A Companion to British Art (1600 to the Present) || English Art and Principled Aesthetics

A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present, First Edition. Edited by Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett.

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

English Art and Principled Aesthetics

Janet Wolff*

The opening address at a conference on English art at the University of York in

July 1997 proved to be an unexpectedly controversial event.1 The speaker was

Charles Harrison, whose book, English Art and Modernism 1900–1939, had

been instrumental in stimulating debate and research on twentieth-century

English art. Since the book’s first publication in 1981 there has been an enor-

mous proliferation of work on English (and more generally British) modern art,

which had received only sporadic, and primarily specialist, attention before that

date (for instance, in the form of monographs and exhibitions devoted to a few

select artists). In the three decades since the publication of Harrison’s book, we

have seen the growth of a substantial field of study, manifest in catalogues,

books, book series, and the journal Visual Culture in Britain, whose first issue

appeared in 2000.2 The assumption behind this new enthusiasm, implicit and

sometimes explicit, has been that English art of the period is, after all, worth

talking about, despite its historic marginalization and its relative invisibility on

the international scene. So for many at the 1997 conference it was something

of a shock to hear Harrison apparently denigrate English art, and register doubts

and second thoughts about his earlier interest in certain English artists. His

argument was taken by some of his audience to be that, since the category of

“Englishness” is irrelevant in the aesthetic evaluation of works of art, we cannot

make a special case for English art. Instead, this must be judged by “non-

sociological” aesthetic standards, by which it will very likely appear inferior.3

The conference organizers themselves clearly interpreted this as an unequivocal

challenge to the field, suggesting that in the later essay version of his address

Harrison “argued that the category of the modern in fact does not pertain to

the art of England and that English art has little claim on our attention, either

as an expression of modern experience or for aesthetic reasons.”4

3

E N G L I S H A RT A N D P R I N C I P L E D A E S T H E T I C S � � � 61

In fact this was not Harrison’s point. Rather than arguing that the category of

the modern does not pertain to the art of England, he was suggesting the reverse:

that the category of “Englishness” is unhelpful in exploring modern art in

England. Nor did he maintain that English art is worthless – indeed he spoke (and

later wrote) enthusiastically about the paintings of Gwen John. This judgment,

he now maintained, has to be made in aesthetic terms, and not through the lens

of a presumed national identity or set of characteristics.

My conclusion was that … there could be no viable study of the modern, whether

in English art or in art at large, without some non-sociological grounds upon

which to determine what is and is not deserving of attention. And by non-

sociological I mean adequately theorised in aesthetic, or formal, or, let us say,

Greenbergian terms – a requirement which seemed to rule out any use of

Englishness as a criterion.5

With this change of perspective, he now re-thought his earlier admiration for

the abstract reliefs and sculptures of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth,

whose lack of insularity and whose engagement with the international avant-

garde had seemed paramount. Now, he says, a certain conservatism has become

visible in Nicholson’s work. On the other hand, “it has become easier to

perceive the relative technical and psychological sophistication of Gwen John’s

work, and to connect that sophistication to a renewed sense of modernism.”6

The reasons for this aesthetic shift, the revaluation of works, is partly to do

with the changed circumstances (from the late 1970s, when he was writing his

book, to the late 1990s, when he gave his address); and partly because he

increasingly came to the conclusion that aesthetic judgments have, or

should have, nothing to do with sociological facts like Englishness and

internationalism.

I want to consider what is at stake in the (re)evaluation of English art. I am

interested in general in the fate of aesthetics after cultural critique, by which I

mean the multiple and diverse challenges in the past three decades to the notions

of a “pure” aesthetic and of universal and transcendent values in art.7 And I am

interested in particular in the case of English modern art, and the basis (both

sociological and aesthetic) of its new visibility in both the gallery and the academy.

I will come back to the work of Gwen John, to consider the grounds for

Harrison’s (and others’) high opinion of her work, since it is generally agreed

that she has been “rediscovered” in recent years.8 I will also look at the work of

the three artists of the Bloomsbury Group – Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and

Roger Fry – since I think they provide a useful case study for examining aesthetic

discourse about English painting. The central question in all of this is how we

assess works of art. Lisa Tickner has made the important point that, when we

have done the valuable work of demonstrating the various social factors in play

in privileging certain work, determining which people have access to art, and

producing particular ideological effects in the works themselves, we still have not

62 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

answered the primary question of aesthetics: how good is it? As she says, “the

question of value doesn’t go away because the emphasis shifts from value to

meaning.”9 This question of aesthetic value poses particular problems for English

art of the early twentieth century, only recently retrieved from obscurity and

now challenged to demonstrate its worth.

