It needs a certain edge for the scratchings of an artist on canvas or stone to get onto the agenda of those representations that really mean something. An intellectual edge, that is, although the other sense, of a cutting or application that has in the original some depth, is also relevant. But the real ‘edge’ has to do with a full commitment of mind - with not holding back about anything, never just making a variation on something that exists already, and never just filling in. This might sound lofty, but it can be felt straight away. What could be the point of painting something as remote as a Judgment of Paris in about 1925, soon after the war, especially if you lived in Camden Town by the canal, and had to walk though all those terraces just north of Euston every day? William Roberts made his painting of this old cliché, as he so often did with others, by eliding two contraries. The great tradition of the old masters, appealing to the potential and inevitably well-educated patron, rubbed here against the real look of a nude in North London as she turned her back, and he imagined his thirty-year-old self walking around her and being able to admire. The new and the old met in his mind, and by linking them through such compelling rhythms he put the ordinary, vernacular life into the world of art. The picture is witty to the point of prickliness, as he was, but polite as well, and generous. But this contact, between a ‘Paris’ who keeps his eye shut and a large lady that resembles a nude by Cézanne, was another of Roberts’s satires of the lack of common sense endemic in modern art, the art which came, of course, from the other ‘Paris’. But our view is from this side, and we enjoy in any case the wonderful brushy pinks and greens that make up the bodies and background. Furthermore, the picture can be lived inside today, as a way of thinking about the old paintings, even of Cézanne, and in return not so much also of thinking about the way that we love, but of the way that we see and think about love between others, always a comedy before it is a sacrament. This status of this imagery is at a mid point, and even if it needs a habit of looking at paintings to get the best of it, the effect is also here and now, especially in a little picture that would fit so modestly into a room. Its ‘edge’ lies in the originality, not just of design and application, though that is striking, but of the sheer overt frankness of display, whether or not the innuendo is noted.

Modern British art is full of such instances that affect us directly. The artists of the various clans that come under that now historical rubric drew and painted things that exist now - not of course everything that exists now- but people and buildings, the inside of a room and kitchen stuff, the country and holidays, as well as the abstraction of borders, textures and colours that contain a space for mental conversation. This was an Anglo-French art that had escaped, at first through the experience of Sickert’s life in Paris, from the redundancy of the pre-Raphaelite heritage, which had lapsed into coloured illustration, often of things that should anyway have been forgotten. At the beginning of the last century, around 1900, the best contemporary artists were always held by the critics to be Walter Sickert and Augustus John - who represented the art of Camden Town and the art of Chelsea, of colour and line, respectively. John was admittedly a bit of a pre-Raphaelite, and before 1914 was at his best as a Symbolist. He fed on all the old masters, circling around ways of finding imaginative portraits of the people around him to whom he was closest and of those he most admired. His variety astonishes, and it was through fabrications about his beloved Dorelia, a pretend gypsy but a genuine mother figure, that he invented his sight of an un-real and benevolently anarchist never-never land of primitive society. Here she is transformed into a Madonna of the gypsies of Provence, standing unseeing like an emanation in the scrubland near Martigues. John was a ‘last romantic’, working outrageously in the margins of taste before his re-birth into the urban world with his great portraits of the 1920s.

Walter Sickert and Frank Auerbach bracket this century, and are linked, not only through their commitment to London, although that is important, but most revealingly through their relation to the foundation art movement of the modern period, which they stand alongside, just before it happened and in a development beyond. The dense paintings of early Cubism revived material painting at the expense of subject, which was taken as a given. Sickert, forever committed to the subjects of his pictures, had lived in Paris until 1905, and exhibited and was reviewed there in 1904, 1907 and 1909, much as if he were a French artist. The thickly applied, close-toned application of his small paintings half conceal their figures, and break up their outlines and surfaces. At their very best these were nudes in dark rooms, which are further hidden within unconventional poses and cut-offs. Sickert’s people come and go to our perception, buried only slightly less than were the still lifes and figures in the thick canvases of Braque and Picasso of the same time. In all these cases they stand as a metaphor for a created life. And as for concealment, the heads and bodies in Frank Auerbach’s pictures of the 1950s and later barely emerge from their paint. Figure and application are structured into each other in his painting, and the work of the viewer in unravelling them re-creates in colour his original vision, rescuing an emotional content with it from an appearance at first as impervious to space as any of the analytical cubist paintings. Auerbach carries on a most precarious illusionism, with more and more of the figure, expression and design matched between image and the application of colours.

