A Cure for Culture: Die Brücke at Moritzburg

bruckThere is a (completely valid) argument that originality in the arts is overrated; and clearly it is better to have something derivative or traditional that is good, than something completely original that is bad. But at the same time, to take conventional or traditional tools – be they guitars, words or paint & brushes – and to use them to create something new, is a challenge no less difficult – but less heralded – than being a true pioneer.liebermann 3
In the Germany of the early 20th Century, there was a lot to reject – not only centuries of rigid regional – Prussian, Saxon, Bavarian – tradition, but also the more recent social and moral repression of Kaiser Wilhelm’s conservative regime (more or less a militarised version of his British aunt’s “Victorianism”). On top of this, there was, in the art world, the relatively recent absorption of realism and impressionism, radical only a generation before, but already becoming a new kind of academicism a decade later.

When a group of young artists formed a group called Die Brücke (‘The Bridge’), late in the first decade of the century, one of their aims was to strip away the patina of suffocating ‘style’ and orthodox practice  that had grown up between subjects or themes and the viewing public. At the same time, they intended  to apply this philosophy to their own lives, freeing themselves from formalised German society and its stifling conventions during summer painting trips into the beautiful landscapes of rural Germany. kirchner-poster-1910Despite these radical aims, the artists were not wholly iconoclastic; rather than rejecting all that had gone before, they looked to art with the most primal, emotional impact, from both home and abroad; both the tribal, ‘primitive’ art of non-western cultures, and Germany’s own ‘barbaric’ Gothic past. In terms of this kind of visceral impact, the group’s most successful works are probably those combining those things over which society and its civilising influence had little control; the human body and the natural world it has inhabited since the dawn of humankind. These works retain their impact over a century later, but although (like all truly ‘successful’ visual art) they require no explanation in order to be understood, the story and context of their genesis is fascinating in itself and helps to illuminate the works and their still-poweful impact.

Despite the Victorianism mentioned above, there were currents of liberal thought in Wilhelmine Germany that were to influence the art of the Brücke. The artists were of that generation (roughly the same one as Hitler), who were inspired by the writings of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1892), Nietzsche stressed the need to destroy the sterile values of decadent civilisation, and cast off history in order to create a positive, healthy art. In 1906’s posthumous The Will To Power, he stressed the point even more clearly – ‘The savage… is a return to nature – and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from culture.’ This was to prove an inspirational doctrine to young artists, who were to find an escape from the stifling pressure of the stagnant past (and present) in the so-called ‘primitive’ art of non-western cultures. At the same time, the cult of nature was widespread and very respectable throughout Germany in this period and was manifested in groups such as the Wandervögel, which was devoted to exploring the German countryside, as well as in health and nudist groups which had grown up partly as a revolt against the effects of rapid industrialisation. Wandervogel2

Although the aspect of nudity seems, even in the 21st century, a symptom of liberalisation, in fact this was an element of the zeitgeist that influenced a whole generation regardless of its political beliefs; both the Communist and Nazi parties in Germany were involved in boy scout style activities with a naturist focus, and even at its height the Third Reich celebrated, rather than suppressed, nude (non-sexual) group activities, and the Hitler Youth had a strong outdoors element. Interestingly, one of the most important authors in this respect was not Nietzche but Jack London, with his stirring tales of (to be honest, fully clothed) adventures in the wilderness of America, such as The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

wandervogel

Although avowedly modern, the Brücke did not have a straightforward view of the recently industrialised, unified Germany. Until 1871 Germany consisted of twenty-five individual states, and regional identity – artistic as well as political – remained strong. This meant that Kaiser Wilhelm’s regime indulged in the kind of extreme nationalist propaganda later carried even further by the Nazi Party, using a semi-mythical German past to appeal to national, rather than local, feelings of patriotism. As in the UK, the speed with which the country became industrialised led to a nostalgic yearning for the rural past, in Germany defined by reference to the ‘Fatherland’ and the volk of Germany, whose traditional way of life was perceived by conservative observers to be threatened by the influx of foreign workers necessary to keep the country’s industrial heart beating. Nationalistic feeling was not however, only the preserve of the political right; one of the aims of Brücke founder member Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, even before the group came together, was ‘the renewal of German art’, although, unlike the statements of Joseph Goebbels and his ilk, this did not imply any denigration of non-German art. This reinforces the fact that, despite surface similarities, the work of The Brücke was entirely in opposition to the Romantic right-wing sentiments then emerging.

The Brücke, consisting of Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Mpechstein 1ax Pechstein, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff and Emil Nolde among others, made excursions to the Moritzburg lakes outside of Dresden, and paintings like Pechstein’s Open Air (Moritzburg) (1910) and Erich Heckel’s series of Bathers attempt to express the communal freedom from convention which was one of the group’s main aims. In these pictures, the bold compositions and the use of vivid colour links the bathers to the landscape they inhabit, with flesh tones reflected in the colours of the trees and land. The two-dimensional quality of the paintings also integrates the figures within the landscape, giving a strong sense of surface deign, enhanced by the simplification of both figures and objects, all generalised to basic shapes and painted in intense saturated colour. The ‘primitive’, almost crude aspect of these paintings could itself be read as a straightforward criticism or rejection of modern urban society and its values, but the real situation was far more complex.

heckel 2Shortly after their founding in 1905, the Brücke issued a manifesto which stressed their desire to rebel against the ‘long established older forces’ at work in Germany and their commitment to modernity. What they didn’t mean was modernity as embodied in the Berlin Secession, then only seven or eight years old; a modernist movement (in some ways comparable to, although more formalised than, the Bloomsbury group in the UK) based on the belated acceptance of Impressionism in German art. German Impressionist Max Liebermann and his followers effectively sowed the seeds of their own destruction by exhibiting the works of artists far more advanced in modernism than themselves, including Munch, Van Gogh, Cezanne and the Fauves, inadvertently highlighting the inoffensive, pleasant mildness of their own work.For the Brücke artists however, it was the expressiveness of Munch and Van Gogh, and the Fauves’ intense use of colour that were to point the way forward.

