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CHAPTER 1
1949: MUNNINGS AND MODERN ART
In April 1949 Sir Alfred Mannings created a national furore by attacking Modern art in strong language via a radio broadcast of a speech given at the Royal Academy. His reactionary views were shared by most academicians, the leader of the Conservative Party and a wide cross-section of the public. Struggling to counter these views were the supporters of Modernism within the British arts establishment.
During the late 1940s an unusual alliance was forged between the professional politician, Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), and the professional and commercially successful painter of horses, Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959). The former was a 'Sunday painter who enjoyed painting landscapes out of doors in a manner indebted to Impressionism. The latter was notorious as a verbose, English eccentric of rural origins. (His favourite catchphrase was: 'What a go!') In terms of art, Munnings was a traditionalist and an empiricist: he believed artists should emulate masters such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Stubbs, and paint what they can see as accurately as possible,' consequently, he hated Modern art because of its 'abnormal fooleries' and 'distortion' of reality. Paintings by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, according to Munnings, were the products of 'disgruntled, cunning, incompetent minds'. He also objected to the fact that Modern art seemed to require the support of pretentious art criticism and complex theory.
These opinions were identical to those that Adolf Hitler expressed in the 1930s when vilifying so-called 'degenerate' Modern art. Like Hitler, Munnings was also an anti-Semite who shared the Nazi opinion that Modern art was an evil Jewish conspiracy. In one 1930s' tirade against Modern Jewish artists he cited Picasso, only to be reminded by his listener that Picasso was Spanish, not Jewish. Undeterred by reason, Munnings switched his attack to the Jewish dealers and critics who were deceiving the public by promoting artists like Picasso. Later, in 1948, he caused a scene at the Garrick Club when he called Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery, a bloody Jew and said this was the reason why another Jew – the Russian painter Marc Chagall – had been given a show at the Tate.
Munnings served as President of the Royal Academy from 1944 to 1949. The Academy at that time was a deeply conservative institution. No self-respecting Modern British artist would become a member or show work in its Piccadilly galleries even if they had been invited to do so. It was thanks to Munnings that Churchil's paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1947. He arranged for six paintings to be submitted to the Selection Committee under the pseudonym David Winter and was delighted when they were accepted. He also made sure that Churchill was awarded a Diploma as a Royal Academician Extraordinary. In his final year as President, Munnings revived the practice of the annual Academy Banquet (held on 28 April 1949). This was an all-male affair – women members of the Academy were excluded – at which speeches were given. In 1949 Munningss dinner speech reached a much wider audience by being broadcast on the Home Service of BBC radio.
With the Archbishop of Canterbury, Field Marshall Montgomery and Churchill present, Munnings chose to mount his most public attack on Modern art. With drunken glee he reported a question Churchill had supposedly put to him: 'Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his something something ...? I said, "Yes Sir, I would." (Churchill later wrote to Munnings to complain, 'This is not the sort of statement that should be attributed to me.)
Also criticised by Munnings were Matisse's The Forest in the Tate Gallery collection, the Arts Council, London County Council public sculpture shows in Battersea Park – 'bloated, monstrous nudes Henry Moore's Madonna and Child sculpture in the Church of St Matthew, Northampton, and Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King's pictures. (Blunt, later unmasked as a Soviet spy, was a target because he had maintained that Picasso was a better painter than Reynolds.) Most of the audience enjoyed Munningss jibes and greeted them with laughter and cries of 'Hear, Hear. A minority disagreed and interrupted Munnings saying that Matisse's painting was 'a beautiful work.
Naturally the speech provoked a public furore: the BBC's switchboard was jammed with calls. Many listeners rang to complain about Munnings's bad language (he had used the word 'damned') and others to defend Modern art. At that time, of course, telephones in Britain were restricted to the middle class so working-class opinion was not heard. Subsequently, sacks of letters and telegrams arrived from around the world. Most writers supported Munnings. Popular opinion was thus anti-Modern art and welcomed its public denigration. Press reports and cartoons were numerous. In the Evening Standard (4 May) David Low's cartoon depicted Munnings on horseback leading a charge up the steps of the Tate Gallery towards its apprehensive director, Rothenstein. It was headed 'Art War News'.
It is clear that in 1949 powerful forces within the British establishment were mounting a rearguard defence of traditional art against the advance of Modern art. It should be acknowledged that other establishment figures – Sir Kenneth Clark (for a time head of the Arts Council and a patron of Moore, Victor Pasmore and other living artists), Herbert Read and Roland Penrose (founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) – were supporters of Modern art. Rothenstein and the trustees of the Tate Gallery were also trying to increase the gallery's holdings of Modern art despite the restriction of a tiny purchasing fund. Evidently, the British arts establishment was divided into two camps, the reactionaries and the progressives.