It is by now well established that from the middle of the twentieth century

the dominant story of modern art was defined by New York (in particular the

Museum of Modern Art, and certain key curators and critics) and characterized

by a Franco-centric prejudice. The narrative traced the development of modern

art (already narrowed down to modernism) from post-impressionism through

Cézanne, cubism, and surrealism to American abstract expressionism. This nar-

rative was confirmed and rendered material in the collections and layout of the

major art galleries, in art history books and in college and school curricula. The

corollary of this trajectory was the exclusion and denigration of other artists and

movements. German expressionism and Russian constructivism, among the great

early twentieth-century modernist movements, were perceived as secondary to

the cubo-futurist tradition.10 Non-modernist modern art (figurative work, more

traditional realist painting), such as the work of the American realist painters of

the Ashcan School, was more or less ignored. The only American art of the early

twentieth century taken seriously in the post-war period was the work of the

modernist artists associated with the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz (Marsden Hartley,

Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin), precisionists (Charles Sheeler,

Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs, Ralston Crawford), synchromists (Morgan

Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright), and one or two others (Stuart Davis, Max

Weber, for example).11 But many of these artists were not well known outside the

United States, and considered inferior to the European modernists at home. The

“MoMA narrative” had no place at all for English art. Even those English artists

who adopted and adapted cubist, futurist, and fauvist styles (Mark Gertler, David

Bomberg, Wyndham Lewis, and others) did not emerge onto the inter-

national scene, and are not included in major collections outside Britain. Where

they are known, they are likely to be judged poor imitations of their Continental

counterparts.

The past couple of decades have seen a radical re-thinking of this orthodoxy.

Figurative and realist art has been re-valued and presented in major exhibitions

and is highly visible in the art market.12 And although English modern artists

have not become, and seem unlikely to become, better known in New York, at

home they have achieved a new respectability, and gained a new respect,

through the work of scholars, curators, and gallery owners. And yet the prob-

lem of value – the question of aesthetics – hangs over this revisionist project.

The organizers of the York conference are straightforward in their objection to

the “long series of dismissals which deny the importance of English art to any

history of modernism,” and they reject the assumption that the same standards

apply across cultures:


It is true that English art made between, say, 1860 and 1914 does not strongly

resemble the most celebrated examples of French modernist painting and sculpture.

But why should we expect it to? How could cultures with different histories, which

inherited different languages of representation and were possessed of different

audiences, produce comparable work? There is no reason to assume that an account

derived from the circumstances of one culture will adequately describe the condi-

tions of another. Judging the achievements of one culture according to the norms of

another is a certain recipe for missing what is characteristic and significant in the

culture that you intend to explain.13

Their particular complaint is about the assumption that only modernist art is

adequate to modern life – that non-modernist modern art (realist or figurative

work) is not the art of modernity.14 But this raises a more general question,

about the transfer of values across fields. Is it, after all, the case that aesthetic

judgment is not based on universal standards? Does it make sense to claim that

English art should be judged by different criteria than French art? The question

“how good is it?” has not been answered by laying bare the (non-aesthetic)

processes and values involved in the side-lining of a tradition. This, I think, was

Charles Harrison’s concern in returning to consider the implications of invok-

ing “Englishness” as both a response to the Franco-centric narrative and a basis

for a competing aesthetics. But it is far from clear that the “formal …

Greenbergian terms” he reverts to will prove adequate here. In fact, he goes on

to make a very different (and at first sight anti-Greenbergian) argument: that

aesthetic evaluation is something mobile, subject to the particularities of place

and time. After all, he insists that he has not changed his mind about either Ben

Nicholson or Gwen John. He also asserts that works do have stable and intrin-

sic properties. His point is that the circumstances of viewing (and judging) are

in flux, with the consequence that perceived value is in some important sense

provisional.

How we perceive and understand the work of art is a matter which is subject to

continual change in accordance with shifts in our knowledge, interests, cognitive

capacities, and material circumstances, however banal. I am saying neither that

Nicholson’s work has somehow got worse, nor that my judgement has got better.

I am saying that as the projective political implications of that work have come to

seem less interesting, it has become harder to ignore those aspects which were always

present as signs of its psychological conservatism.15

Aesthetic judgment, on this view, is a relative affair, dependent on circumstances

and in general a product of specific historical factors. This is not exactly an answer

to the question of how good a work of art is, and it still leaves open the possibility

that some of the “stable and intrinsic properties” of works might transcend these

contingent judgments. But I think we can probably do no better than accept

what we might call the “situated aesthetics” underlying Harrison’s explanation

64 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

for his change of heart (whatever we happen to think about either Ben Nicholson

or Gwen John as specific examples). The task is to formulate more carefully the

principles of such an aesthetic theory, and then to consider in what way (if at all)

it differs from the radical relativism that has seemed to be the product of critical

theories of art and culture.