Manifesto1Perhaps not surprisingly, given the sense of design and structure in their works, the four founders of the Brücke; Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were architecture students with little or no training in painting. Being based in Dresden was important, as it not only gave them access to some of Germany’s most unspoiled countryside, but also the opportunity to study modern European painting (Van Gogh’s art was exhibited in the city as early as 1903) alongside the then-neglected mediaeval and Renaissance German art.

Van Gogh set a powerful example of how to imbue not only figures, but also landscape with personal, symbolic and emotional meaning, with colour used in an expressive rather than realistic way. At the same time, the Dresden Ethnographic Museum displayed many ‘primitive’ works from the South Seas and elsewhere. Particularly important for the group were some roof beams from the Palau islands in the South Seas, which had been taken by Germany as part of the Kaiser’s aggressive policy of Imperial expansion. While these influences were important for the group, it’s probably fair to say they helped liberate it from contemporary restrictions, rather than actually shaping the art that they produced.

ernst-ludwig-kirchner-three-nudes 4A case in point is Kirchner’s paintings from the group’s summer excursions, such as Bathers at Moritzburg and Three Nudes in A Forest (1909). These are not exercises in emulating primitive art and neither are they intended as purely decorative works, but instead they attempt to recreate the sense of freedom that the artist and his friends actually experienced at the time, without reference to the accepted conventions of nude or landscape painting. While fascinated by the art of tribal, non-European cultures, the Brücke artists were ignorant of its context and meaning, but this actually strengthened, rather than undermined its usefulness to the group. ‘Primitive’ art was resonant mainly for its position outside of the Western European art tradition; whether it was truly ‘untutored’ (unlikely) or sprang from cultures who were more in touch with the basic instincts and impulses obscured by centuries of religion and convention (questionable), this was the perception of the westerners encountering it for the first time. This meant that its features, such as the simplification and generalisation of the human figure and the lack of mathematical perspective were potent tools for artists trying to make art based on primal feeling rather than convention.

To tap into the desired raw creativity, the artists valued informality and impulsiveness, training themselves to capture the human figure as economically as possible by employing amateur models and having them pose for nude studies for a maximum of fifteen minutes per sitting. The nudes of Kirchner’s paintings owe as much to these studies as to any ‘primitive’ prototypes. Similarly, although there are parallels between the Brücke’s use of flat intense colour and that of the Fauves, an equally (or more) valid comparison is with the simplified use of colour created by woodblock printing, a major activity of the group from its inception onwards. Whereas the Fauves used colour boldly, but for harmonious and decorative purposes, the Brücke used it to reinforce the sense of vigour and life within the group’s dynamic compositions as well as for symbolic impact.

aryannudeAs previously mentioned, nudity in itself was not controversial in Germany; not only were liberal and conservative alike agreed on the healthiness of nudism and outdoor pursuits (an aspect of German society that would become even more dominant in the inter-war Weimar period and beyond),
but the academic tradition of German painting too, celebrated the nude in its romantic, Arcadian visions. The Brücke’s attitude to nudity is, however, possibly the most revolutionary aspect of their work. The teaching of art has usually stressed (and in general still does) the human figure as form rather than gender and structure rather than meaning.
The Fauves (notably in works like Matisse’s Joie de Vivre (1906) or The Dance (1909)) aimed at a mat dance 7satisfying decorative composition and a sense of harmony and peace, but the Brücke artists – and Kirchner in particular – imbued their figures with a positive and sexual energy, influenced as much by the writings of Nietzsche and Walt Whitman as by any artistic source. In this, they were influenced to an extent by Munch, but whereas the Norwegian’s haunting and bleak paintings expressed his anxieties about sex and relationships, the Brücke used the depiction of nudity to purge their work of the sexual repression and neuroses that was the darker side of Wilhelmine Germany’s obsession with nudity and hygiene. Two paintings by Kirchner highlight the importance the setting has in the meaning at atmosphere of the group’s treatment of the body. girl cat 11Girl With A Cat – Franzi (1910) is an ambiguous image; the modern interior and the ribbons in Franzi’s hair, combined with the viewpoint which forces the viewer to look down on the girl, creates an uneasy sense of vulnerability and tension, which, despite the painting’s vibrant colmunch 8our, makes it comparable in effect to Munch’s Puberty (1895). By removing the same model from an urban environment in Franzi With a Bow and Arrow (1909-11) the tension is replaced instead by a vibrant and carefree energy. The natural setting and dynamic pose (very much a standard image of German nudism) neutralise the troubled psychological aspects apparent in the urban setting.

