Modern Painters: Art in a Cold Climate: The Art of Cornwall, or, the self delusion of the educated mind

Recently I watched a TV programme on the BBC where a well educated, apparently intelligent professional art historian (Dr James Fox, of Cambridge University) claimed, in effect, that this;

Two Boats by Alfred Wallis

was in every way far superior to this:

Timber Barque off Pendennis by Henry Scott Tuke

How is this possible?

There are many signs and symbols all around us that tell of the collapse of culture and to my mind the fact that a well educated person can hold such an opinion (and I do him the honour of accepting his sincerity) is most definitely one of them.

To some that may seem a harsh statement and an overly judgemental view about an essentially subjective issue. I like tea, you prefer coffee, you like Wallis I prefer Tuke, its just a matter of taste is it not? Well it is a matter of taste but a truth too little acknowledged today is that taste can be developed and refined over time, indeed not to do so is a sign of arrested development. Even in the realm of food we would look a little askance at an adult whose preferences went no further than rusks in milk but art of course appeals to the intellect and the spiritual side of humanity to a far greater extent than food and thus has even greater scope for development.

For 600 years the standards by which art was judged were more or less agreed and relatively stable. Different cultures had their own emphases and preferences for subject matter, Protestant Dutch burghers of the Golden Age on the whole had more of a feeling for domestic pictures, interiors and still life, Catholic Spanish aristocrats more interest in the lives of the Saints, but as to the manner of the thing represented there was far more to unite them than to separate. Good drawing, not merely accurate but showing a certain delicacy and sensitivity, harmonious arrangements of masses, both in terms of value and hue (what the layman calls colour), clear reference (but not necessarily slavish adherence) to the rules and appearance of the natural world, order and arrangement, rhythm and structure. These were the tools of the artist and with them he could extol the virtues of his domestic daily life, criticise the follies and injustices of his fellow man or humbly praise his creator as he saw fit. In the whole canon of Western Art form Giotto to Sargent there was no subject matter left untouched and no style left unexplored. And yet still these criteria I have outlined not only endured but were found to be indispensable guidelines for producing pictures that people actually wanted to look at and own and live amongst.
So we come back to the art of Cornwall, the art of Wallis, Nicholson, Wood and others. Now, by the standards by which art had been judged for the previous six centuries it would clearly preposterous to claim that this self portrait by Wood is a better picture than this portrait by Elizabeth Forbes.

Fisher Girl by Elizabeth Forbes

Self-Portrait by Christopher Wood

The one is horrendously badly drawn, the colour is muddy and lacks any depth, the masses unbalanced, the edges handled in a very amateurish way resulting in the figure looking as though it were pasted onto the background and the table (if its slide out of the bottom of the picture is arrested) occupying an ambiguous position in space seemingly both in front of and behind the painters right leg. Forbes' picture by contrast is sensitively drawn; the girls posture and facial expression, even her positioning on the canvas hint at a touching combination of vulnerability and defiance. The beautiful color harmony of blues and greens contrasted with the red of the floor is delicious and reflects the calm mood of the girl herself. It is a lovely little painting from an artist who has been somewhat overshadowed by her more famous husband.

I return to my original question therefore, how is it possible to consider Wood or Wallis better artists than Forbes (Mr or Mrs) or Tuke? Not clearly by reference to any of the accepted standards of art up until the early 20th century. Only by inventing new standards could this judgement possibly be made. So what are these new standards which overturn 600 hundred years of culture and tradition. Ah! here their advocates become a little coy. It is fact surprisingly difficult to find a modernist actually list the criteria by which they value this

St.Ives by Ben Nicholson

more than this.

Across Mount's Bay by Elizabeth Forbes

are you surprised?

We get some hints though from the start of the film where Dr. Fox, in order to set the scene for his heroes, rapidly disparages the artists who first came to Cornwall from the 1850's and more particularly who first created what could be described as a "school" in Newlyn and elsewhere in the 1880's. The tone is dismissive and the language subtly disparaging. These artists are characterized as "gentleman artists" that is to say, not serious professionals, they didn't need to struggle for their art as did the heroes of modernism. Yet despite this they apparently "turned out thousands of highly marketable paintings" Thousands! it was production line stuff is the subtext, no soul in it, and of course it was much to their discredit that people actually liked their work and wanted to buy it! They would have been more highly regarded no doubt had they produced very little work which nobody cared to look at. But their patrons were fools as well because they didn't realise that the pictures they bought were "mawkish and patronising", "Victorian myth making" myth here obviously used to mean falsehood and Victorian to mean, well, Victorian, It wasn't the "real Cornwall" we are loftily informed from the distance of more than a hundred years and several hundred miles, but "a fantasy. a make believe".
I presume by that Dr. Fox means the sun never shone in bad old Victorian times, pretty girls never existed and if they did they certainly never waved their husbands and sweethearts off to sea, or sat alone on the beach waiting for them to come home. And as sometimes happened the menfolk didn't return, they never cried about or sat regretting the past in a rundown cottage. And even if all this were true, where does that leave this wonderful picture by Walter Langley?

An old Cornishwoman by Walter Langley

"Mawkish" "patronizing"? "fantasy"?. I think it a fine picture comparable in every sense with a better Rembrandt, and I am rather inclined to believe that had it been painted in 17th century Holland and not 19th century England Dr Fox would have agreed with me.

It seems therefore that the modernist art of Cornwall is to be valued chiefly for what it isn't than what it is. Dr Fox, like many a modernist sympathiser lays great store by the fact that his heroes were "radical" "exhilarating" and they "changed everything" He even makes the preposterous claim that they "revolutionised the way we see landscape and colour"! Well, thank you Dr Fox but I don't see landscape like a flat cardboard cut out without perspective or the unifying light of the sun and what is more I fail to see how in any way it could be desirable that I should. Newness, even originality is not a virtue in itself and no artist of any power has ever sought it. To do so is a sure sign of the feeble and second rate and for an art historian to elevate it to such a level that all the accepted qualities of fine art, of Giotto, of Titian, of Rembrandt, of Turner, even of Manet and Degas are overthrown and considered (if recognised at all) as being of lesser importance is really inexcusable. It takes a peculiar cast of mind to see virtue in newness without any other quality, it is unfortunately a cast of mind very commonly found in the modern age, whether it is a cause or an effect of the modern world or both is difficult to say, but the desire to overthrow the past and jettison its values indiscriminately just because they belong to the past is a very dangerous one. It has already caused great upset to modern western civilization, it may not be too dramatic to say it has helped to kill it. It is certainly one of the main reasons why most of us live in dull utilitarian houses in increasingly ugly towns and cities. I have written about this before and no doubt will do so again; to restore those broken links with the past is part of the reason why I paint and ought to be the chief concern for all of us who care for our culture. Dr Fox would regard that notion as ridiculous I'm sure but then I in my defence I would have to point out to him that his theory of modernism has rendered him by his own admission quite unable to understand wherein lies the merit of a good picture. Maybe the pictures he admires were in their time revolutionary, but a lot of people tend to lose their heads during revolutions and later it doesn't seem quite so clear why. Modernists have constructed a theory which makes bad pictures more important than good ones. Dr Fox is free to spend the rest of his life analysing the temporary importance of this picture