Paintings from Penlee House Museum, Penzance

We begin with a flatly painted image of a pint of beer in a straight glass resting on an otherwise empty table in the grip of a sturdy hand - it’s a factual exercise and nothing more.  Attached to the hand is Robert Morson Hughes, a fellow artist and associate of the painter Harold Knight - the year is 1915, the First World War is in progress and Knight, a conscientious objector, is about to be put to work as a farm labourer.  The subject, Hughes, was a Lamorna based painter of mainly topographical subjects. Here he has the air of a country landowner in a slightly oversized suit, from beneath the downturned brim of his hat he stares with suspicion out of the painting. Knight has conveyed strength of character and a sense of presence in a stolid, unemphatic manner.

Harold Knight (1873-1953), Portrait of Robert Morson Hughes (c 1915)

Robert Morson Hughes (1873-1953), Carn Boscawen (1928?)

Visits to local museums are always a pleasure and Penlee House Museum is a fine example that has the dual function of providing a lively overview of local history with a comprehensive collection of interesting paintings by locally based artists with historically national reputations.  The core of the collection is made up of painters active in the 19th. and early 20th. century, working in the Penzance - Newlyn region of Cornwall.  Aesthetically conservative, averse to experimentation and inheritors of a tradition of realism that goes back to Courbet (as diluted by Bastien-Lepage), these painters built up an impressive visual archive of the minutiae of Victorian and Edwardian daily life in West Cornwall alongside a comprehensive record of the abundant varied landscape and coastal scenery in the county. Many had worked in the art colonies of Brittany and become committed to painting en plein-air but Impressionism remained a step too far.

Laura Knight (1877-1970),  My Lady of the Rocks  ND

Although this body of work has come to be regarded as an essential component of the Cornish cultural identity it’s notable that many aspects of that identity were, for the most part, studiously ignored.  While the fishing industry was much celebrated for its pictorial values, the world of mining, heavy engineering and new technologies got little or no attention - the only exceptions being quarrying, a reliably popular landscape subject and the railways that became a regular source of income for Stanhope Forbes.  All this despite Cornwall having a strong claim to being the global birthplace of steam power. The Celtic heritage that separated Cornwall from the Anglo-Saxon territory east of the Tamar likewise went unremarked along with the great Neolithic assemblages of menhirs and stone circles, at least until the 1940s when Ithell Colquhoun turned up in Lamorna.  Most of these painters were drawn to Cornwall from elsewhere in the country and many formed strong personal links with the indigenous community, their interests didn’t encompass the profound sense of Cornish exceptionalism held by the local intelligentsia. 

Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947), Abbey Slip (1921)

Laura Knight  (1877-1970), Spring (1916)

This is not to undervalue the contribution that these artists have made to the popular image of Cornwall as a special place.  Their brushes may have been preoccupied with surface values but by virtue of sheer representational brilliance their work acquired lasting value.  Laura Knight and Stanhope Forbes stand apart in the quality and consistency of their work though Knight’s paintings have a bravura and vitality that often make Forbes look pedestrian by comparison. By the time Laura and Harold Knight moved to Newlyn in 1907, Forbes was well established as the leader of the Newlyn painters where he’d been active since 1884.  The Knights settled in Lamorna but were soon accepted into Forbes’s circle.  While Harold’s taciturn nature caused him to hold back, Laura played a full and active part in the social life of the artistic community.  For his part, Forbes was especially impressed by Laura’s paintings.  Most Newlyn painters stayed loyal to their locality a few shuttled back and forth to St. Ives where new ideas were more readily accepted.  Forbes reacted with disproportionate hostility when Whistler and Sickert spent time in St. Ives. This went both ways - Sickert especially loathed the paintings of Newlyn’s Frank Bramley whose A Hopeless Dawn was rapturously received by an audience hungry for pathos at the Royal Academy (RA) in 1888.