*

In another context, I have suggested that aesthetics can usefully take its lead

from recent work in moral and political theory.16 All three fields have had to

deal with the crisis resulting from the demolition of those universals we inherit

from Enlightenment thought. The ethical dilemma produced by the charge of

ethnocentrism is how it is possible to justify the promotion of western liberal

ideals to other cultures. Moral and political philosophers have accepted this

challenge, refusing either to revive pre-critical “universal values” or to abandon

the possibility of principled positions.17 Indeed, some have welcomed the con-

temporary state of lack of certainty as a basis for a truly moral position. As

Zygmunt Bauman has put it: “Uncertainty is the home ground of the moral

person and the only soil out of which morality can spring shoots and flourish.”18

The point is that a genuinely principled ethics emerges from the negotiation of

values in dialogue. Similarly in the case of aesthetics, we start from the recogni-

tion that there are no universal aesthetic values that transcend the contingencies

of time and place or the interests and investments of diverse social groups. Nor

are there necessarily agreed criteria of evaluation. Instead, as I concluded at the

time, “the establishment of criteria of judgment and of hierarchies of works of

art is, ideally, the product of reflexive deliberation in the context of communi-

ties of interpretation.”19 The reference both to reflexivity and to communities

is, I think, important here. Others responding to the problem of relativism have

accepted the contingency of value, and for them the persistence of value across

time and place is simply the accumulation of consecutive and continuing evalu-

ations – in this sense, then, ultimately still provisional and arbitrary.20 On this

view, competing aesthetic values cannot be reconciled on any common ground.

Opposed to this is the dialogic approach, premised on the belief that out of

dialogue, negotiation, and debate agreement can be reached and new, perhaps

composite, aesthetic judgments and regimes produced. However, the discur-

sive model that underlies this type of pragmatist account (that is, a model of

conversation and debate) ignores something crucial about the nature of dia-

logue: namely that it takes place in a social context, and this often produces

unequal voices and unequal access to the power of persuasion. A sociological

account, which pays careful attention to the situation and structure of the com-

munities involved in aesthetic discourse, is essential for any useful theory of

“uncertain” and “principled” aesthetics. Such an approach is reflexive in its

commitment to laying bare the basis – social, cultural, ideological – of any

judgment, including one’s own.21


How does this help in addressing the problem of English art? The aesthetics

of relativism (perhaps implied by the statement of the York conference organ-

izers, quoted earlier) might conclude that there are simply competing value

systems, and that (for example) there is no way of comparing English art with

French art of the period, or, more importantly, assessing their competing

claims. On that view, the fact that a hierarchy of values – a canon – has emerged,

which has marginalized modern English art, would be seen as an effect of the

relative power of art markets, art institutions, and art professionals. That is, for

a series of complex social and historical (and economic) reasons, one account

of twentieth-century art became dominant.22 But the main conclusion would

be that English art, in general, is not comparable with the art of other cultures.

A dialogic account (including the kind of approach I am proposing as a

“principled aesthetics”) would be able to go further than this, and consider the

possibilities of cross- cultural aesthetic evaluation. It would not, importantly,

insist on deference to the dominant aesthetic, but instead initiate dialogue

based on recognition of the social production of that aesthetic (that is, based

on reflexivity). At the same time, the criteria for judgment would be made

explicit, whether formal (composition, line and color, innovation), extrinsic

(content) or more subjective (beauty, connotation, pleasure). The art- historical

revisionism that has taken place in the past three decades, challenging the privi-

lege of the MoMA story, may well make this possible. Although this story is

now established in the materiality of the major collections, and therefore fixed

in a certain way, it is not out of the question that through the mechanism of

visiting exhibitions, as well as the publication of catalogues and both scholarly

and non-academic books, English artists of the first half of the twentieth

century will achieve the attention and interest they have so far failed to receive

outside Britain.

In the rest of the essay I will look in some detail at the critical language employed

with regard to four English artists. What is quite striking is the tendency, even

among the most dedicated promoters of these artists’ work, to assume an interna-

tional or universal aesthetic, with half-apologetic asides about the limited claims

to be made about their work. For example, Cecily Langdale, a long-time aficionado

of Gwen John’s work, partner of a gallery which shows and sells John’s work, and

author of a major study, with catalogue raisonné, of her paintings says this in the

conclusion of her book:

It would be a mistake to claim too much for her. She was not a major historical force,

affecting those who followed; she neither set new problems nor discovered new

solutions. Her art for the most part turns its face from the greater world, choosing

instead to explore shy corners of feeling. But in the riches of that “interior life”, in

the beauty, integrity and fierce resolve of her work – in the whole brave isolation of

her career – lies that strange mixture of gift and will that can only be termed genius.

Though perhaps a minor one, she must nonetheless be acclaimed as an enduring

master.23

66 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

And Richard Shone, author of a book on the Bloomsbury artists, and curator

of a major exhibition of their work in 2000, is equally modest in his claims,

inserting this comment in the last paragraph of his essay in the exhibition

catalogue:

Although their work carries little of the weight and resonance of some of their pre-

eminent European contemporaries, it is conspicuously adventurous in Britain.24

Of course the question is by what criteria John is judged only a “minor” master,

and Vanessa Bell and her Bloomsbury colleagues less “weighty” than European

artists. In the next two sections I cite and discuss a range of opinions about the

work of these artists, before concluding with some thoughts on how a principled

aesthetics might approach these and consider the basis and the validity of such

hierarchical ranking.