kirch 12

On the surface, this transformation would seem simply to conform to the spiritual regeneration of Germany as Heimat (homeland) as espoused by right-wing nudist groups with their obsession with cleanliness and sports, but in fact it is far more revolutionary. The carefree sexuality seen in a painting like Kirchner’s Striding Into the Sea (completed in 1912) was definitely not approved of by Kaiser Wilhelm’s establishment, and goes beyond the somewhat detached approach to the nude in contemporary French art. archer 13The Brücke were in a sense living (or at least trying to live) their philosophy; on their summer trips the group went beyond the regimented nudist groups to stay in secluded woodland spots where they could bathe alongside their female models in what Max Pechstein described as ‘perfect harmony’; just as in their paintings (of course this has its own troubling aspect, since the group was mostly male and the girls involved were, in some cases, paid to be there). There is in fact a noticeable change in tone in the group’s work after 1911 when they moved to Berlin, where Kirchner’s nude paintings tend to separate into urban studies of sexuality as the summer trips ended and they instead began to go on trips individually, with, not surprisingly, far less communal or social feeling in the paintings they completed there.

The idyllic nature of the Brücke’s Moritzburg paintings, does not, however, mean that the artists made the standard distinction between a healthy outdoor life and a decadent urban one. Many of the group’s images of the city, especially those painted before the relocation to Berlin, explore their sense of excitement they felt on the fringes of urban modern life, rather than a Munch-like sense of alienation. Also, whereas the Moritzburg paintings were essentially attempts to capture the mood and a philosophy of an enclosed, self-created world, their urban paintings were more self-consciously artistic; whereas German academic painting (like most 19th century academic painting) was essentially an amalgam of romanticism and the mathematical principles and idealising tendencies of the Italian renaissance, a painting like Kirchner’s Standing Nude With A Hat (1910) looks to the then neglected German ‘primitives’ such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, whose Venus and Cupid, like Kirchner’s nude, is almost certainly the portrait of a real court lady, her fashionable hat stressing the flimsiness of the mythical setting.hatty nudes

Following the move to Berlin, the Brücke became less close-knit as a group and the influence of art as opposed to lifestyle on their painting became more direct. The theme of the nude in nature remained important, but the works became less unified as Kirchner and Erich Heckel began to travel to the Baltic island of Fehmarn, while Max Pechstein painted at Nidden and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff visited Otto_Mueller_two girls in the wood (1920-25)Dangast, by the North Sea. Newer member Otto Müller, who joined the Brücke in 1910 had impressed his fellow artists with the woodcut-like flatness of his painting style and his paintings, such as Bathers (c.1912) and Reclining Nude in Dunes (c.1915) are far less dramatic and strident than the group’s earlier works, but reflect a similar interest in non-European (and especially ancient Egyptian) painting.mueller 18
Müller’s main interest was in simplicity and clarity and to this end he began to use distemper to gain a matt, two-dimensional effect. Despite its relatively conventional aspects, Müller’s delicate art was to influence Kirchner’s own painting.

In Fehmarn, Kirchner felt, like Gauguin in Tahiti, that he had found a place unspoiled by modern industrial society, but in reality it was this society (in Kirchner’s case the recently-built railway network) that made these trips possible. In works such as Five Bathers at the Lake (1911) and Two Bathers, Fehmarn (1913) Kirchner’s painting has become more tightly controlled than before, and the figures are based on ‘primitive’ sources, rather than simply being depicted with primitive energy. Even more than Kirchner’s had, Müller’s work shows the influence of the forms of African sculpture (and of Kirchner’s carved driftwood figures), rather than simply using them as models of simplicity and freedom from Western art conventions.

bathers fehmarn 21In this period Kirchner himself was influenced by John Griffiths’ book Paintings in the Buddhist Cave Temples of Ajanta (1896) and by comparison with the Moritzburg works, these paintings are calmer, more decorative and stylized and, crucially, feature no male figures; this is not an artist recording a world in which he plays an integral part, but is instead depicting and celebrating something which is ‘exotic’ and separate from the artist’s everyday experience; in fact a ‘primitive’ record, like Gauguin and Bernard’s depiction of rustic life in Pont Aven; not a new art for a new society.


kirchsculptGauguin was also an important influence on the works Karl Schmidt-Rottluff painted at Nidden, (Nidden being its German name; properly Nida, on the Lithuanian coast) in 1913. Pictures like Nudes in the Dunes and Three Nudes retain the intense saturated colour that marked the Brücke’s early style, and Schmidt-Rottluff also integrates figures and landscape more completely than Kirchner did in this period. The hot, complementary colours are clearly Fauve-influenced, and like Kirchner and Müller, the artist attempts to create images that are flat and decorative, rather than realistic or three-dimensional.


