Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. . - book review

LISA TICKNER

Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 336 pp.; 46 color ills., 104 b/w. $45.00

This is a rich and abundantly detailed study, one that long simmered, as Lisa Tickner acknowledges in her opening sentence. The subject is modernism, or what in less stentorian tones can be referred to as certain modernist ambitions played out in British art in the first years of the last century. It is a familiar yet still difficult topic. Of modernism itself we have an acceptable account: that it was a response to the simultaneously developing forms of capitalism, industrialization, and democracy, and, as Wyndham Lewis put it in a characteristically bold phrase, it was to be "almost entirely credited to Anglo-Saxon genius." But at a cost, he added, for busy with "this LIFE-EFFORT" England became "the last to be conscious of the Art that is an Organism of this new Order and Will of Man" (p. 193). Tickner claims that if Britain was not rebellious enough to accept modernism itself--the terms "modernity," "modernism," "modernise" had long been used in English criticism, but they referred to the battle of the an cients--still, there are moments of modernism to be recognized within the visual arts and understood from a cluster of issues that emerged in the cultural commentary of the period: a sense of the Englishness of English art, wrested from its basis in rural landscape into the urban, the virile, the industrial, and the primitive; the association, by supporters and detractors alike, of avant-garde practice with radical social and sexual politics; the demand for rough and masculine work (Lewis again)--this to be an answer to the supposedly degenerative influence of women and homosexuals; and finally the development of a certain fashionability of the avantgarde and the transformation of patronage, the art market, and the media.

The tone of any account of British modernism is not easy to set. Tickner is careful to avoid a trap that has caught lesser spirits, that of either underplaying the influence of the Continent or, as with the collages of 1914 by Vanessa Bell or Duncan Grant, of exaggerating the formal possibilities of the art in England of this moment--just as too much could be made of the Objective Abstractions of Graham Bell, Rodrigo Moynihan, or Geoffrey Tibble twenty years later. Between such extremes there is much to be done, especially if the focus of the account is extended beyond the boundary of art history to recognize and understand what Tickner, using contemporary parlance, calls the "permeability of the work" (p.212), that is, the object of art seen within a far wider cultural field. Within the sociology of modernism, historians, passing over the idea of gender, have often ignored the possibility that the new modernity, sometime after about 1880, disrupted certain patterns of social intercourse to give women an auto nomy in all aspects of their professional and sexual lives that was not available earlier in the age of industrialization. Money and class would still matter. But for some, as Gertrude Stein put it, "life without father" could now begin, and "a very pleasant one" it might be (p. 197).

Tickner's narrative and her selection of artists--Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Lewis, Vanessa Bell, and David Bomberg, each of whom is discussed in a separate chapter--are based on Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements, an exhibition that was held in May and June 1914 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The show featured works by Sickert, John, Lewis, Bell, Bomberg, and others. Grand public exhibitions had been deeply important occasions in the world of art in London since at least 1769 and the first summer shows at the Royal Academy. Yet this one was very different, as was the gallery, which was located in Whitechapel, an area in the East End that teemed with poor immigrants, most of them Jewish. The show's intent--to present to the public all that was new in art--was the same as that of Twenty Years of British Art, which was held at the Whitechapel in 1910 to mark the tenth anniversary of its founding. Indeed, when set against figures of the Royal Academy, the artists included in the 1910 exhibi tion, such as George Clausen, John Lavery, or Wilson Steer, could be thought of as working in styles and with subjects that were modern. Yet by then most of them were well known, and the pictures selected still fit very easily into the older and more directly moralizing model of cultural philanthropy that was first enunciated by the cofounder of Whitechapel, Canon Barnett. In the 1914 show, everything was different. The new curator, Gilbert Ramsay (about whom very little is known) chose works that were fundamentally new, distinct from one another in style, and could only be considered a group because they were not like the art more usually presented to the general public in London, that is to say, based on "an academic treatment of history, anecdote, and sentimentality" (p. 7, from a memorandum Ramsay wrote to the trustees of the gallery). (1)