*

The catalogue to a major 2004–2005 exhibition of the work of Gwen John and

her brother Augustus John begins with the claim that Gwen “almost disappeared

from history, but her reputation has been recently revived and she has become an

artist of international repute.”25 Indeed, there is a certain perception that Gwen

John has in recent years, and for the first time, emerged from an obscurity that

characterized her lifetime and the years since her death in 1939.26 This is often put

down to her self-imposed exile from the art world and her choice of the life of a

recluse, a view that has been challenged by Alicia Foster.27 It has also been assumed

that both she and her work were overshadowed by the more public and flamboy-

ant life and the more successful work of her brother, Augustus (though almost

every text on Gwen John makes a point of quoting Augustus’s own prediction

that 50 years after his death he would be remembered as Gwen John’s brother28).

But a review of the critical reception of her work reveals a more complex history

of aesthetic judgment. Although her reputation has grown enormously in the

past 20 years, she had her supporters and enthusiasts among critics, curators, and

collectors from the very beginning of her career. It is worth looking at a few

examples of this critical response over a 100-year period before coming back to

the question of the social basis of aesthetic judgments.

In the early twentieth century, during Gwen John’s active career, she gained

many complimentary, and some superlative, reviews. In 1926, she was described

as “a sort of modern Vermeer.” Her 1907 portrait of Chloe Boughton-Leigh,

exhibited at the New English Art Club in 1908, was considered by T. Martin

Wood, writing in The Studio, “one of the greatest achievements in this exhibition

because of [its] sincerity.” John Quinn, the American collector who was her great

supporter, said of a later portrait of Chloe Boughton-Leigh, “I think it is finer

than anything of that kind that Whistler ever did.” Wyndham Lewis wrote an

admiring piece about her in The Listener after her death. John Quinn lent her


1911 painting, Girl Reading at a Window, to the landmark 1913 Armory Show

in New York. In 1917, her painting Nude Girl (1909–1910) was presented by its

first owner to the Tate Gallery, the first of her works in a public collection.29 In

the following decades, her work continued to receive praise from important

figures in the art world. Alfred Barr, who became the first director of the Museum

of Modern Art in New York, is quoted by Lisa Tickner as praising the three paint-

ings by Gwen John that were by 1928 in the Tate Gallery, “which by their subtlety

and color, make the work of her flashy brother seem awkward and uncertain.” She

also quotes John Rothenstein, in his 1952 Modern English Painters, as describing

John as “one of the finest painters of our time and country.” And writing in The

Observer Review in 1968, Nigel Gosling has this to say:

The force of this almost obsessive reticence is astonishing … the extreme subtlety

and reticence of the exquisite tonal arrangements … is a chief source of delight in

the oil paintings … the essential mystery and atmosphere of these little works …

depend on the intense vision… Its power within awesomely restricted means is remi-

niscent of Morandi’s.30

The language of these reviews gives a clue to the basis of the judgment in some

cases. Subtlety is valued as against “flashiness.” Reticence, mystery, and atmos-

phere are important attributes of the paintings, and their achievement by

“awesomely restricted means” seen as a great advantage. If we look at John’s

1903–1904 painting The Student, we can see these qualities manifest (Fig. 3.1).

The tonal range is minimal, contributing to the quality of the piece as a chamber

work. The solitary figure, her downward gaze and her self-absorption, produce

both a sense of calmness (reinforced too by the books in her hand and on the

table, alluding to immersion in reading) and a certain intensity. (Unusually for

John, the effects of light also produce a suggestion of drama, as the figure is front-

lit, with the edge of its looming shadow visible to the left of the frame.) Here too

it was the modest and self-contained nature of the painting and its subject which

gained praise, as in Lawrence Binyon’s 1909 discussion of its “singular delicacy

and beauty.”31 The painting is one of several Gwen John made of Dorelia McNeill,

her close friend at that time (when they were both living in Toulouse), and also

the lover of her brother Augustus, whose many paintings and drawings of Dorelia

construct an entirely different person – sensuous and bohemian as opposed to

Gwen John’s version of a more introverted and thoughtful woman. This is an

early painting of John’s, in which she is still using the rich color and careful layer-

ing she had learned as a student at the Slade. As Mary Bustin has shown, after

1910 John abandoned this for an increasingly “Spartan method of painting,”

with more fluency and immediacy.32 As a result, her later paintings (more likely

the ones the various reviewers I have quoted had seen) were even better able to

capture the ephemeral but intense moment of the interior scene.