RottluffRedDune 24Schmidt-Rottluff ensured that there was little background/foreground or distancing effects by making horizon lines either high or non-existent and eliminating empty space from his pictures. At the same time, this, while definitively modern by the standards of its time, is idyllic and escapist, rather than rebellious or reforming in intent. Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel experimented with the cubist style then emerging in France, but  it was a short-lived phase for Schmidt-Rottluff. Heckel was more serious, becoming friendly with the members of the Expressionist group Der Blauer Reiter, whose works were indebted to both Cubism and Futurism. He was also influenced by William Worringer’s 1908 book Abstraction and Empathy, which argued that the artist could only reclining-nude-in-dunes 19escape the confusion of the chaotic modern world by depicting nature in a way which simplified the organic forms of nature into something abstract, crystalline and ‘imperishable’. Heckel’s 1913 painting Glassy Day shows the influence of this doctrine in its simplified, dynamic forms. The figure is generalised in the manner of the African sculpture the group had seen, but though there is the influence of the dynamic lines of Futurism, the jagged reflections do not disturb the calmness of the scene, but instead suggest an intense clarity of light and atmosphere. Again though, Glassy Day seems to represent escape, rather than rebellion.

heckel-erich-glassy-day-c-1913

When the Brücke disintegrated in 1913, it had achieved some of its aims; notably the renewal of a kind of German art which acknowledged developments elsewhere without abandoning the Germanic past. The aim to establish a new and harmonious way of living, outside of the constraints of society had worked for a while, in the kind of artistic commune dreamed of by Van Gogh and Gauguin, but it was ultimately doomed to failure, perhaps because carefree harmony as a way of life robbed the artists’ ambition of any sense of urgency. Even had the group remained true to this aim, it was unlikely to have survived the World War that was almost upon them.

As the  Brücke dissolved as a group, the artists went on to pursue their own personal visions, but from this point onwards they were to look at the landscape and the human figure in a detached way, as artists and intellectuals, and not as social revolutionaries; a shame perhaps, but their early work was to stand as a testament to their liberating, life-affirming ideals throughout the Nazi period (when it was, typically, classified as ‘degenerate’ by the authorities) and the freedom they created and recorded still retains its power today.

daboyz

kirch 0

broooker

Woman Power! Ms Marvel & 1970s ‘Farrah Fawcett Feminism’

woman power

Problem: It’s the 70s, you are editor-in-chief for Marvel Comics, the biggest (or joint-biggest) comicbook publisher in the USA. Your readers are mostly fairly young; you want to move with the times. Your top titles regularly receive mail from female readers who want to feel represented, not just as a sidekick or team member, but as a bona fide title character.

DC has Wonder Woman after all, and for all her old-fashioned qualities, she is iconic. Marvel doesn’t (yet) do ‘old fashioned’. Simple; except for the fact that the majority of the readership (and indeed the vast majority of comicdom’s creators) is still male. By and large, these young men and boys are okay with empowered, intelligent and charismatic women. They do want them to be sexy though. After all, to be ‘an ordinary person’ is kind of not what superheroes are about, and in the comicbook universe of the time (and even now, mostly), the superheroine is ‘feminine’ (ie curvy), athletic and fond of tight clothing, where her male counterparts are musclebound and fond of tight clothing. So…

Ms Marvel – whose name alone is strongly redolent of the 70s – was one of many comics launched by Marvel in that period to cash in on (or, more charitably, to fulfil a recognised demand for) a specific phenomenon or corner of the comics market hitherto neglected; at the high end of the scale, they attempted to redress the racial balance of their output a little with Luke Cage; Power Man  (and, a few years before that, the superior Black Panther) and far further down the ladder of actual relevance, Captain Britain was launched as part of the then-new Marvel UK imprint (and, several leagues of magnitude more trivial even than that, with the great Dazzler they cashed in on the disco craze), but Ms Marvel was all about a very glamorous, Charlie’s Angels*/Cagney & Lacey, 1970s version of feminism. Despite the disclaimers around their creation, there’s a lot to be said for these kind of characters; comic readers are used to different artists/writers stamping their personal style on Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Spider-man & co; but anything perceived as messing with an icon (witness the Supermullet fiasco of the early 90s) does not go down well. These kind of less venerable characters are far more flexible; writers and artists can experiment with them, change them with the times and, if the central core is strong enough, all is well (which is not to say people don’t have their favourite teams/stories etc; see below).

*she even borrowed Farrah Fawcett’s iconic hairstyle, albeit in a manner more suitable to gymnastic crime fighting. Unlike the Angels though, she had no ‘Charlie’ pulling her strings…

joe
a typical moment of Ms Marvel Mayhem

 
In the original Ms Marvel series, Carol Danvers was a successful journalist who, in a moment of slightly uninspired (but damn it,  still brilliant!) Stan-the-Man-ism became a female version of Marvel B-list superhero Captain Marvel (himself rather uninspired & definitely not to be confused with the legendary golden age Captain Marvel later known as Shazam.)

As a Marvel title in its own right, Ms Marvel didn’t run for long, but at its best it is pure entertainment with a slightly compromised but definitely not half-hearted message of female empowerment. Although (naturally) a sexy superheroine, Carol Danvers was the usual put-upon Marvel character, endlessly worrying about work deadlines, angry bosses etc. However, her insistence on her equality with (or her evident superiority to) her male colleagues (leotarded and otherwise) and her general lack of husbands or steady boyfriends – though old news in the world of actual real people by 1977 – was refreshing in the muscles and capes world of the Marvel Universe.