Ramsay came to this selection of pictures only after much deliberation. He arranged them in four categories, which he defined in the show's catalogue: the first, which included examples by Sickert, he described as treating "common or sordid scenes in a sprightly manner"; the second, with John and others, made for "imposing decorative design by the creation of commanding human types"; the third demonstrated the influence of Paul Cezanne and included Lewis; and the fourth comprised works by Bell and the Vorticists, who had "abandoned representation almost entirely" and recently set up what Ramsay called a "Rebel Art Centre" (p. 7). There was a fifth section to the show, on Jewish art; Bomberg curated it and put some of his own pieces in it. This segment was obviously an ethnic rather than a stylistic category, and it was clearly directed to the interests of the local Jewish community. The classification by styles was, as Sickert admitted in a review of the show, about as just as any attempt to write contemporar y history could be, though characteristically he made fun of one group, the painters misled by critic Roger Fry "to see what could be done by caricaturing in a superficial manner the faults of Cezanne" (p. 7). Nevertheless, the point of the exhibition was certain: that if in 1910 the link between modern art and modern life came from the subjects represented--the Salvation Army, as in a painting by William Strang, or Piccadilly Circus in one by Muirhead Bone--here what was important were the forms of this art, which, like modern life, rejected the hierarchies and protocols of the past to make a place for what Tickner calls "subjective feelings and expressions" (p. 8). Modernism was now to be understood as a kind of democracy in action in art.

Critics had various things to say about the pictures shown. Of those like Bomberg's In the Hold (1913), those of the Vorticists, and so on, A. J. Finberg said that he believed nobody could understand them, "and no one who sees them wants to" (p. 9). Randall Davies was gentler, and if he admitted that he could not stomach all that was on display, the "Futurists, Cubists, Post- and Propter Impressionists and the Paulo-Post-Contortionists," still, he expected that, given time, the British public would come to prefer real pictures like these to "the bonbonnieres" of someone like Sir Edward Poynter "with which they have hithertoo been foosled" (p. 8). (2) Yet something else was going on, as John Middleton Murray noted: modern art was being "monopolised and misformed by movements," and whatever he thought of the choices made, he worried that they might exclude some artists like Gwen John, who did not fit easily into any one category (p. 9). Or as Tickner comments, putting the issue in terms of cultural politics, th e groups Ramsay devised were not simple descriptive categories but social coteries, "fighting for hegemony both institutionally and ... discursively" (p. 9).

Nothing about this art was fixed, nor, we imagine, was anything clear for those who went to the gallery, accustomed as they were to the sermons of Canon Barnett that were designed in ways at once democratic and patronizing to satisfy what he called that lingering craving for the ideal, even in the cramped lives they led, and "a capacity to respond to ... beauty in form and colour" (p. 4). Here, in contrast, is the modern audience, as it looked at this new and possibly confusing art, either fascinated or lost and on its own. To see anything like it earlier or elsewhere we must refer to a show held in 1910 at the Grafton Gallery, where Fry had introduced Post-Impressionism to a London equally unprepared for what it was looking at. Basing her information on the work of J. B. Bullen, Tickner reports that the critics who disliked the 1910 exhibition and one held in 1912 chose to speak of the audiences as women, and as hysterical or easily gullible, either giggling and laughing or, as Sickert put it, "the mothers o f England verifying with reverence the statements in the descriptive catalogue by the pictures on the wall" (p. 301 n. 18).

The next stage in the history of the modern-art audience--though this is out of the range of Tickner's work--is found in a now forgotten show, A Nameless Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary British Artists, that Fry was involved with in 1921 at the Grosvenor Gallery. Here the point was the distinction of styles, Fry selecting the modernists, Charles Sims, R.A., the academics, and Henry Tonks of the Slade School what were called the intermediates. All the paintings were displayed without labels, as Desmond MacCarthy noted in his review, so that viewers should look at what was there with as few prejudices as possible. (3)

