The
first in a promised series on long-gone art exhibitions, this time a mini-show at Tate Britain dedicated to William Roberts
When looking at the Vorticist exhibition here in this very venue, we saw how David Blomberg's 'Mud Bath' (below) had
a totemic influence on the group he never officially joined. Mostly
they seem to have seen it as a step ahead from something like
Matisse's 'Dance' (below below).
And,
okay, you can line them up that way should you choose. But Blomberg
was most likely trying to evoke the loss of self that can be
generated by group frenzy. While the Vorticists too often saw in it
something linear, the next footfall in the regular advance of the
avant garde - the collapse of the figure into abstract angularity. If
a little geometry is a good thing, then more of it must be better –
right?
They
drew, in short, the wrong lesson and went tilting off at the horizon
line. Blomberg had pitched his painting precisely, at the point where
the human figure tips into the abstract. That's what makes it so
compelling and so memorable an image - that it's so stark and
striking yet so hard to pin down. It hits you and then it lingers.
William
Roberts, however, was not caught up in this charge. He may have
gained more of an insight into Blomberg through studying alongside
him at the Slade. Or the self-identifying prole may have refused to
fall in line out of personal animosity with Vorticist guru (and arch
toff) Wyndham Lewis. Perhaps he was simply smarter than the pack.
Whichever, it ended up the same way, and he refused to fall in with
the frog-march and instead embarked upon... well, let's check it out.
The
earliest piece on show, 'Leadenhall Market' (1913,
above), is a pencil drawing made while he was still a student at the
Slade. Particularly when placed against the bold use of colour he was
employing later, it would be easy to dismiss it as juvenilia. In
fact, incipiently, everything's here.
The
tubular geometry he would use for anatomy is already emerging. But
more significant is the composition. It's calm descriptive title
(almost inviting the prefix “study of...”) belies its contents,
for the figures are thrown in a tumult that often seems fractious.
The crowd pours into view like a raging river; faces are sometimes
realised, sometimes not, as if semi-discerned under it's froth. It's
almost the opposite of Jose Munoz's comic strip art, whose street figures are trapped in an alienated
individualism. For better or worse, these are thrown together.
Though
it's shown only through a preparatory sketch, its with 'Return
of Ulysses' (1913, up top) that Roberts ceases budding and
starts to flower. Actually, it doesn't even matter that it's just a
sketch. There's many sketches in this room, and beside them the
paintings often look like sketches blown up rather than filled in
with any greater detail - the blocky faces, the thick lips, the eyes
a clamped-closed line. If there's a lingering influence from
Blomberg's bathers, they look as much like the graphic icons of the working man from Otto Neurath's Isotype picograms. Equally drawn from the world
of graphics is the posterly look – the limited palette of deep but
vivid colours.
Vorticism
was almost absurdly short-lived, and by 'Athletes Exercising
in a Gymnasium' (1920, above) we're already past it. If
Roberts seems to be moving away from the Blomberg style, then by this
point so was Blomberg himself. The figures are less bold geometric
colours, and more naturalised. However stylised and transformed they
may be, we can see the basis in actual people in a real space. It's
almost like 'Mud Bath' decoded. Perhaps because of
it's transitional nature it's not one of Roberts' best, but looks
like something of a half-way house.
'The
Port of London' (1920, above) is, conversely, the least
Roberts-like work on show here and much more successful. Described by
the indicia as “unusually a landscape composition”, the few
figures are faceless and non-dominant. You can see the influence of
Impressionism and it's celebration of everyday life. (Water-side
scenes being of course an Impressionist favourite.) But it's an
English Impressionism, of quiet business, of caps
and chip wrappers, something akin to Stanley Spencer or later Edward Burra. Roberts would habitually walk the London
streets and frequent its bars. And he paints the waterfront warmly,
like a portrait of an old friend.
'The
Cinema' (above) was painted the same year, but is based on
the genre of Music Hall paintings, by Walter Sickert and others. Traditionally the genre celebrated the
unruly liveliness of such popular entertainment, with a boisterous
audience undifferentiated from the stage. Formally, Roberts
distinguishes his cinema from such shenanigans - fencing off the
silver screen into a square in the upper corner, and giving it it's
own separate palette of gold and bronze.
But
from there he quite deliberately undermines his own composition. A
woman's head strays across the corner of the screen, the angle of her
body pulling it's diagonal composition out into the auditorium. The
figures mostly look to the screen, but from a bustle of different
poses. They're not in the neat rows you'd expect to see in a cinema.