Mainly written by the eternally underrated Chris Claremont, the comic had heart and action aplenty, although at times the superheroics (Ms Marvel battled an endless list of Marvel’s more ridiculous non-iconic villains during her brief run) get in the way of the rather more fun soap opera-like elements of the strip.

mooneysinnott
Mooney & Sinnott make Ms Marvel look good

The nearest thing the book had to a regular art team was Marvel greats Jim Mooney and Joe Sinnott, perhaps not as glamorous as John Buscema or Jack Kirby, but with their own stylish, hard-edged approach, which in the early issues gave the series a bold, dynamic feel in keeping with its forthright character. Although other artists were to draw Ms Marvel, it is undoubtedly the Mooney/Sinnott team (like the individualistic work of Mike Vosburg on the generally quite comparable Savage She-Hulk around the same time) that gives Ms Marvel its vibrant character.

shulk
Mike Vosburg’s individualistic She-Hulk


The only ‘star’ artist to ever draw Ms Marvel in her original 70s series was the great (and sadly now late) Carmine Infantino, who gave her a finely detailed, subtle sparkle very different from the  feel of the classic issues, but it was too little, too late and shortly after premiering a new, vastly less good (though at least not second hand) outfit (which however seems popular with cosplayers, which is something), the comic was cancelled.  Ms Marvel herself continued (and continues) to pop up all over the Marvel universe,* but it’s the Claremont/Mooney/Sinnott issues that have that special something missing from many a ‘better’ comic series.

*2019 update; she finally got her own movie, kind of. Captain Marvel wasn’t quite Ms Marvel, but it was good

It’s easy to mock the sometimes clunky melodrama of Ms Marvel, but in fact the book is absolutely typical of Marvel comics in the late 70s, regardless of gender. Her outfits (especially the original/best) are no skimpier than most Marvel heroes, and her domestic woes are absolutely on the same level as Peter Parker and co, and in that sense Ms Marvel; glamorous, tough, funny and hard-done-by, is a true feminist icon of her era; albeit one designed to entertain while reflecting the changing social landscape, rather than actually challenging the status quo. It’s just a shame, though not a surprise, that in the 70s, no woman actually got to write or draw her strip.

carminefanto
Carmine Infantino’s stylish and elegant Ms Marvel


 

Constructive Misanthropy: Wyndham Lewis – Tyros & Portraits

PWL

It’s not just ‘the general public’ that sometimes finds abstract or conceptual art to be the empty, meaningless work of opportunistic charlatans; sometimes artists do too. While belonging firmly to the European avant-garde of his time, artist, poet and novelist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) created a series of figurative works – the Tyros – which both stand outside of and satirise the modernist movement in a way that we would now recognise as ‘post-modern’ in their knowing, ironic nature.

While the satire of modernism was not new in Lewis’ art, the ‘Tyronic’ works of the 1920s mark the beginning of a wider programme (which included his relatively commercial portraiture of the period) which attempted not just to draw attention to the stagnation and decay which the artist perceived in post-WWI European culture, but also to put forward (somewhat half-heartedly) the aim of a new and rigorous ‘classical’ regeneration of both art and society. In the aftermath of the First World War, Lewis saw an opportunity to start afresh in an age in which artists were ‘creatures of a new state of human life.’[1]

the tyro

With the Tyros, Lewis devoted himself to addressing, in his characteristically humorous and aggressive fashion, what he saw as lingering aspects of the old world, in particular the decadent ‘90s of Oscar Wilde & co and the limp quasi-modernism of the Bloomsbury group. However, much of the underlying philosophy of Lewis’ ‘new’ direction derives from the works – both literary and artistic – of his own earliest, pre-war maturity. The implications of this philosophy run far deeper than simply a criticism of the artistic milieu of 1920s Britain, addressing the very nature of humankind itself, with, typically of the artist, entirely negative conclusions. Indeed, Lewis’ vehement opposition to the apparently progressive movements of his time has often led to an overly simplistic (although understandable) denigration of the artist as a fascist. After an initial flirtation with the far-right, though, he was eventually to dismiss the simple-minded politics of fascism with exactly the same kind of aggressive amusement as he dismissed almost everything else. Much of the power of the ‘Tyronic’ works derives from the tension between the relatively positive aims of Lewis’ programme of regeneration and the basic negativity of his satire and personality. This tragic, even hopeless, view of humankind is integral to the satire of the Tyros as it lay at the very heart of Lewis’ conception of humour.

the tyro 2

 Wyndham Lewis introduced his Tyros in April 1921 at the Leicester Galleries, London, in an exhibition named Tyros and Portraits. Whereas the portraits could, to a certain extent, be seen as conventional, though modernist in style, the Tyros were intended to act as a shock awakening to the docile English spectator – ‘These Tyros’ he wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, ‘are not meant to be beautiful…they are, of course, forbidding and harsh.’ The Tyros represented a new mythology, a race of human creatures, fully grown, but new to life, reliant on gut emotional responses and free from reason or logic. As such, they are depicted (both in the finished paintings and in the drawings which illustrated his magazine, The Tyro) as grotesque figures, usually grinning, laughing* or sneering. In the magazine’s fictional works the Tyros are depicted as simple-minded fools, usually engaged in inane gossip, almost a prefiguring of the 21st century era of talent-free celebrity. As paintings, they are modernistic in style, but also embody the intellectual concerns that Lewis felt should be the domain of the artist.