Tickner begins her narrative with Sickert and his pictures of the Camden Town Murder and other tabloid crimes. He made at least three pictures whose titles referred to the killing of the prostitute Emily Dimmock in her bed in Camden Town in 1907. Much can be said on the subject of prostitution in London embodying the anxieties and fears that the city induced--disease, contagion, isolation, and alienation--plus that horrible trade passed on from mother to daughter, which Dostoyevsky described in all its horror after he saw a girl one night on the Haymarket, not older than six, covered with bruises, nobody paying attention to her, "the look of such distress, such hopeless despair on her face." (4) Here it seems appropriate to add that by some accounts Sickert bad been very interested in the story of Jack the Ripper, though now Patricia Cornwell has revived the old idea that he was indeed Jack, it seems dangerous to do so. (5) But for all his curiosity about the facts of such cases, by Tickner's account Sickert was not concerned with depicting life, or, for all the decipherability of what we see, with producing images of real events. Instead, these paintings, and the others like them, somehow occupy what Tickner sees as the area where three circles--those of the nude, the prostitute, and the murder--overlap. If in their varying ways these images preserve the facts of the world--and Sickert claimed to Virginia Woolf that he was always a literary painter--they are, equally and obviously, as the concern with their painterly facture suggests, about other subjects as well, one of them the tradition of painting the nude. This is not the nude of the art school, "someone generally nowhere," as Sickert put it, but the nude "someone here somewhere" (p. 35), where tile somewhere he speaks of might be the setting of his imaginary model, Tilly Pullen, "the first dirty little staircase in the first shabby little house," where the artist then follows her "into her kitchen, or, better still ... into her bedroom." (6) Sickert's pict ures also convey a very particular idea of the body. Tickner draws attention to a chamber pot in one of the works, under the bed where tie woman lies; this object, beyond signifying realism (in anger, Augustus John once said that Sickert wanted everyone to paint piss pots), offers a modern account of the body, one not bounded and contained as in the classical nude, but one with orifices, a body that leaks and decays--or as Tickner puts it, a punishing defetishism of the nude that owns up to a voyeuristic perversity that implicates the viewer. (7) Yet essentially all this is also about painting; as she notes to confirm the complexity of these images, Sickert said that the subject of painting is perhaps that it is not death, at the same time "that it is, perhaps, nothing more" (p. 47).

For all the artists she discusses, Tickner invokes a mix of readings of modernism itself and of the facts of modern life. With John, a fundamentally different account of modernism has to be suggested. Since his fascination with Romany life would seem to be a turn against the city as subject, her first point to argue is that the tramp, as much as Charles Baudelaire's flaneur, was involved in the rejection of tile urban spectacle and the commodification of exchanges to which such spectacle so often leads. Whether John could have used the imagery of tramping, or gypsying, as the stately magazine the Tatler called it, to define some form of nonurban modernism, or if he would even have wanted to, is unclear. But as Tickner notes, whatever we make of this, he was one of the few English artists to have seen Les demoiselles d'Avignon in Pablo Picasso's studio, and he liked it. Nonetheless, especially around the image of woman, he seems to have fallen back into nostalgia and a hope for reparation--here Tickner refers to the death of his son Pyramus in 1912, that of his wife Ida in 1907, and even that of his mother, Augusta, in 1884--in ways that allowed the various identifications and idealizations in a picture like Lyric Fantasy (The Blue Lake) (1913-14) to smother the possibilities lie had of constructing a serious imagery of a nonurban modernity.

Tickner sees the same confusion of purpose, if now in politics, in the work of Lewis. The examples she uses are two paintings, Lovers and Kermesse (both 1912), tie latter currently known only in a small surviving version in New Haven. Tickner observes that Lewis was not essentially involved with life except as expressed in the culture of popular entertainment, an armchair flaneur at the Alhambra music hall, she nicely calls him, "who riffled through The Tatter at the breakfast table" (p. 79). Hence, there is something essentially compromised about his interest in primitive modern dance, especially "la danse des Apaches," in which the crimes of passion of the narrative, "illicit, sadistic, explicit, vengeful and wildly disruptive in their local communities" (p. 85), could serve for him as an antithesis to all the bourgeois concepts of love and sexuality. Out of this came the imagery to translate the idea of dance of the Fauves or the Symbolists into something more masculinized, a phallic aesthetics, it could b e called--comparable to that image of the piston rod that the philosopher and critic Thomas Ernest Hulme invoked as the symbol of the modern--to control the body, orgiastic and wild, hysterical and stupid. Tickner steps very cautiously here, for if, as she suggests, in his art and writing Lewis was one of the most vigorous and interesting critics of culture of the 20th century, his more general ideas are difficult to take account of as they are misogynist, homophobic, and politically very much of the right. And if the criticism of bourgeois values he offered was possible only from someone of the right, in coming from such a source they seem irreparably and fatally compromised. (8) The criticisms of culture and sex that Lewis advanced could in their arguments have been almost feminist. But they were not, and in the end all Lewis did now, if later he changed, was fall back into the familiar patterns of seeing women as sexual threats or sexual victims rather than represent them as modern and emancipated sexually . And he repressed all homosexuality obsessively.

