The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground

Michael Saler (1999)

Mission

• Instead of Bloomsbury, influenced by 19th century romantic medievalism
  • John Ruskin
  • William Morris
  • Finally, the 19th c thinkers are widely believed in interwar period
• Have more of a traditional understanding of art-life connection
• Medieval Modernists are the true avant-garde
  • “a concatenation of shared terms” that were debated, adapted

On Modernism as a field

• Agrees that it is a vague, slippery term
• Traces a history of definitions
  • Dominant understanding: aesthetic, or formalist, modernism
    • Anti-mimetic
    • Detached from “utility” or context
    • Art is autotelic, independent
    • Clive Bell and Roger Fry (“significant form,” not life-knowledge)
  • Antinomic understanding (diversity)
    • Baudelaire: “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (“The Painter of Modern Life”)
  • Art-life
    • Dealing with question of relationship of art to everyday life
  • Idealist
    • Finding the ideal or immutable – or at least order
    • Quest for unity or essence
    • Scared response to modernity
    • Saler puts medieval modernism and regular modernism here: tries to unify antimonies
  • Praxis
    • Burger and others now, but was dominant question 1910-45
    • Avant-garde art restores art to social praxis
    • “Form versus function:” they’re on function side

Medieval Modernists?

• Had “significant form” and “utilitarian” value
• Spiritual value as well
• Slow changes into a better, more organic world
• Visual arts will lead to better world
  • “Aesthetic State” where individual and social is in harmony
    • Integrate individual into community organically
  • But Morris and Ruskin had said that change had to come before good art
• Believed that Middle Ages were harmonious, stable
  • Collectivity
    • Artists have a responsibility to the masses
    • Capitalism minus competition and individualism
  • Would correct the “excesses” of modernity (11)
  • Lord Shaftesbury, 18th c: art “quickens moral sense” (11)
  • Not make it new, but return to the good old stuff
    • “What is modernism but bringing old things up to date?” – critic Huntly Carter (1913)
• Art connects to Nature and Religion through intelligent”design”
  • Nonconformism, Protestantism, not Catholicism or atheism
• Art connects to craft: an “inclusive” theory of art during interwar period

What kind of art?

• Primarily visual, not literary
  • Against mainstream England (“We like the word not the senses b/c we’re not effete like the French”)
  • Eventually, they did win over English public to love the visual arts
• Accessible
  • National traditions (not cosmo)
    • “All great art, in the great times of art, is provincial” – Ruskin (1884)
  • Mass circulation, BBC, provinces, the North, education
  • Values of practicality and industry match British middle-class culture
• “Fitness for purpose” (pre-Renaissance)
  • “art as simlpy an artifact that genuinely fulfilled its purpose” (18-9)
• Against hierarchy of art (objects and houses are as cool as paintings)
  • They succeeding convincing public to believe it until WWII
• Connected to the State
  • Decorated the London Underground
  • Less suspicious of “the Establishment” than other modernists

Chapters

• Frank Pick designs the London Underground (and pretty much London itself)
  • Chooses “medieval modernist” sculpture for it (Jacob Epstein)
  • Believed that “common people” can appreciate art
• Lots of artists from the North of England
  • Juxtaposition of beautiful landscapes and ugly industrial sites = aesthetic interest
• Morris and machines, the 1920s
  • WWI finally made people go against fine arts/applied arts distinction (more about utility now)
  • Anxiety that Germany had done a better job uniting industry and good design
  • Fry: all arts are the same; design underlies them all
    • But still believed more in “aesthetic satisfaction” than in functione
  • Appreciating good art leads to choosing tasteful commodities
  • Now, good design applied to mass production (not just a few Arts and Crafts all-by-hand artisans)
• 1930s: “art and industry” now a state mantra
  • Government sponsors articles, books, broadcasts, education programs all about it
  • BBC and the Underground seen as giving art to people who wouldn’t get it otherwise
• Goodbye, medieval modernism
  • WWII looming, people think designers need engineering classes, not art classes
  • “Fine arts” as a distinction from “applied arts” in vogue again

Economic Intersections

• “They believed that modern art was compatible with modern commerce” (8) b/c you could use industry to help people have art
• Art would “spiritualize capitalism” (9)
• “Breaking down distinction between art and life at the level of public rhetoric” (8)
• “Household goods would be transformed into household gods” – Lubbock, Tyranny of Taste (1995)
• Ruskin, Morris said that commodities weren’t art, but some medieval modernists did
  • Artists could produce commodities

Ideas about how my fiction intersects with this book

• Cold Comfort Farm—Narrator uses commodities to improve pastoral slum-farm: Usually ridiculed, but what if she’s a medieval modernist, using industry in alliance with art for a better world?

• Saler mentions Women in Love: “Art should interpret industry, as it once did religion.”