*Lewis’ ambivalent feelings about humour were forcefully expressed in the Vorticist manifesto BLAST, where it is both cursed as ‘arch enemy of REAL’ and  blessed as a ‘great barbarous weapon’. More about this below…

The figures of the Tyros, with their naive, childlike responses to life are, at first glance, not courtshipentirely new in Wyndham Lewis’s art. The theme of the human being as an instinctively motivated animal is a feature of both his art and writing from his earliest maturity. The Breton peasants of the Wild Body stories of 1909-17, crude and animalistic, have recognisable features in common with the Tyros. Artistically too, the subjects of his drawings, such as Dieppe Fisherman (1910) and Courtship (1912, right), share with the Tyros the signs of an intuitive, animal nature such as low foreheads, ridiculous postures and a general lack of individuality. His satire has more than one target – though the fisherman and the romantically engaged couple are, to Lewis, comical figures, they are merely representative samples of wider humanity; ‘’men’ are undoubtedly, to a greater or lesser extent, machines… Men are sometimes so palpably machines, their machination is so transparent, that they are comic.’[2] This point of view remained constant in Lewis’s philosophical worldview, but the Tyros nonetheless differ significantly from his earlier work.

The First World War had an enormous impact on the generation who lived through it, Lewis included, as well as on that which came after. Before the war, Lewis was already a public figure – the outspoken leader of the UK’s own avant-garde art movement, the Vorticists. This celebrity was not to survive the war, and neither was the public enthusiasm for (or at least amusement with) the modern art which had created it. Whereas in 1914/15, Lewis’s work had approached complete abstraction, he now found the hard-won achievements of the Vorticist period ‘bleak and empty. They [the abstract geometric forms] wanted filling.[3] The Tyros and Portraits exhibition was Lewis’s first major attempt at fulfilling this goal. With these works he attempted to address the problems with modern art – its lack of contact with or interest in real life, its obsession with the fleeting and transient and its preoccupation with the intuitive and sensual (exemplified slightly later by Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood’s ‘discovery’ of the ‘naive’ painter Alfred Wallis) which, to Lewis, democratised and undermined the skilled, privileged position of the artist, whose role as documenters (and even creators) of culture and guardians of the intellectual heritage of humankind entailed a sense of responsibility which he felt was being betrayed by the artistic elite of his time. Therefore, the satire of the Tyros is intensified by a moral element which had not been present in his depiction of humanity in the pre-war period.

 The primary target of Lewis’s satire, epitomising all that he felt was wrong with modern art, was the Bloomsbury group. Lewis’s enmity towards this group and in particular its leader, omegaRoger Fry, dated back to the pre-war period when he and his fellow Vorticists left Fry’s Omega Workshops in acrimonious circumstances. Lewis’s view of the Bloomsbury group in 1913 – ‘the idol is still Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck’[4] – was not significantly altered by the intervening years and in fact his attitude was probably hardened by the suspicion that the group had underhandedly used the period of the Great War (the group was, in stark contrast to the Vorticists, largely composed of conscientious objectors) to consolidate their standing as the modern art movement in the UK. Despite the obvious paranoia inherent in this point of view, it is certainly the case that the Omega Workshops heightened its profile during the war years, selling its products more widely than earlier, as well as holding the first exhibitions of Children’s Art in 1917, a venture that seemed to encapsulate everything that Lewis felt about the group.

Lewis’s complaints about Bloomsbury were not entirely without foundation. Roger Fry and Clive Bell were, to the art world in France and elsewhere, the face of the English avant-garde, but they failed to use what little influence they had to promote English art outside of their own somewhat cosy coterie – indeed, even artists broadly in sympathy with their aims and methods – such as Ben Nicholson – did not receive the kind of support they could perhaps have expected. Similarly, Lewis’s claim that Fry, Bell and Duncan Grant were dilettantes (and therefore related to the novice status of the Tyros), ‘playing’ at art without any intellectual seriousness is  not entirely without foundation. Even the relatively grander theories of the group (such as ‘significant form’) seem, in practical execution, to correspond with Lewis’s picture of ‘colour-matching, matchbox-making, dressmaking, chair-painting…tinkerers.’[5] Comments such as Fry’s ‘After all, there is only one art; all the arts are the same’[6] or even worse, Clive Bell’s crass use of a sporting metaphor to grade the differing qualities of French versus English artists (‘the English is normally a stone below the French’[7]) strengthen the validity of Lewis’s claims.

The vision of the amateurish, pseudo-intellectual, self-consciously ‘artistic’ figure of the Bloomsbury artist lent itself easily to the grinning, elemental figures of the Tyros. Probably the most powerful work on display in the Tyros and Portraits exhibition was the large (165.1 x 88.9cm) oil painting, A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) of c. 1920.

read ovid

 A Reading of Ovid

This painting, acknowledged by Lewis as one of his most carefully finished works, shows two Tyros disturbed in the act of reading. The humour of the satire derives from the juxtaposition of the vacantly grinning masklike faces of the two figures with the intellectual pastime they are engaged in. This corresponds with Lewis’s extremely bleak theory of the comic in general; ‘in one sense you ought to be just as much surprised at finding a man occupied in this way [reading] as if you had found an orchid or a cabbage… The movement or intelligent behaviour of matter – any autonomous movement of matter, is essentially comic.’[8] At the same time, the satire is more pointed and direct – these ridiculous figures are, as Lewis explained, an attempt to ‘frighten away the bogey of ‘art for art’s sake’’, the basis for the ‘cultivated and snobbish game’ of English art,[9] art which had no root in culture or society, but was an activity – even a hobby – driven only by the whim of the artist. This satire is especially barbed when one takes into account Lewis’s elevated view of the artist as a cultural leader – and whatever his evaluation of Roger Fry’s talent, Lewis did accept that he was a ‘sensitive and real being’ outside of the homogenous and unthinking mass of the general public. He might therefore be expected to feel the sting of the satire keenly. If the foreword to the exhibition catalogue was not specific enough, the clothing of the Tyros in A Reading of Ovid; the baggy suits and the foppish, ostentatious handkerchief, identifies them clearly as the dilettante artists described in Lewis’s 1918 novel, Tarr; ‘the art-touch, the Bloomsbury technique, was very noticeable. Hobson’s tweeds were shabby, from beneath his dejected jacket emerged a pendant seat, his massive shoes were hooded by the superfluous inches of his trousers: a hat… shaded unnecessarily his countenance.’[10]