For Vanessa Bell and her painting Studland Beach (1912) Tickner has to turn to still other associations. Studland Bay, along the Dorset coast near Bournemouth, was a place Bell visited on holiday with her family for a number of years, paying the then not inconsiderable sum of eight guineas a week for lodgings at the Harbour View Hotel. There she produced a number of paintings, some more finished studies, some evidently done on the beach itself, full of what Tickner calls the insistent textures "of linens, tweeds, knitted bathers and straw hats, sand spiked with razor shells and dune grass, settling into turn-ups and dog fur" (p. 121). In this painting, done in the studio, everything is translated into the visual, simplified in form yet also, as Tickner claims, full of a certain psychological intensity. As Richard Shone has suggested, Studland Beach in all its abstraction is one of the most radical works of its time. On this issue, Tickner refers to questions Bell herself had addressed in 1913 to Leonard Woolf , worrying about the apparently irresolvable distinction between representing facts accurately and producing significant form, "or whatever you like to call it," adding that it cannot be the only task of the great artist to tell us facts "but at the cost of telling [us] what he felt about them" (p. 138). Seen in this context the picture is nicely complex; and if in all its colors it is full of vitality, still as a whole it seems empty, or tinged with what Tickner calls "a melancholy undertone of loss and denial." If the image of the blue of the sea across the background, like all colors, invites an instinctual response, it is also one (as) Julia Kristeva has said), that invites a particular instinct, that of the infant eye, returning the subject to what Tickner describes as "an archaic moment of maternal dependency and its first struggles with the resolution of Self from Other." Such an interpretation makes this painting modern and quite different in its imagery from earlier images of the beach by William Dyc e, Stanhope Forbes, and others. And if in Bell's canvas the idea of the sea may be tied to what Tickner, again drawing on Kristeva, calls "women's time," the beach becomes a place of domesticity, free of men yet full of the notions of health, play, and childhood that make it, as Alain Corbin has suggested, the site of "an extended maternity" (p. 131). Perhaps in her idea of aesthetics Bell would not have accepted any such accounting. To support her reading, Tickner turns to Virginia Woolf and her later novel To the Lighthouse (1927), which features numerous references to the beaches at St. Ives of Vanessa's and her childhood and to their memories of their mother, who died suddenly when they were both young. Thus we return to the idea of significant form, since for Tickner this is how the painting works, simplified of all anecdote yet able in its metaphors to see anything and everything in all its oddity and grandeur, condensed into other associations. As Woolf wrote, "One wanted, so Lily Briscoe thought, dipp ing her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, it's a miracle, it's an ecstasy" (p. 276 n. 106).

The last chapter, a lengthy one, has as its immediate subject the Jewish section of the exhibition, some fifty-four works in all. Here questions of social history--those of the situation of Jews in England--arise. In her reading of Bomberg's apparently abstract painting In the Hold, Tickner sees an allusion to immigration and to labor, or as Bomberg put it, perhaps referring to working on the docks of the East End, "some men emerging from one trap-door and entering another in the hold of a ship" (p. 179). The image then resolved into what he called "its constituent forms which henceforth are all that matter." Such a representation Tickner compares to the slightly earlier work of Mark Gertler such as Jewish Family (1913), "timeless, exotic and rabbinical," as she puts it, "their life in London, sordid and precarious as it was, yet held together by the moral principles of Judaism and the embrace of family and home" (p. 164). Gertler thus holds out the possibility of a process of assimilation for them, and Tickn er has interesting notes on education and the support given by organizations like the Jewish Education Aid Society to Jewish students at the Slade School of Fine Arts. The situation changed a little later, but these scholarships were the only ones then available to working-class students at the Slade. (9)

Bomberg's choice of artists in this section was very wide, Jewishness being, as Tickner tells us, an unstable notion; some came from abroad, like Jules Pascin, Elie Nadelman, and Amedeo Modigliani, whom Bomberg had met through Jacob Epstein in Paris. No one style of art was represented, even among artists from London, several of whom, such as Bomberg or Clare Birnberg, one of the few women included, had studied at the Slade. The dual aim, as Bomberg insisted--and this justified his leaving out the more realist work of an older artist like William Rothenstein--was to represent the younger school of Jewish artists in the country in order to attract many new recruits, and to translate the life of a great city, "its motion, its machinery, into an art that shall not be photographic, but expressive" (p. 158). At this point, the cause of Jewishness became that of the modern movement--to acknowledge, whatever the forms used, that part of Jewish life in London that was rootless. Tickner contrasts Gertler's painting wi th Bomberg's In the Hold, which is organized on a grid, and, as she suggests, grasps and orders and puts some distance on a world in flux. Of this painting, Hulme wrote, "nothing is accidental...a new geometric and monumental art, making use of mechanical forms... closely allied to the general tendency of the period" (p. 181). The general response of the Jewish community to all this is not recorded, though faced with a painting by Modigliani, the Jewish Chronicle chose to speak of it as "Futurist" and thus "beyond our comprehension" (p. 159). A writer in a very different newspaper, the Observer, described the scene one Saturday afternoon (many Jewish immigrants at this time observed the Sabbath only on religious holidays) as half full of children coming by themselves, or with their parents, "stout foreign mothers and dark sometimes ragged fathers" (p. 160).