Although John’s reviews were not uniformly positive (David Fraser Jenkins

quotes a particularly dismissive one from 1901, describing her work as “altogether

68 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

wanting in every pleasant quality”),

it is interesting to see that the terms

of praise did not vary much from

the early twentieth century through

to some of the most recent res-

ponses.33 And yet I still want to

make the case that aesthetic eval-

uation is always situational, and a

product of its contemporary cul-

ture and its values. The continuities

of judgment (and there were also,

we can be sure, other, more critical

responses) point to the persistence

across the decades of certain val-

ues, particular investments and,

not least, the staying-power of art-

critical discourse itself (as critics

inevitably take up and respond to

the judgments of earlier critics). It

is the discontinuities that are illu-

minating, and that expose the cul-

tural shifts subtly or dramatically

registered in changes in aesthetic

regimes. The changing fortunes

of Augustus John’s work perhaps

confirm this more than Gwen

John’s own history. The Tate exhi-

bition organizer refers to a “cross-

over” in the relative appreciation of

Gwen and Augustus in 1926, with the former in the ascendancy and the latter in

decline. It is suggested that the Symbolist art that Augustus favored was no longer

in vogue by that date, and that his rather uncritical overproduction of work inevi-

tably entailed a fall in quality.34 With a fuller range of contemporary reviews, it

would be interesting to explore the different constituencies (writers, journals,

groups) that favored one artist rather than another, one style of work over another.

I think one could also make the case that although John has found an admiring

audience among her viewers from early in her career and since, certain cultural

shifts have privileged the kind of work she did. There is no question that the femi-

nist revisions of art history, which date from the 1970s, have been crucial in the

“rediscovery” and promotion of women artists. Gwen John is included in several

of the key texts of 1970s feminist art history.35 In addition, it is not only her

gender but also the nature of her work that feminists have valued, and helped

make respectable – the intimacy, domesticity, female- centeredness in its subjects

and subject matter.36 Also relevant to the re-evaluation of John’s work has been

FIG. 3.1 Gwen John, The Student.

Source: © Manchester City Art Galleries.


the aesthetic revisionism that has brought more traditional figurative art back into

the mainstream; a sociology of aesthetic taste would need to look closely at the

discourses and interests involved in this transformation.37 Here I am only suggest-

ing what the analysis of the critical judgment of Gwen John’s work might involve.

The question of whether it is “any good” is unavoidably a question of considering

past and present aesthetic judgments and their context, as much as it is a matter

of composition, form, and originality.

*

The Bloomsbury artists have fared less well than Gwen John. The Guardian

correspondent greeted the major Tate exhibition of their work in 1999 by

describing it as “an ambitious attempt … to rescue the word Bloomsbury from

a century of derision.”38 When the show travelled to the Yale Center for British

Art, The New York Times opened its review with the remark that “the art has

the earmarks of provincialism.”39 I have already noted that the curator, Richard

Shone, himself appeared to see the work of Bell, Grant, and Fry as less impor-

tant than that of their European contemporaries. Defending Vanessa Bell

against accusations of merely “pleasant, thoughtful paintings,” which proclaim

“the unadventurous status quo of the English middle classes,” Richard

Morphet, in an essay in the exhibition catalogue, can only manage a rather

weak defense:

One of many texts which imply that in order to be significant art must “develop”,

this seems to overlook the quiet strength of painting that draws on long experi-

ence, slows the viewer down as the means of disclosing its content, both plastic

and affective, and has greater stamina in the long run than much work that is more

“progressive”… Bloomsbury’s finest still lifes reflect the artists’ increasing indif-

ference to the demands of idiomatic advance. While certain qualities were thereby

lost (a problem compounded by a degree of overproduction) others, associated

with the very inwardness of the works, were gained. Today’s is not perhaps the

most propitious climate for the recognition of these lasting qualities.40

(There is, incidentally, a resonance here with the Augustus/Gwen John

comparison – weakness resulting from overproduction as against the appeal

and success of more “inward” paintings.) The literature on the Bloomsbury

artists is full of disappointment, dismissive terminology, and faint praise: “thin

and amateurish,” “uneven” output, “workmanlike quality,” “always a trifle

disappointing.”41 Sometimes this works indirectly, by comparing one with

another (Bell often seen as inferior to Grant) or by citing the three artists’