In contrast to the directness of his visual attack on Bloomsbury, the use of Ovid as the text over which the Tyros grin, leaves the scene open to several interpretations. This may in itself be a joke on Lewis’s part; the author of the Metamorphoses being evoked in a picture which shows primitive ‘elementals’ attempting to transform themselves by aping the manners of their intellectual superiors. It is also possible that Ovid was chosen as the classical author best known for his erotic works, such as The Art of Love, and that the Tyros are simply shown sniggering over the ‘dirty bits’ of one of the world’s great authors, as befits their base, sensual outlook. Yet another interpretation, with wider-reaching conclusions, is that the use of Ovid refers to the ‘return to stability’ within the French avant-garde of the post-war period, a neo-classical revival looking back to Ingres and David. Lewis, with his own leanings towards a new classicism, was scornful of this fad, which he saw as a French retreat into a safe, patriotic ‘mother-tradition’.[11] In this reading of the painting, the pseudo-intellectual Tyros are engaged in a futile attempt to build a new thought-world, entirely grounded in the past. Lastly, it is possible that the use of Ovid as a figure beyond the reach and understanding of the childlike Tyro is a piece of somewhat arrogant self-identification. Ovid, like Lewis, was an outsider figure, both in his own time and in subsequent literary history, and had been excluded from the elite of his own day for the subversive and satirical nature of his art.[12] The arrogance suggested by this interpretation is not at all inconceivable when looked at in the context of Lewis’s artistic programme of this period – his criticism of Fry in particular seems to suggest that a more suitable figurehead for English modernism would be a professional artist and genuine intellectual – i.e. Lewis himself.

Whatever his pretensions, A Reading of Ovid presents vivid evidence of Lewis’s outsider status in the context of European modernism. As a painting, it has little parallel in Europe at that time. The figures,  though influenced by cubist ‘primitivism’ in their hard-edged, geometric, non-naturalistic outlines, bear little resemblance to extant cubist art. Likewise, although effective satire was being produced by Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp and (most notably) by the German Expressionist George Grosz, their art has little in common with Lewis’s bizarre vision. Nor do these artists share the scope of Lewis’s aims, balancing artistic, social and philosophical concerns, making the Tyro paintings, as he explained, ‘at once satires, pictures and stories.’[13] Lewis, devoted to the cause of ‘art’ in a way that was anathema to the Dadaists, totally eschewed the iconoclastic playfulness of Picabia and Duchamp. The power of Grosz’s art often derives from the passionate rendering of the artist’s bitterness and disgust with the decay and corruption of post-war Germany, where the economic, social and political situation was far more unstable and extreme than in France or England.

grosz

 Grosz, The Pillars of Society

Lewis’s view of satire did not intend to have the emotional, inflammatory impact of work such as Grosz’s; Lewis declared that ‘satire is cold… the non-human outlook must be there.’[14] It is this coldness that allows the intellectual response that Lewis desired in the viewer. The only real parallels for A Reading of Ovid are in fact in the earlier works of Lewis himself. The effective, non-naturalistic colour scheme of opposed visceral reds and deep metallic blues had been a feature of his art since his earliest, Futurist-inspired works. This colour scheme is the opposite of the warm, harmonious, Matisse-influenced and decorative style of the Bloomsbury painters, and so fulfils the dual function of preventing a sensual response (thereby inviting an intellectual one) and providing a corrective example to contemporary Bloomsbury practice. The composition has a tense vitality which is achieved in a similar way to that of his pre-war abstract works such as Composition (1913, left). This energy comes not from loose, free, energetic compositionbrushwork, but from the way in which the dynamic and surging forms of the Tyros, as with those of the abstract works, are locked into a tense design by firm, clean outlines. The power of the line imprisons the energy of the composition, creating an image which is static, but bursting with potential movement. The vitality is, in the Tyros, not merely abstract ‘design’, but also an integral part of the subject.

The vital energy of the Tyros was stressed in Lewis’s writings, and expressed in their grotesque laughing faces. Laughter, to Lewis, was an important philosophical concept. The ‘wild body’ of the human animal, said Lewis, ‘triumphs in its laughter. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.’[15] The world this laughter reveals is that of the human animal in its true element, stripped of all artifice. In issue two of his magazine The Tyro, Lewis included a ‘Tyronic dialogue’, in which ‘X’, a Tyro representing Lewis himself, makes the following assertion to his more naive companion – ‘Every civilised milieu is… the devouring jungle driven underground, the instinct of bloody combat restricted to forensic weapons.’[16] This underlying reality, masked by complex human behaviour is also hinted at in smaller works, such as the Tyro Madonna (1921, below right) where religion and sexuality are combined in a totem-like image which seems to satirise the edifices built upon the baser instincts of mankind. Laughter brings this subterranean Darwinian world to the surface – and satire, though a form of criticism, aims partly to provoke an amused response in the viewer. This laughter is, like all laughter, an instinctive reaction, and therefore a tragic reminder of the inescapable fate of the human being – to live and therefore to die as an animal like any other. We are laughing with the Tyros as well as at them.Tyro Madonna