Here the story ends; it is followed by two brief appendixes, an afterword, and notes. The first appendix is on the Albert Hall Picture Ball of 1913--and to anyone who remembers, the pictures will seem like those from the Chelsea Arts Club balls before and after 1945--and the second is an attempt to list more precisely the works that were in the Jewish section of the Whitechapel show. The afterword is an examination of terms--modernism, modernity, British modernism, gender, primitivism--plus a meditation on the methods Tickner used and the sources she consulted. The tone of these texts is familiar from an essay Tickner wrote eight years ago on the idea of the object, the "impossible object," she called it, where in the idea of interpretation she imagined both a certain adequacy and a principled and reflexive skepticism about what at any moment we might think to be adequate. Hence comes, as she said (pace D. W. Winnicott), a good enough history. (10) Such thinking reveals her generosity as a historian, as does the notion she borrows, if cautiously, from the model of thinking of the analyst Walter Bion, by which she suggests that the historian, like the analyst, should not work at the level of theory but at one closer to the dream or reverie, which might create "the silence necessary for a conversation with the work" (p. 312). History, she also notes, is always for someone, and the someone here is a person concerned with gender, history, the modern world, and psychology.

As we are carried along by the fascination of Tickner's accounts in Modern Life and Modem Subjects, perhaps all we might wonder is to what extent, where with John or Lewis she sees a certain failure of enterprise, this is something she comes to from her sense of the work itself, considered as objects of art, or from her reading of a failure of politics or sexual attitude outside the work. We might also ask to what degree, when she speaks of these objects--to use the distinction she herself borrows from Erwin Panofsky--they are to he viewed as documents or as monuments (p. xiii), or if, as in her lectures on these works given at the National Gallery, London, she sees an opportunity for speculation in the interpretation of pictures. (11) I ask these questions only because I would like to imagine that some accord is possible between the way Tickner talks of this art and the other way of thinking about it, as in the essay Andrew Forge wrote some years ago on Sickert and Steer. That account is based on the idea of technique, in the context of French painting, and the conclusion, if deeply nuanced, is a familiar one: that the confidence and self respect of English art depend always on its need to demonstrate its grasp of the most important modern art "and [yet] to prove its independence from it." (12) Tickner comes to a stronger claim: that there was indeed a modernism, "in England of all places," as one reviewer put it, (13) and one to be understood not as provincial but as local, the point being that all modernisms, despite their debts to one another, are essentially different, because there are "local inflections to the web of relations that make up the cultural field" (p. 193). As students of both language and history we may wonder how it is that one form of modernism is called local and another general, universal, or global.

The volume ends with Tickner's magnificent mass of notes, some ninety-four pages of double columns and smaller print. They are full of the most interesting material, much of it, as one commentator has amusingly said, "forced into the light from the periodicals at Cockfosters and the newspaper collection of the British Library. (14) But there is much more, in words and images, from the records of the Slade School, the archives at the Tate Gallery and Whitechapel, and reviews, letters, and commentaries of all kinds, gathered with the careful labors of many busy years. It is also in this part, rather than in the main text, that when Tickner disagrees with someone--as whether to call this art British or English--she lays Out her reasons, gently and openly. (15) If, like all critics, I have to have at least one small cavil, it is that the index does not cover adequately all the subjects and names that are buried in the treasuries of the notes, this merely means that readers, like those who used books in the past, will have to make up their own sets of annotations and, if they are written on separate pieces of paper, be sure not to misplace them.

Notes

(1.) In this section, Tickner acknowledges her special debt to the work of Julict Steyn, "The Complexities of Assimilation in the 1906 Whitechapel Art Gallery Exhibition 'Jewish Art and Antiquities,'" Oxford Art Journal 13 (1990): 44-50.

