Singular And Grand

By ROBERT HUGHES

It would be hard to think of a more overdue or, in some ways, a more welcome subject for an exhibition than "British Art in the 20th Century," the panorama of 310 works by some 70 artists that is now in its last month (through April 5) at the Royal Academy in London. It will then be in Stuttgart from May 8 to June 9. This is the second in a series of surveys that, under the guiding hand of the academy's exhibitions secretary Norman Rosenthal, are designed to look back on and rethink the history of modern art country by country. (The first, in 1985, dealt with German art.)

Our fin de siecle is the natural time for summation. But it already seems clear that the Royal Academy (only 30 years ago the last bastion of peevish misunderstanding of modernism) is stealing quite a march on its competitors. The subject of modern British art has never been tried in depth by an American museum. And no matter what quibbles and demurrals one may have about the choice of this work or that name, the Royal Academy has done a wonderful job. No one with half an eye could spend a couple of hours in Burlington House and leave without asking why the cumulative achievements of British painters and sculptors -- as distinct from the popularity of a few individuals, such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney -- have been so scanted by the official and mainly American annals of modernism.

Unfortunately, American views of British art tend to echo the Chinese court scribe who is said to have remarked, in a letter to George III, that his Emperor was not unmindful of the "remoteness of your tiny barbarian island, cut off as it is from the world by so many wastes of sea." Modern British art, that is to say, tended toward the provincial, the marginal, the literary and the cute; it cultivated nuance and eccentricity at the expense of broader and grander pictorial concerns; it was anecdotal and too much tied to a fascination with human society -- little-island art, not really comparable to the utterances of those Hectors of the prairie and Ajaxes of the long white loft who, in New York City, were busy using up all the air in art history's room.

So why do so many of the lesser-known things in this show -- like the dense and acerbic paintings of Degas's friend Walter Richard Sickert, or Matthew Smith's responses to fauvism, or the work of the vorticists around 1914 (Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska), or that of individuals like Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and Paul Nash, and so on through to the post-'60s paintings of men like Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Howard Hodgkin -- now strike us as not just a footnote to, but an essential part of, the visual culture of the past 80 years: neither "provincial" nor "minor," but singular and grand? What muffled the recognition of British art? Partly, it must be admitted, the English themselves. No nation in this century has been harder on its own artists.

The most durable form of English hostility came not from the Royal Academy, whose fogies died off, but from the enlightened purlieus of Bloomsbury, where the critic Roger Fry, who had organized the first postimpressionist show at the Grafton Galleries in 1910, and his truculent fugleman Clive Bell, inventor of the catch-phrase "significant form," made it just fine to despise new English art in the name of the French avant-garde. Given their belief in an imperial France whose seigneurs were Cezanne, Matisse and Gaugin, Fry and Bell preferred any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid, to anything else, however strong. They both disliked vorticism, the remarkable English movement that combined elements of cubism, futurism and Dada and centered on the belligerent genius of Wyndham Lewis, painter, soldier, novelist, critic and editor of Blast. Bell in 1917 sneered at the "new spirit in the little backwater, called English vorticism, which already gives signs of being as insipid as any other puddle of provincialism," and thereafter the Bloomsberries rarely missed a chance to put Lewis down.

Hence, one of the early pleasures of this show is its vindication of Lewis and his colleagues: to walk from the gallery that contains the weak pastiches of Matisse by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and other Bloomsbury-approved painters into the one dedicated to Britain's avant-garde at the time of World War I is to move from cozy provincialism to formidable energy. Its monument (or perhaps, its idol) is the only large marble carving that Henri Gaudier- Brzeska was able to complete before his death in an infantry charge, at the age of 23, in 1915. This is the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914, and hieratic it is; the face, with its wedge of a nose, embrasure-like eyes and triangular goatee, is as powerful as a royal Assyrian portrait, possessed of an awful gravity that the outrageous phallic pun of the poet's hair fails to reduce.

The war, which evoked so little from French artists, inspired some English ones to their best work; Paul Nash's A Night Bombardment, 1919-20, a view of the sea of cratered mud and dead trees at the front, is both formally rigorous and filled -- though not a figure appears in it -- with the most intense pathos, an elegy for the pastoral mode itself. Facing a mechanized world whose origins lay in England's Industrial Revolution, Lewis argued, the English should be peculiarly fitted to make art of it: "They are the inventors of this bareness and hardness, and should be the great enemies of Romance." The pleated, diagonally stressed, armored precision of Lewis' paintings, as grand in their own way as Fernand Leger's, testifies to this -- in A Battery Shelled, 1919, even the smoke is metal. "I look upon Nature, while I live in a steel city," exclaimed David Bomberg in 1914, and the terse machine-like signs he found for briskly moving figures in The Mud Bath, his early masterpiece of 1912-13, have a tonic decisiveness that is only magnified by the simple color scheme of red, white and blue.

The most unexpected things could happen in British art. A few years ago, just when people thought they had Walter Sickert pegged as a narrative-minded and garrulous Edwardian follower of Degas, they were faced with an exhibition of his extraordinary late paintings, which had largely been ignored by his admirers and appeared to contain the first "appropriations" of narrative mass-media sources by any artist: thus Sickert's huge but obviously unofficial 1936 portrait of Edward VIII stepping from a car and about to don his busby was based, like Warhol's Jackie 30 years later, on a news photograph. (No wonder that the long arm of Sickert would have such an effect on the best history painter of our time, R.B. Kitaj.) Time and again, especially between the wars, England produced artists to whose work there was no Continental parallel, and who thus came to be seen as "eccentric."

The greatest of them, Stanley Spencer, might appear to an unsympathetic eye to have the very qualities -- an obsessive, almost fanatic religious vision, abhorring art theory and centered on the landscape and populace of his native village of Cookham in Berkshire -- that are supposed to make for parochial art. Certainly, if anyone inherited the pre-Raphaelite mantle, it was Spencer. Yet his work was also rooted in earlier traditions of European painting; one might not immediately notice, for instance, that the watchers by the bed in The Centurion's Servant, 1914, are quoted from the mourning angels in the sky in Giotto's Crucifixion in Padua. Spencer's anxiety, especially the sexual anxiety his paintings record, was also intensely "modern": the almost desperate frankness that made his self-portrait with the naked body of his disagreeable future wife Patricia Preece unexhibitable in its day, and still shocking in ours, belongs to a whole subhistory of the crisis of the ideal nude, beginning with Degas's pastels and continued by the unconsoling candor of Lucian Freud, Sigmund's grandson.

There is in this show, of course, no shortage of art that fits the history of avant-gardism as normally constructed; from Ben Nicholson in the '30s to Anthony Caro, Roger Hilton and Bridget Riley in the '60s, Britain has had its share of distinguished abstract artists, and the fundamental ideas about mass culture that lie behind pop art were first explored there by Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. But the impulse to make art about other media is seen to gutter out in the last gallery, amid the mincing, pompous banalities of artists like Bruce McLean and Gilbert & George, and one is left with the conviction that the real pictorial genius of English art has everything to do with the peculiar stress and intensity of natural vision. There are no equivalents in American figurative painting to such painters as Freud, Kossoff and Auerbach. Their deep scrutiny of the motif and their ability to render its raw truth within the hard-won diction of their respective styles seem unique in the 1980s -- as in fact they were, though less noticed, for decades before.

Despite its overencyclopedic look, then, "British Art in the 20th Century" is a highly stimulating show. One may take issue with some of its editing (why only very early Hockneys, for instance?) but not with its general intent. It is a great pity that no American museum had the sense to bring it across the Atlantic.