The use of satire, had then, despite its appeal for Lewis, extremely negative connotations. In appealing to the sense of humour, it is the denial of the classicism which he himself had put forward in his portraits as the basis of a new modern art, and in fact the denial of all meaningful progress. Although he attacked the situation of the arts in England vigorously, privately he declared that ‘it would be unwise to regard [this state of affairs] as anything but permanent.’[17] The truth of this remark must have seemed self-evident in the irony that A Reading of Ovid was purchased by one of the leading members of the late-Victorian dilettante class, Osbert Sitwell, himself a butt of Lewis’s satire. Whatever his hopes for the future of art and society, Lewis had, fundamentally, a pessimistic view of humankind. This pessimism, a feature of Lewis’s thought since his early maturity and sharpened by the influence of T.E. Hulme, had been, not surprisingly, deepened by the events of the First World War. The art historian David Peters Corbett claims that Lewis was ‘too satirical’ to show his mourning in his art[18] but in fact, the Tyros themselves, in their elemental stupidity, can be interpreted as a bleak kind of mourning for the pointlessness of the mass slaughter of 1914-18.

The Tyros, vessels for the raw energy and vitality of the human animal, necessarily display none of the stillness and ‘deadness’ which Lewis saw as essential to the creation of an ‘immortal’ classical art, and by their very theme, deny the truth of such an art. However, classicism’s loss is satire’s gain, as the concentration on the eternal truth of the real nature of civilisation paradoxically gives the Tyros a timelessness that transcends the immediate situation they satirise, making them of more than socio-historical interest.

The wide-ranging satire and deep pessimism of Lewis’s outlook did not spare even the intellectual elite which he saw as the ideal leaders and creators of a new culture. The culmination of his ‘Tyronic’ period is the one of the most extraordinary paintings of his career; the self portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920/1).

lewis tyro

 Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro

This painting shares many features with A Reading of Ovid. The colour scheme has dramatic contrasts of dark and light, creating a dramatic tension, again denying the comfortable sensual response of most Bloomsbury art. The composition is jagged and stark, containing great energy within tightly enclosed boundary lines. The Tyro bares his teeth in a sneer, looking disdainfully past the viewer from under the aggressive sweep of his hat. In contrast to the average Tyro his forehead is high, but the facial expression (and his status as a Tyro) suggests animal cunning rather than intelligence. While promoting the exhibition, Lewis stated in an interview with the Daily Express that the vitality of the Tyro is ‘purposeless, and hence sometimes malignant’[19] and this is the aspect we see here. The Tyro sneers at the viewer, revealing the basic, negative instinct underlying Lewis’s complex criticism of art and society. Given that Lewis had repeatedly stated his views on the ultimate tragedy of human life, the ‘terrible nature of its true destiny’[20] as revealed by Darwin, it is not inconceivable that the self-portrait depicts Lewis’s real ‘animal self’, sneering at the somewhat romantic ideal of immortality through art that the artist fostered through his intellectual ambitions. Given the nihilism that formed the heart of Lewis’s worldview, the animal response, the sneer or laugh of the Tyro was the only valid one when confronted by the essential joke of human consciousness. Ultimately, the Tyros invite the audience to laugh with as well as at them; to mock the ridiculousness of humankind and to sneer at its pretensions and aspirations.

inferno

With the Tyros, Wyndham Lewis created a mythology based on the essential transience of human life and the animal impulses which ultimately guide all of our seemingly civilised pursuits. In the end, as the artist no doubt expected, the Tyros failed to accomplish much beyond consolidating Lewis’s position as an antagonistic troublemaker in the art world of inter-war England. In the build up to World War Two, Lewis isolated himself even further with some misjudged political writings, and pursued the pessimism of the Tyros on a bigger, more generalised scale with powerfully negative works such as Two Beach Babies (1933, below) and Inferno (1937, above). Post WW2 though, despite completing his massive, Dante-esque mythological trilogy of novels, The Human Age, he was never to regain either his power as an artist or his standing as a public figure.

Beach Babies

[1] Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Children of the New Epoch’ from The Tyro No.1 available to download at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/pdfs/116015166093419.pdf

[2] Lewis, Men Without Art (1934)

[3] Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950)

[4] Lewis, Etchells, Hamilton & Wadsworth, in WK Rose (Ed), the Letters of Wyndham Lewis (1963)

[5] Lewis, The Caliph’s Design (1919)

[6] Fry, quoted in J. Ferguson’s The Arts in Britain in World War One (1980)

[7] C. Bell, quoted by Lewis in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis

[8] Lewis, The Wild Body (1928)

[9] Lewis, The Wild Body (1928)

[10] Lewis, Tarr, 1918

[11] Lewis, The Caliph’s Design

[12] Ovid, The Erotic Poems (trans. P. Green, 1982)

[13] Lewis, The Wild Body

[14] Lewis, Men Without Art (1934)

[15] Lewis, The Wild Body

[16] Lewis, The Wild Body

[17] Lewis to J. Quinn, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis

[18] Peters Corbett (Ed) Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War (1998)

[19] Quoted in The Complete Wild Body (1982)

[20] Lewis, The Wild Body