Norman Garstin  (1847-1926),  The Rain it Raineth Every Day (1889) 

Most of the Newlyners were reluctant to stray far from their patch - an exception was Irish born Norman Garstin whose global wanderings set him apart. His travels took him to Africa, North America and all over Europe and inspired him to lead groups of students on sketching trips to continental art centres.  In 1889 his major painting of a rainswept Penzance seafront (The Rain It Raineth Every Day), was rejected by the RA for being ‘too French’ with its subtle tonal observations.  Further humiliation lay in wait - when Garstin later presented the painting to Penzance Town Council it was hidden away for fear it would deter visitors.  Garstin’s vindication may have been a long time coming but today’s visitors have voted it their favourite painting in the museum.  A future post will look at how  local history is served in the museum 

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  The Quiet of our Valley (1940)

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  trio of landscapes, Lamorna Valley in Summer (right)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  A Game of Cut-throat Euchre  (1909)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  The Little Maid (1923)

Charles Simpson  (1885-1971),  Dying Light, Carn Barges  ND

Stanley Gardiner (1888-1952),  The Old Quay, Lamorna (Upper), Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch (1869-1955), Lamorna Cove (Lower)

Harold Harvey (1874-1941), Laura and Paul Jewill Hill  (1915)

Frank Bramley (1857-1915),  Eyes and No Eyes (1887)

 

Rundfahrten

The tour bus never goes away - every major city has fleets of these vehicles, usually open-topped, finished in garish colour combinations and accompanied by teams of outriders roaming the streets to sign up new customers.  It’s sightseeing at its most basic,  sit back and let the sights come to you.  Seconds later your photos can be glowing on Instagram.  In the interwar years the tradition was for a jobbing photographer to capture the tour bus and its passengers before its departure.  Darkroom technicians would swiftly do their magic and sparkling prints would be sold to passengers on their return.  The results were often surprisingly good considering the time pressure and as you might expect, these examples from German cities achieved a remarkable degree of definition.

We begin with the Berlin tour guide posed in front of the bus on the Unter Den Linden - like everyone else she squints into the glare of low autumnal sun. Hats, overcoats and furs offer protection from the cold, the date is October 6th. 1922. Most passengers make the effort to smile for the camera and have the air of belonging in upper income groups.  A potential subversive loiters second from the right, his prominent facial hair indicative of a non-conformist nature.  Moving on to Cologne in 1910 we meet a horse drawn charabanc outside the west doors of the cathedral. Uniformed staff in top hats are in charge and the group are perched high on upholstered benches. Not so many smiles in 1910 and some notably grumpy veiled faces. Three further examples from Cologne, all posed outside the cathedral and examples from Munich and Nuremberg complete the selection. 

 

Art of Society 1900-1945, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin

Z VIII, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy (1924)

Of all the paintings in this exhibition, this was the one that held my attention the longest.  Its connection with the exhibition theme was not immediately obvious but it was a singular point of calm in a line-up of loud and assertive paintings demanding serious scrutiny.  Looking at an abstract arrangement of related geometric forms in muted colours  makes it own demands - principally that the viewer is prepared to accept its legitimacy as a work of art and not worry about the absence of figuration.  While there’s not much of a case to be made for overlapping and intersecting semi-transparent shapes as windows into the human condition they can be a rich source of visual pleasure when choreographed with sensitivity and precision. All his career Moholy-Nagy was a restless experimenter and this is one of a series of related compositions painted in his second year of teaching at the Bauhaus where he replaced Johannes Itten who together with Paul Klee represented the spiritual tendency of the early years Bauhaus.  Moholy-Nagy had no such tendencies and took full advantage of the opportunity to button himself into his boiler suit and get to work in his studio.  This painting comes at the high point of his interest in Constructivism-inspired composition - he would continue to explore his favoured themes (transparency, asymmetry, dynamism, spatial ambiguity, transformation) in photography, collage, assemblage, typography and graphic design.  Constructivists sought to integrate their practice into state-led programmes to advance social progress and eliminate inequality which finally connects us back to the exhibition theme.

Stadt, Otto Moller (1921)

Elsewhere in the exhibition, which was drawn from the collection of the Neue Nationalgalerie, artists could be seen engaging with major themes - Weimar-era decadence, Prussian militarism, socialist utopianism, horrors of modern warfare, dehumanising labour. This is a personal selection of paintings that caught my eye - Expressionist paintings are given short shrift, ships, trams and trains keep turning up and there’s a bias towards unfamiliar (on my part) material.  It was interesting to see so many disturbing visions of the not so distant past, a period whose first hand witnesses are almost all deceased.  And a comfort in the sense that the visions of the artists who shared in the collective experience of the chain of catastrophes that stains the period under review, still have a part to play in the avoidance of a reprise.