The imaginative stance of modern British art is placed between degrees of the observed and the re-created, between a reliance on the material of paint and the varied re-inventions of the traditional secular subjects. The solid reality of the medium was vivified by some artists within the new international ideals of pure form and colour, while the sketchbook-artists looked to both surreal and romantic habits. There was an idiosyncratic alliance in Paul Nash’s work between good manners and the secret traces of emotion, often pictured by him in terms of a clash between primitive elements found in the southern counties and in the sea and beaches of England. Nothing in Nash is ever actually said straight. Some of his pictures were devoted to special landscape places, others were constructed like paintings by Magritte and de Chirico from ordinary things so misplaced in context that they seemed to reveal a totally unworldly motivation for their existence. The years around 1928 were critical for all these three European painters, their subjects becoming more fantastic at the same time as more ordinary, their patient application of paint given the power to create a shocking transformation of what was almost descriptively true. Nash’s Mantelpiece of 1928 evokes the mind of an architect, with everything seemingly at right angles, and yet transformed through the simple fall of light so that the hang-hole of the ruler becomes something like an eye, and reveals its shape in shadow as a figure looking around a corner. The humdrum tilted looking glass becomes lopsided, and reflects an alarmingly empty space. The wooden and parchment colours of winter allow a potential for life only within the plans, which are kept rolled on the shelf. Architecture and painting come together, as Nash marvellously holds in one image the diversity of modernisms between observation and ideal.

The ideal was explored for private contemplation in the abstract architecture of Gabo and Ben Nicholson. It came to life in their textured surfaces that implied a mental activity within strictly imaginary dimensions. Their originality lies in the push of their new forms within this space, to make things that cannot otherwise be described. The tiny prisms of Mary Martin’s reliefs manage to produce reflections, patterns and shadows that can suddenly turn the calm of ordered squares into an image. Here a windmill-like movement, which can only be imagined in terms of something that does not exist, is seen best by slightly shifting the head to spur it into suggestion.

The artist can begin with imaginative, post-cubist space, allied to the rectangular canvas, and wrench it forwards into the day; or can grab from what is around and about, and see some aspect that finds an echo in paint or line. It is often difficult to be sure where Prunella Clough’s images began, though the earlier ones are clearly centred on figures, and the later ones are more exclusively patterns and colours. But in between, as with the flatly titled Man by Building Site, the life is evenly balanced between the person and the trellis of paint, who seem made of the same things. Her position in this picture is similar to Paul Nash’s in his Mantelpiece, but everything had changed after the war, so that the two paintings can be read against each other. Nash was the distant professional, with shakily optimistic plans for the future, while Clough gives no re-assurance, and refers in the building under construction not to the architect but to the people who laboured to build it, who might also work or shop in it, and certainly have to wait for a bus in the shadow of its cantankerous disarray. If nothing here is in any way lyrical, at least the world of the art gallery, and the entire back-catalogue of painting and design, can touch the ordinary life of the city.

There is a sense in which lines, borders and edges within paintings impose a control over the representation. An outline omits so much that what is left acts like a botanical drawing that is limited by the wish to exemplify a name, or like a map that exists to mark ownership. A linear painting makes the identity of the subject very clear, a house, a tree, a table, while seizing it as an object to be used. The journey through Paul Nash’s glass to the uncertain space of the future is continued along Keith Vaughan’s Road out of a Village. The whole perspective follows the gap between cottages, and goes along an imaginary, un-real line towards hills and moon, as in pictures by both Sutherland and Nash himself. It would seem contrived, were it not for his particular colouring, so much a part of twilight that it seems unlikely there is any way out at all. The grey and acid light of Vaughan’s persistent colouring makes everything, whether landscape or abstract, look like the most unglamorous flesh seen under reflected streetlamps, suggesting faces and torsos in buildings and hills.

