by the large centenary exhibition
at Tate Modern. As the Suffrage campaigner Margaret Nevinson explained to readers
of Vote (journal of the Woman’s Freedom League), the Futurists ‘are
young men in revolt at the worship of the past. They are determined to destroy
it, and erect upon its ashes the Temple of the future. War seems to be the tenet
in the gospel of Futurism: war upon the classical in art, literature and music.’ To
have the work of his followers displayed together in a former power station on
London’s Bankside would have suited Marinetti perfectly.
By 1912 Marinetti and his colleagues were back in London – the vibrant
modern metropolis which, with its underground, music halls and electric lighting,
they considered ‘the Futurist city par excellence’ (even if they
found its inhabitants stultifying, and its artistic legacy worthy of nothing
more than a large bonfire in Trafalgar Square). They delivered more lectures
extolling Futurism’s outlandish ideals, as well as theatrical performances
of Futurist music. The only true English convert to their cause joined them:
it was Gertler’s old Slade colleague (and Margaret Nevinson’s only
son), Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.
Nevinson’s anguished life and career can tell a lot about what it is to
be the son of pushy, prominent, successful parents. As well as a key figure in
the movement to win the vote for women, Mrs Nevinson was a writer and social
reformer. Nevinson’s father, Henry, was one of the most famous liberal
journalists in England, covering wars all around the world for newspapers such
as the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Chronicle. In their Highgate home, Nevinson
later recalled, he ‘heard little but a lucidly expressed contempt for the
grossness of Edwardian days and its worship of all things which were established’.
The depressive, bullying, insecure Nevinson duly rebelled – both against
the expectations of his parents, and the staid expectations of English society
at large. Along with Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth and Ezra Pound he helped
establish the Rebel Art Centre. But his espousal of Marinetti’s Futurist
cause – and his appending of the names of his ‘Rebel’ colleagues
to that cause – cost him their friendship. When the RAC transformed themselves
into the Vorticists and set about blasting conservative England, Nevinson was
persona non grata.
If it seemed that he was now out on a limb both socially and artistically,
August 1914 came to his rescue. The Futurists had praised war and ‘the beautiful
ideas that kill’ beyond everything else as the only way of overthrowing
the stultifying, conservative past. Now came the War to end all wars. The first
fully mechanised mass conflict in history, it quickly revealed itself as a hideous
machine – one that consumed men in their millions, sucking them in like
a vast assembly line, pounding them on an industrial scale, and then spitting
them out in pieces. As a volunteer with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit for
a few hideous weeks in late 1914, Nevinson witnessed it all at first hand.
Though horrified at the thought that Futurism had glorified such destruction,
he recognised that its fractured techniques of painting, its emphasis on speed,
spectacle and conflict, meant it was what he considered ‘the only possible
medium to express the crudeness, violence and brutality of the emotions seen
and felt on the present battlefields of Europe.’ Some critics believed
it would be impossible to record this new kind of war in paint. With a series
of outstanding pictures, Nevinson proved them wrong.
In La Mitrailleuse (now in the Tate’s collection, but sadly not exhibited
in the ‘Futurism’ exhibition), Nevinson revealed the dehumanising
cost of the Great War. Nevinson’s French machine gunners are cold-blooded
automatons, dealing out blind, mechanised slaughter. One critic writing in the
London Evening News declared, ‘When war is no more this picture will stand,
to the astonishment and shame of our descendents, as an example of what civilised
man did to civilised man in the first quarter of the twentieth century.’ On
seeing it exhibited in 1916 the artist Walter Sickert agreed: ‘Mr Nevinson’s “Mitrailleuse” will
probably remain the most authoritative and concentrated utterance on the war
in the history of painting.’
These paintings would be the peak of Nevinson’s career. Though he went
on to become an Official War Artist, and though he is represented in major galleries
and museums in the UK, compared to Slade friends and contemporaries such as Stanley
Spencer, Mark Gertler and David Bomberg, he is relatively forgotten today. This
is unfortunate. As his works in the Tate’s Futurism exhibition reveal,
he could hold his own with some of the major names of early twentieth-century
European art. Certainly not all of his later work reached the same heights
as those produced early in the war, and Nevinson proved mistaken in his belief
that
he could use style (be it Futurist, Realist, Post-Impressionist, or whatever)
to command substance. But as a product of the intense pressures wrought both
on British society at large, and on artists in particular, in the first decades
of the last century, his very best work is almost second to none.
© David Boyd Haycock