(2.) Finberg and Middleton Murray are familiar; not so Davies, but his taste in art can perhaps he gauged from his recommendation in 1921 of a painting by Steer to the National Gallery, Victoria, Australia; see Bruce Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer: 1860-1942 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 153.

(3.) This exhibition, not much noted in tile modern literature, was held at the Grosvenor Galleries on New Bond Street in June 1921. It included 170 paintings, styles intermingled, and the exhibition list gave merely the name of the artist and the number of the exhibit. At the gallery, there seem to have been labels indicating subjects; thus MacCarthy referred to pictures as "(9) Ballad Seller" (in fact, John), or "(85) Pines" (Gerald Kelly); Desmond MacCarthy, "The Nameless Exhibition," Burlington Magazine 38 (1921): 261-62. It is interesting to see the modern pictures, all presumably selected by Fry, which included works by himself and Nina Hamnett, Vanessa Bell, E. McKnight Kauffer, Boris Anrep, Bomberg, and Matthew Smith. It was Tonks who chose the intermediates--Mark Gertler, Steer, Alvaro Guevara, Frederick Brown, William Rothenstein, Albert Rutherston. But who chose Sickert?

As Tickner mentions, the nature of the philanthropy of Canon Barnett is still somewhat unclear; to the article she cites by Seth Koven, "The Whitchaepel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing," in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel J. Sherman and Jrit Rogoff (London: Routledge, 1994), add G. Budge, "Poverty and the Picture Gallery: The Whitechapel Exhibitions and the Social Project of Ruskinian Aesthetics" Visual Culture in Britain 1 (2000): 43-56.

(4.) Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 2000), 378.

(5.) Tickner follows the account of Sickert's interest found in A Free House! or The Artist as Craftsman, Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert, ed. Osbert Sitwell (London: Macmillan, 1947), xxxviii; for a more doubtful account, see Richard Shone, "Review of A. Robins, Walter Sickert: Drawings; Aldershot, 1996," Burlington Magazine 139 (1997): 342-43.

(6.) Walter Sickert, The Complete Writings on Art, ed. Anna Gruetzner Robins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

(7.) As Tickner notes, a similar chamber pot was placed under a caricature of Edouard Manet's Olympia published in the newspaper L'Illustration on June 3,1865. For the remark by Augustus John, see Richard Shone, "Review of Sickert, Wolfe, Hamnett," Burlington Magazine 128 (1986): 914. John's quip invites us to note the ordinary object Fry used in his famous criticism: "It is all the same to me if I represent Christ or a saucepan, since it's the form...that interests me"; see Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), vol. 2, 497.

(8.) On this point, Tickner turns to what Terry Eagleton has said of Yeats; see Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978), 179-81.

(9.) My father, Jesse Cast, who was a student at the Slade School from 1922 to 1926, had first attended the Cambenvell School of Arts and Crafts in 1920 to study with Albert Rutherston on a scholarship from the London County Council; in 1922 he was allowed to transfer it to the Slade, where he was also given a Special Talent scholarship. From its beginning, the Slade offered six scholarships of thirty-five pounds a year, tenable for two years and open "to students of both sexes"; whether this was enough to allow a working-class student to attend is not clear. See Tessa Mackenzie, Art Schools of London: 1895 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), 74.

(10.) Lisa Tickner, "The Impossible Object?" Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 404-7.

(11.) For an account of Tickner's lectures at the National Gallery, given in April and May 1997, see David Jenkins. "Psycho-Feminism in Trafalgar Square," London Magazine 37 (1997): 122-25.

(12.) Andrew Forge, "Gentlemen Impressionists," Encounter 87 (1960): 38-45. I mention this delicate essay since it seems to have been overlooked in modern scholarship.

(13.) T.J. Clark, blurb on the back of the jacket for Modern Life and Modern Subjects.

(14.) Jenkins (as in n. 11), 123.

(15.) Thus Tickner says that in using the term "British" rather than "English" she is parting company with both Charles Harrison and David Peters Corbett; this she does since she feels "British" is the more unstable term and thus does justice to the significant foreign presence in prewar modernism: "Augustus and Gwen John were Welsh, Fergusson was Scottish, Lewis was Canadian, Epstein (like Pound and Eliot) was American, Yeats and Joyce were Irish, Gaudier-Brzeska was French, Bomberg and Gertier were the Yiddish-speaking children of immigrants from Poland and Galicia, even Sickert was born in Munich of Danish, English and Irish ancestry (p. 304 n. 49).

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