Walter Spies, The Carousel, 1937

Natalia Goncharova, The Clock

Upper is Leger, lower is Edmund Kesting, Rote Sichel, 1927

Otto Dix

Heinrich Vogeler

Heinrich Vogeler

Heinrich Vogeler

Paul Fuhrmann, Am Bahnhof (1930)

Oskar Nerlinger, The Early Train (1928)

Franz Radziwill, Der Hafen II (1930) 

Christian Schad

Franz Radziwill,  Flandern (Wohin in dieser Welt?), 1940-50

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Field Grey Creates Dividends (1931/1961)

Lyonel Feininger

 Carlo Mense, Double Portrait (Rabbi with Young Woman) 1926

The Fortnight in September

The advancing tide has driven the holidaymakers ever closer to the sea wall to the point where they huddle together in uncomfortable proximity.  Just such a scene is described in R C Sherriff’s novel, The Fortnight in September, along with the social anxiety it gives rise to.  It tells the story of a lower middle-class South London family meticulously planning and making the best of their annual late summer holiday in the south coast resort of Bognor - when the holiday ends the novel ends too. Published in 1931 just a few years after Sheriff’s First World War drama, Journey’s End, had been a great success on the stage on both sides of the Atlantic. Sherriff followed up his great drama with a novel in which drama is entirely absent.  No action or event is too insignificant to be described in detail along with the inner voices of the characters as they attempt to conduct themselves with decency and propriety while at all costs avoiding stepping into the sea of embarrassment that never ceases to threaten. Painfully aware of their modest status in the hierarchy of social class, the head of the family must lead his dependants safely through the social minefield and he’s never more tormented than when he finds himself in the company of his social superiors with every muscle tensed to avoid transgressing the boundaries of class.

The Stevens family is a model of English decency and emotional restraint, ever polite and respectful to all, never allowing a mean thought to enter their heads.  Their ambitions are tempered by realism and they share the capacity to take pleasure in simple things.  They enjoy each other’s company much more than the company of strangers.  Routine is what holds the family together and builds a fortress against negligence and chaos.  In the Great March to Bognor, everyone must play their part as assigned by Father and his masterplan.  Before it has even begun, he contemplates the end of the holiday and the accompanying sense of melancholy - his glass is resolutely half empty. The holiday is the single great annual event in their lives and has followed the same pattern for 15 years.

In those 15 years the children have grown up while the boarding house where they stay has aged and decayed. It’s impossible to ignore the declining quality of service and the impact of the ageing process on their hostess.  All of which signals that change is on the horizon - and change is the enemy of routine. Another sign of change is the growing independence of the older children as they move into a future outside the family.  Mary is the oldest, at 19 increasingly aware of the male gaze and in a mood to take her chances with the opposite sex.  After a year working in a white collar job, Dick (17) is restless and has begun to dream of training to become an architect. Forces are gathering that will drive the family apart.  Quietly and incrementally, the universe that Father created is collapsing around him.  His own future is equally uncertain - his much valued post as secretary to the local football club has deviously been taken away from him. At work his thoughts of promotion to senior management have come to an end with a discreet message that this can never happen. Mother is the least contented character and the least likely to articulate her unhappiness.  She scarcely has a voice and her very existence is overlooked by all while she labours night and day at the endless domestic tasks that make family life possible.  The sea terrifies her, yet when she goes missing at the seaside, the family display only limited concern. Typical of the silly goose to get lost and cause a lot of unnecessary fuss.

Sherriff created a single event in the life of an unexceptional family and explored some major themes as he recorded their addiction to ritual and resistance to change.  There’s no peace of mind to be had while survival seems poised on the edge of disintegration. Despite eternal vigilance not everything can be controlled. How to live with unfairness and small failures.  Loss is one of life’s great certainties and Sherriff placed it at the heart of this book with his subtle account of the passage of time eroding everything that we value and depend upon for emotional wellbeing.