criticisms of one another’s work (for example, Bell and Grant’s “unflattering

view” of much of Fry’s work; or, more self-deprecatingly, Bell’s being con-

vinced of Grant’s “greater gifts”).42 The main criticisms are that the artists

were too eclectic in style, picking up and dropping different influences and

70 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

approaches; that they (and especially

Grant) were too prolific, sacrificing

quality in the process; that a good

deal of their work consisted of poor

imitation of Cézanne or Matisse; and

that their purely abstract work was

generally uninteresting and unin-

spired. Indeed, the catalogue entry

for Vanessa Bell’s 1914 Abstract

Painting points out that this was

merely an academic exercise for which

she felt no real passion.43

Against this background and his-

tory of aesthetic denigration it is illu-

minating to pick out the compliments,

and to discover which works were

judged “good.” Lisa Tickner, com-

paring a number of paintings and

sketches of Studland Bay by Vanessa

Bell, is clear that one of them

(Studland Beach, c. 1912, now in the

Tate Gallery) is superior to the oth-

ers.44 Andrew Causey and Charles

Harrison have both said that the por-

traits by the Bloomsbury artists are better than their other work.45 Richard

Morphet talks about Grant’s “final flowering” in the 1960s and 1970s, after

his renewed contact with the European avant-garde.46 And at least one abstract

work by Grant is singled out for special praise.47 This suggests both that it is

unhelpful to judge (or dismiss) a body of work as a whole and that the particu-

lar assessment of individual works is based on specific aesthetic criteria. Grant’s

1917–1918 portrait of Bell may reveal its fauvist influences; nevertheless, it has

been judged a successful portrait, which “captures some of the qualities for

which Bell was revered by her friends; she appears both seductive and mono-

lithic, straightforward and mysterious.”48 Roger Fry’s 1928 self-portrait

(Fig. 3.2; in Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery), whose directness and immedi-

ate sense of character reminds us as much of German expressionist and Neue

Sachlichkeit portraits as it does of the post-impressionist revolution in style,

also invites us to judge it in its own terms. The fact of European influence

(absolutely and explicitly clear for all three Bloomsbury artists) does not entail

that the work will be derivative. What the artists make of their influences, how

they adapt them to their own particular subject matter and concerns, their own

(pace Harrison) English heritage, is an entirely open question, and the work is

judged accordingly. But it would be as well to confront directly the assumed

aesthetic standard, with its Franco-centric bias, which operates subtly even

FIG. 3.2 Roger Fry, Self-portrait, oil on

canvas, 1928.

Source: © Samuel Courtauld Trust, The

Courtauld Gallery, London, UK/The

Bridgeman Art Library.


among English critics, inclining them to denigrate English modern art as a

poor imitation. Here we come back directly to the question of the grounds of

aesthetic judgment.

*

As we saw earlier, both Charles Harrison and Lisa Tickner insist that aesthetic

judgment is distinct from assessment of the social origins, uses, or meanings of a

work of art. Harrison offers formal (Greenbergian) criteria as key to this. Tickner,

though equally opposed to the reduction of aesthetics to sociology, is less willing

to return to a pure (Kantian) aesthetics and instead proposes a radically contin-

gent approach that sees artistic value, and its persistence in time (and in the

canon), as the successive evaluations of situated social actors. But this only repro-

duces, in a different form, the sociological account, as is clear from this passage:

A work that has ceased to be valued (books out of print, paintings in basements) may

be rediscovered and rescued when its original functions are again desired or “when

different of its properties and possible functions become foregrounded by a new set

of subjects with emergent interests and purposes.”49

The question of the intrinsic evaluation of works is avoided entirely in this account.

More useful is her invocation, earlier in the essay, of Bourdieu’s concept of the

“field of cultural production,” which brings into view the complex array and

intersections of institutions, individuals, and discourses in the specific field of

visual art. There is room here for the aesthetic values in play in a particular

context – the judgments made about composition, tonal quality, formal innova-

tion, and so on. These are the criteria usually invoked (or implicit) when we call a

painting “good.” These criteria too are historically variable – but they are distinct

from questions of interest and use. In practice, aesthetic judgments often mix

the purely formal with referential criteria, which, though not directly expressions

of interest, may be traced to social or political values. In the cases of Gwen John

and the Bloomsbury artists, we have seen that critics talk about the intimacy of

the paintings, the character of the figure portrayed, at the same time as they ana-

lyse color and composition.

But it is not a question of the “right” criteria for aesthetic judgment. In some

ways, it does not matter whether judgments are “purely” formal or informed by

personal or social interests. My argument here is that the important project is to

make transparent the grounds for judgment, as well as the possible interests

invested in evaluations (for example, the feminist interest in Gwen John). Such

interests do not invalidate aesthetic judgment, though they do require us to

support it in non-sociological terms. With regard to the situation of English

modern art on the international scene, the recent relaxation of the dominant,

Franco-centric, story of modernism has certainly opened the way to dialogue

about alternative aesthetic regimes. It makes possible a debate about the relative

72 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

qualities of the so-far separate visual cultures, without either assuming the superi-

ority of one or accepting the incommensurability of the two. A principled aesthet-

ics, explicit about the cultural context of judgments, takes English art on its own

terms without absconding from the broader, more challenging, questions of the

value of art.

Notes

* A version of this essay was published in Janet Wolff (2008) The Aesthetics of Uncertainty,

Columbia University Press.

1 The conference was “Rethinking Englishness: English Art 1880–1940.” It was organ-

ized by David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, Lara Perry, and Fiona Russell.