It seems clear that Churchill was somewhat embarrassed by being publicly associated with Munnings' views even though in private he shared them. The latter was confirmed a few years later when he reacted with loathing to the portrait that Graham Sutherland (1903–80) painted of him in 1954. This portrait was commissioned as a gift by both Houses of Parliament to mark Churchill's eightieth birthday. After its unveiling in Westminster Hall, Churchill made a short speech in which he sardonically observed: 'The portrait is a striking example of Modern art. It certainly combines force with candour.' In reality, compared to a Cubist head by Picasso or Braque, Sutherland's representation was traditional and conventional. On learning how much the portrait upset Winston, his wife Clementine promised him that it would 'never see the light of day'. Consequently, in 1955 or 1956 she had the painting destroyed by burning. The fate of the portrait only became known to the public after Clementine's death in January 1978.
Munnings continued to rage against Modern art until his death in 1959. On one occasion he turned aside from painting horses to make a pictorial satire on Modern art. The painting, executed in 1956 for display in the RA's annual Summer Exhibition, was entitled Does the Subject Matter? It depicts a scene in an art gallery – the Tate presumably – in which six figures, and a dog, are shown reacting to examples of Modern paintings and sculptures. Three Picassos hang on the wall and various shapeless lumps are displayed on plinths. The viewers include several of Munnings's friends who naturally respond with scepticism and distaste. On the extreme left Munnings features the tense, unctuous figure of Rothenstein with Jewish facial characteristics.
As far as Munnings was concerned, the School of Paris and its British followers were the enemy. What he did not realise, apparently, was that by 1956 New York had replaced Paris as the world's art capital and a new, different kind of abstraction had become dominant, namely, Abstract Expressionism.
CHAPTER 2
1951: GEAR AND ABSTRACTION
As part of the 1951 Festival of Britain an exhibition of paintings was organised which included a prizewinning 'abstract' by William Gear. It aroused much adverse comment in the British press and questions were asked about it on the BBC and in the House of Commons.
The incident in the career of William Gear (1915-97), a Scottish painter, demonstrates the antipathy felt by the majority of the British people towards Modern art, particularly the abstract variety, during the 1940s and 1950s. This was in spite of the historical precedent of Turner who produced highly abstracted landscapes, seascapes and interior scenes. In a 1996 television history of British art the critic/presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon claimed that Modern art was founded in Britain by Turner and Constable. However, there is a strong empirical strain in the British people and, consequently, they prefer artists who 'paint what they see, who make trees in pictures look like trees in reality'. This is why Constable is closer to the hearts of Britons than Turner.
Because of their empiricism and nationalism the British have been suspicious of theory and abstract ideas emanating from German, French and Russian philosophers and revolutionaries. Modern art met resistance partly because of its supposedly foreign origins and its avowed internationalism. For many people on the right of the political spectrum both in Britain and in the United States, Modern art was associated with left-wing political ideologies such as anarchism, communism and socialism. There was some basis in fact for this opinion: many Modern artists have held left convictions. Picasso, for instance, was a member of the French Communist Party.
Gear came from a miner's family and grew up in Fife. He studied art and art history at Edinburgh College of Art from 1932 to 1937 and then obtained a travel grant to France where he spent time in Fernand Leger's studio. After military service in the Middle East and Europe during the Second World War, he lived and worked in Paris for three years (1947–50) where he had contact with such School of Paris abstract and semi-abstract painters as Nicolas de Stael, Hans Hartung and Alfred Manessier. For a time he also associated with the European avant-garde group known as CoBrA [Copenhagen Brussels Amsterdam) (1948–51) whose members thought of themselves as an International of experimental art and who were sympathetic to Expressionism and Surrealism but opposed to geometric abstraction. In 1949 he shared an exhibition with Jackson Pollock in New York (Betty Parsons Gallery, November-December 1949), From 1958 to 1964 Gear was curator of Eastbourne's Towner Art Gallery. He then taught painting at Birmingham College of Art where he was appointed Head of the Faculty of Fine Art. He retired from the Birmingham college in 1975 but continued to paint until his death in 1997 at the age of 81. It is clear from this summary that Gear's experience was far more international and 'foreign' than the majority of British artists.
To celebrate the achievements of living British artists at the time of the Festival of Britain, the Arts Council organised a show entitled 60 Paintings for '51. Sixty artists were invited to contribute 'large' new pictures and they were supplied with canvas which was then a scarce material. The list of artists invited provoked a negative reaction from a lobby of academic artists [which included Augustus John and Dame Laura Knight) who thought the Arts Council was politically biased in favour of artists on the Left. Fifty-four paintings were eventually displayed in Manchester City Art Gallery in 1951 (May–June). The exhibition then moved to London [June–July) and subsequently toured England and Scotland. The paintings on display were overwhelmingly representational; there were only three examples of abstract art: works by Gear, Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore.