One group sit on a bench at right-angle to the screen, while the
couple on the lower left seem more interested in each other. Others
amble in, even though the film is already showing. The capped,
uniformed, upright figure dominates the auditorium, and looks to be
some sort of usher or guard. But his arms are folded, his eyes angled
up at the same screen as everybody else.
The
cinema was held by some to draw a line under the Music Hall era, to
mark the imposition of order. Not to Roberts. He's celebrating the
crowd, its carefree, good-natured unruliness, its true nature lying
unabated beneath those bureaucratic rules and regulations.
It
features a device characteristic to Roberts which might at first seem
paradoxical - to give each figure a unique pose while withholding any
individual features. After all, this is no faceless horde but a
cheery gang. But Roberts isn't concerned with the people that make
the crowd up, he's concerned with the sum of parts. Roberts' subject
matter was his own people – the English working class.
'Deposition
From the Cross' (1926) uses a device Roberts shares with
Spencer and other artists of the era - uniting not just modern and
classical themes, but the everyday with the legendary. Here, despite
that title, the emphasis is not on the cross but on the ladder. The
figures are in modern dress and multi-racial. When you hang pictures
up in a row like this, you cannot help but see a sequence to it. And
unlike 'The Cinema' they're not at their leisure
but at work, united in common purpose. The earlier claim that the
crowd is innately untameable is now more nuanced, more muted.
Yet,
while the face of Jesus is obscured, three sets of eyes triangulate
upon him. Rather than being stuck on a cross, like the figure on the
far left, he's handled tenderly. Again despite the title, it's
ambiguous whether they're taking down or placing up his body. This is
Jesus the modest carpenter's son, who belongs not to Kings and Queens
but to working people.
But
there's also an almost Communist reading, to file alongside the
religious one. One of the paradoxes of capitalism is that our need to
sell our labour is what brings us together. With common orders, wage
labour gives us common purpose. Jesus could represent salvation but
also workers autonomy, which had seemed so strong immediately after
the Great War. Perhaps it's significant that this was painted the
year the General Strike was defeated.
With
'The Art Gallery' we suddenly fast forward to
1973, and with the leap in time comes a corresponding change in
style. Most immediately noticeable is the new palette. Colours are
now brighter, pinks and purples, the once-dark background a mustard
yellow. But the bigger shift is in the figures. Heads are no longer
blocks but rounded, individualised, caricatured, like his cartoons
from the '50s seen elsewhere in room.
In
what must surely be a snub to Vorticism, geometric abstract artworks
are thrown into the background - almost blocked out by crowd, barely
space for a triangle to protrude. Unlike the screen of 'The
Cinema', not a single figure looks to them - instead they
look at each other or out to us. Roberts, the great chronicler of
life in the streets, finds the visitors more interesting than the
art. Had he been in the Tate the same day as me, he'd doubtless have
found more inspiration in the crowd than on the walls.
And
yet there's a trade-off. Cinemas, at least in Roberts' day, had one
mighty screen in a large auditorium. While art galleries featured a
multiplicity of works, making gallery-attending a more individualised
experience - something reflected here. (It's perhaps a paradox of
our age that, as general life becomes more closeted, modern art is
becoming more installation-based or otherwise experienced
collectively.) Figures are blocked together, in one heaving clump,
but their body languages places them in chatting couples or family
groups. If the Cinema could still be like the Music Hall, the Gallery
is no longer like the Cinema. As figures grow features and gain their
individuality they lose their common purpose. The two works probably
reflected their respective eras.
Much
of the criticism directed against Roberts (and there's plenty) is
simple art snobbery. True, he sometimes gave a romanticised view of
the working class, which took its subjectively as almost
self-evident. But his sin was not to depict the lower orders through
the necessary distancing devices, not to place them as his subject,
his sin was to give them collectivity.
However,
it shouldn't be denied that he could be repetitive, falling back
again and again on familiar themes and devices. At its worst his work
looks like Playpeople in stock sets, ready to pushed around in little
dioramas. A child's eye parody of working class life, one cliché
swapped for another.
I'm
forever insisting that British Modernism needs bigging up, and
complaining when this or that artist doesn't get a major
retrospective. Whereas this time we may well have been better off
with a greatest hits sampler rather than the comprehensive box set.
However, while in life Roberts walked his own furrow and kept the art
establishment at a firm arms-length, there is no need to keep him in
such a box today. As mentioned above, there are frequent overlaps
between his work and other British Modernists of the time. His
contribution should not be over-stated. But it should be celebrated.