2 A very abbreviated list of publications includes the two collections which came out

of the York conference, Peters Corbett, D. and Perry, L. (eds) (2000) English Art

1860–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, and Peters Corbett, D., Holt,

Y. and Russell, F. (eds) (2002) The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the

National Past 1880–1940, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press; Peters

Corbett, D. (1997) The Modernity of English Art 1914–30, Manchester: Manchester

University Press; Tickner, L. (2000) Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in

the Early Twentieth Century, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

Exhibitions include British Art in the 20th Century: the Modern Movement, Royal

Academy of Arts 1987; Modern Art in Britain 1910–1914, Barbican Art Gallery,

1997; and numerous specific exhibitions of the work of David Bomberg, Mark Gertler,

Gwen John, the Bloomsbury Group, and many others.

3 His particular example of radical re-thinking here is the abstract art of Ben Nicholson

and Barbara Hepworth, whose work he commended in the book. In the lecture, and

in the version of it subsequently published as an essay, he compares Nicholson

unfavorably with Mondrian and Rothko (Harrison, C. (1999) “‘Englishness’ and

‘Modernism’ revisited,” Modernism/Modernity, 6, 1, 85).

4 Peters Corbett and Perry (2000), 1. See Harrison (1999).

5 Harrison (1999), 79.

6 Harrison (1999), 86.

7 These critiques include feminist and post-colonial approaches, which have made clear the

exclusionary practices involved in canon formation; sociological work on art institutions

(the museum, the art academy, the dealer–critic system), which shows the particular

interests involved in the selection and promotion of some works/artists/styles and not

others; interpretative strategies (hermeneutics, ideology-critique, semiotics, psychoana-

lytic criticism) that challenge traditional notions of the purely formal character of art.

8 Her work has been included in many of the key texts of feminist art-historical revision-

ism, starting in the mid-1970s. See, for example, Tufts, E. (1974) Our Hidden

Heritage: Five Centuries of Women Artists, New York and London: Paddington;

Petersen, K. and Wilson, J. J. (1976) Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal

from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper and Row;

Sutherland Harris, A. and Nochlin, L. (1976) Women Artists 1550–1950, Los Angeles

and New York: Los Angeles County Museum/Knopf (catalogue of an exhibition at

Los Angeles County Museum); and Greer, G. (1979) The Obstacle Race: the Fortunes

of Women Painters and Their Work, London: Secker and Warburg.


9 Tickner, L. (2000) “English modernism in the cultural field,” in D. Peters Corbett

and L. Perry (eds) English Art 1860–1914, 28.

10 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach famously demonstrated how this was still manifest in

the organization of rooms in the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s: “The Museum

of Modern Art as late capitalist ritual: an iconographic analysis,” Marxist Perspectives,

4, 1978.

11 See Davidson, A. A. (1981) Early American Modernist Painting 1910–1935,

New York: Da Capo.

12 See Wolff, J. (2003) AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United

States, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, especially Introduction and

Afterword, on this revisionism.

13 Peters Corbett and Perry (2000), 1.

14 This is addressed fully in David Peters Corbett’s book, The Modernity of English Art

1914–30. In fact his proposal here, repeated by Peters Corbett and Perry, is that it would

be better to define “modernism” more broadly as the art of modernity, on the grounds

that it is not only post-cubist art that is suited to the depiction of the modern world. With

this definitional change, English art (and not just the work of the vorticists) is “modern-

ist.” On non-modernist modern art, see the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art

exhibition, Modern Art Despite Modernism, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000.

15 Harrison (1999), 85, 86.

16 Wolff, J. (2006) “Groundless beauty: feminism and the aesthetics of uncertainty,”

Feminist Theory 7, 2, 143–158.

17 See the essays in Squires, J. (ed.) (1993) Principled Positions: Postmodernism and the

Rediscovery of Value, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

18 Bauman, Z. (2003) Liquid Love, Cambridge: Polity Press, 93.

19 Wolff (2006), 152.

20 See, for example, Herrnstein Smith, B. (1988) Contingencies of Value: Alternative

Perspectives for Critical Theory, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University

Press.

21 Lisa Tickner has suggested that Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “the field of cultural

production” may be useful in addressing the problem of value. This too has the

advantage of citing aesthetic judgment clearly in a sociological context, though in a

different kind of conceptual framework, with different implications. Tickner (2000),

23–24.

22 See Serge Guilbaut (1983) How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract

Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, for a now-classic account of the post-war dominance of New York in

the art world.

23 Langdale, C. (1987) Gwen John, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University

Press, 123.

24 Shone, R. (1999) “The artists of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan

Grant,” in R. Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan

Grant, London: Tate Gallery, 22. The exhibition was shown at the Tate Gallery,

London, The Huntington Library, California, and the Yale Center for British Art,

New Haven, Connecticut. See also Shone, R. (1976) Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa

Bell, Duncan Grant, and Their Circle, Oxford: Phaidon.