From the show five prizewinners were selected by a three-man international jury. The paintings were purchased by the Arts Council and some were then donated to municipal galleries. Gear's winning painting – Autumn Landscape (1950) – is now in the collection of the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was awarded one of the five prizes of £500 and proved to be the most controversial choice.
Autumn Landscape communicates a sense of energy and dynamism. Its background consists of a patchwork of organic shapes over which angular, jagged irregular forms with strong, heavy outlines are superimposed. The complex overlapping of these forms creates an ambiguous, shallow space. Gear's favoured dark tonalities and his colours – olive greens, dull yellows and oranges, ochres, browns and blacks – have been described as 'bruised'. A white-painted form resembling a lightning flash stands out from the surrounding autumnal hues. The forcefulness and dourness of some of Gear's abstracts do make them difficult to appreciate, even by those who are otherwise tolerant of abstraction.
Right-wing newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph carried the story of Gear's winning picture together with grey reproductions of it in April 1951. An article in the Daily Mail was headed: 'Arts Council pay £500 for "jam pot thrown on canvas".' The reports prompted a stream of angry letters. One in the Daily Telegraph described paintings such as Gear's as 'fooleries' and complained about the 'ugliness' of Modern art compared to the 'beauty' of past art. A second moaned about the squandering of public money on 'grotesque doodling'. A third called for the abolition of the Arts Council for 'wasting public money'. A fourth expressed disgust and claimed 'a child of three' could have done better. A fifth linked the painting to the scientific and technological developments of the period by describing it as an 'atomic composition. Predictably, a long letter from Sir Alfred Munnings appeared headed 'Fine Art on the Dustheap'. Yet again he attacked the influence of the School of Paris, the Arts Council and the Director of the Tate Gallery. Furthermore, he claimed that the Moderns could not draw.
Although critical letters were the most numerous, Gear did have his defenders – they included the poetess Dame Edith Sitwell and the collector Howard Bliss – who pleaded for open-mindedness towards the new in art and warned against judging paintings from low-quality reproductions. On 26 April Gear responded to his critics in the pages of the Daily Telegraph. One of his concerns was the intimidating effect abuse and hostility was likely to have: it would deter those who might otherwise be willing to appreciate and buy avant-garde art.
The debate spread to other media when a question was asked about the painting's purchase on the popular radio show, Any Questions. MacDonald Hastings, one of the panellists, defended the Arts Council's expenditure and argued that 'the public were the last persons on earth to judge good or bad art' because 'the public's opinion about art had been consistently wrong for 2,000 years'. R.P. Winfrey disagreed and claimed the public did recognise good art but what they didn't like in pictures were 'ladies with triangular bodies'.
Feelings continued to run high and in May a Liberal Member of Parliament, Edgar Granville, put a question to Hugh Gaitskell, then Labour's Chancellor of the Exchequer, which suggested that Gear's painting was not a representative example of British art. The reply given sidestepped the specific question by claiming that, taken as a whole, the five prizewinning pictures were representative of various styles and aspects of contemporary British art. Colonel Alan Gomme-Duncan, a Tory MP, was not satisfied. In November he told the House of Commons that Gear's picture was 'the most appalling example of Modern art ever produced'.
The main reasons for the public hostility which greeted Gear's prizewinning painting have been summed up by the art and design historian, Anne Massey:
... it was the international, modern nature of the work which so many found objectionable. The exhibition attempted to integrate Festival of Britain policy with that of the Arts Council by promoting wholly British culture. None of the contributing artists had spent as much time abroad as Gear had done ... Gear's painting was uncompromising, aggressive and abstract ... It was the foreign nature of Gear's work which distinguished it from most of the other exhibits and which countered the consensus of Welfare State culture.
Two questions about abstract art were and are repeatedly posed by the general public: 'What is it supposed to be? and Ts it the right way up? In Gear's case, his art still retained a reference to nature, as indicated in the statement he made in 1983: 'Most of the paintings have a reference to landscape or gardens, rather statements of kinship with the natural visual world. The works are created with "both eyes on the canvas" but with an aesthetic card index of things seen, selected and stored in the visual memory. Furthermore, many of his titles indicate connections to landscapes and seasons. Autumn Landscape is a case in point. It could be read as a close-up of leaves and branches in motion and dappled with light.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts"
by .
Copyright © 1999 John A. Walker.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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