The group of John Minton’s 1940s over-wrought landscapes of the mind, black and white, wiry and corrugated, was a triumph of the style that Robin Ironside defined as ‘neo-romantic’. They are fantastically thoroughgoing in ambiguity of scale, and of meshing of thought with figure, and figure again with countryside. They are an urban view of a British literary remoteness, like the instability of Coleridge’s walks across the mountains. The man and woman of the Welsh Landscape share, he without his clothes, in the contorted, small-scale frenzy of undergrowth and hill and bumpy lane. It is not as if the farmer’s children of the Prescelli were actually like this, living in some pre-history that can be seen only in moonlight. The drawing is similar to another of the same size that he called English Landscape, with the same male figure in reverse. Piero di Cosimo’s animal-figures in the Ashmolean are relics of some cul-de-sac of evolution, but Minton’s equally hallucinatory pre-Cambrians are witness of a London artist in the destruction of wartime Europe, re-convening the craters and twisted nature, and the absence of colour. Everything in his great inventions of this period is double valued, and the ellipse and the lane at the centre become by an alteration of scale a detail of some earthy organism. The wholly imaginary landscapes of the essayist and painter Cecil Collins had attained their conviction in the 1930s through sheer invention. During the war a group of his ink drawings with titles like The Invocation and The Gardener suggested the re-fertilisation of the land, and the angel of his Hymn might (not that anyone can be sure) be carrying a sharp cross to ward off evil, and a disc to bend the shining light to encourage growth. The weirdly compelling trees, landscape and new people are more or less the same things, and the covering of the angel echoes the pattern of the flora, so that the whole invention is linked together.

Some of the best of modern British art is found in abstract landscape. Styles evolve, and the pictures can be assigned earlier or later, the colouring be seen alternating by decade between bright and sombre, but beyond that there is here an unexpected painterly tradition in this school that includes Smith, Bomberg, Bacon, Hodgkin and others. The point of reference was almost always to French painting, but with the application of paint used to take the place of drawing, in a balancing act of structure and representation. Each artist painted their own motif or locality repeatedly, finding space and light in terms of colour. It was an art that re-invented itself by making the depiction more difficult, with colours closer or more distant in tone. Because of the well established position of landscape painting there were patrons, so that Smith, for example, sold well between the wars. The artists found new colours, and success depended on the tension within the work. As it is an art that is totally non-verbal, despite the edge between success and failure in each work its criticism has been quite limited, with a few remarkable exceptions. Ivon Hitchens seems time and again to have been a master painter, most admired for the late 1940s paintings of his own private landscape in Sussex with a view across water. He worked directly in the open air, and his oblong pictures measure the scale of his sight as he turned his head. His paintings were always on the figurative side of abstraction, while the St Ives painters were usually just on the far side of depiction. Patrick Heron, a generation younger than Hitchens, was in the same game. The Boats and the Iron Ladder was near his step off, going beyond the small boat paintings that Braque had made in Normandy through a much freer drawing and a new colouring. Heron was notoriously irked when his own larger scale and totally abstract paintings were compared to his sight of American art, which co-incided. This is much written about, but the St Ives artists indeed differed from the Americans, neither sublime nor metaphysical, and dependant on a touch that always relates to the stretch of the hand and a single glance of the eye.

The paintings of figures by Auerbach, which because of their surface depth cannot be seen at all properly in reproduction, are effective through the extreme unlikeliness of their representation. The application depends on direct and laborious contact, and inspires a reciprocated sense of the penetration of privacy, as if to reveal a personality while at the same time noting a distance. Auerbach’s pictures are a kind of pictorial sculpture, built forward from the canvas to disclose an individual. By the opposite procedure, a painterly sculpture, William Turnbull scratches the surface of his material and patinates the surface of the cast bronze shape to bring it slightly towards a figure, or sometimes a head, of such minimal individuality that it is held in life only by the least amount that can make it a person and not some standing cult object. Auerbach and Turnbull are co-incidental opposites, and have no relation. Yet there is a common feeling in their work of life against the odds, with a peculiarity and old-fashionedness about these heads. The painting almost questions mortality through the delicacy of its life, and the sculpture almost brings a god to earth through the individual quirkiness of the slight engraving that makes it like us.

David Fraser Jenkins
April 2006