25 Fraser Jenkins, D. and Stephens, C. (eds) (2004) Gwen John and Augustus John,

London, 6. The quotation is from the Supporters’ Foreword, in the name of Lady

74 � � � J A N E T W O L F F

Hollick, Chair, Tate Members. The exhibition was shown at the Tate Gallery,

London, and the National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff.

26 In one of the catalogue essays, Lisa Tickner says “Gwen John has always seemed a

marginal figure but her reputation has risen steadily.” Tickner, L. (2004) “‘Augustus’s

sister’: Gwen John: wholeness, harmony and radiance,” in D. Fraser Jenkins and C.

Stephens (eds) Gwen John and Augustus John, London: Tate Gallery, 31.

27 Foster, A. (1999) Gwen John, London: Tate Gallery. See also Foster, A. (2000)

“Gwen John’s Self-Portrait: art, identity and women students at the Slade School,”

in D. Peters Corbett and L. Perry (eds) English Art 1860–1914, Manchester:

Manchester University Press.

28 Quoted by Langdale (1987), 2.

29 These are cited in (in order): Tickner (2004), 29 (quoting Mary Chamot in Country

Life); Fraser Jenkins and Stephens (2004), 95; (the portrait is from 1910; the state-

ment is in a 1914 letter); Tickner (2004), 40 (The Listener of 1946); Tickner (2004),

30 (the painting is now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York); Fraser Jenkins

and Stephens (2004), 96 (the subject is Fenella Lovell).

30 Quoted by Langdale (1987), 131 n.17; the other references are from Tickner (2004),

31 n.18 and 31.

31 “Here is that intensity, quiet and shy though it be, which counts for so much more

than brilliancy, and which is so rare in contemporary art. It is a picture of singular

delicacy and beauty.” Saturday Review, 11 December 1909, quoted in Fraser Jenkins

and Stephens (2004), 73.

32 Bustin, M. (2004) “The rules or problems of painting: Gwen John’s later painting

technique,” in D. Fraser Jenkins and C. Stephens (eds) Gwen John and Augustus

John, London: Tate Gallery, 196.

33 “Amazement will grip the visitor on looking at Miss G. John’s portrait of ‘Miss

Winifred John’, a work altogether wanting in every pleasant quality.” The Lady’s

Pictorial, 20 April 1901, quoted by Fraser Jenkins, D. (2004) “Gwen John and

Augustus John: mutual differences,” in D. Fraser Jenkins and C. Stephens (eds)

Gwen John and Augustus John, London: Tate Gallery, 14.

34 Fraser Jenkins (2004), 24.

35 See note 8 above.

36 In this John’s work can be related to the paintings of Impressionist Mary Cassatt,

another artist celebrated in books – and art gallery visibility – since the advent of

feminism. But I am also thinking of an exhibition in 2001 at New York’s Metropolitan

Museum of the work of the male Danish artist, Vilhelm Hammershøi, featuring espe-

cially “Vermeer-like” figures in interiors, also in the most minimal range of tones.

37 Charles Harrison claims that John’s work has come to embody better than Nicholson’s

the historic and critical concerns of modernism, specifically “the use of the opaque picture

plane as a kind of frontier across which self-critical imaginative exchanges are conducted

between the absorbed and self-exerting spectator on this side and whatever may be con-

tained or connoted by an evoked or illusory depth on the other.” Harrison (1999), 86.

38 Kennedy, M. (1999) “Bloomsbury comes in from the cold,” Guardian, June 25.

39 Zimmer, W. (2000) “Art: from the high-energy Bloomsbury crowd,” New York

Times, August 6.

40 Morphet, R. (1999) ‘Image and theme in Bloomsbury art’, in Richard Shone, The

Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, London: Princeton

University Press, 35.


41 In order: Harrison, C. (1981) English Art and Modernism 1900–1939, 71; Shone

(1999), 22; Morphet (1999), 36 (discussing Roger Fry); Rupert Brooke’s 1912

review of Duncan Grant’s work, quoted by Shone (1976), 83.

42 Shone (1999), 17; Morphet (1999), 36; Shone (1976), 81.

43 “Intellectually she must have been convinced by her brief excursion into abstraction:

but emotionally she found no compensation for what she regarded as the ‘loss’ of

subject matter” (Shone, 1999, 160).

44 Tickner, L. (2000) “Vanessa Bell: Studland Beach, domesticity and ‘significant

form’,” Chapter 4 of Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early

Twentieth Century, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

45 Causey, A. (1986) “Formalism and the figurative tradition in British painting,” in

S. Compton (ed.) British Art in the 20th Century, Munich: Pressel, 16; Harrison

(1981), 70, writing specifically about Duncan Grant.

46 Morphet (1999), 35.

47 Russell, J. (2000) “Rambling amid a springtime of the arts in a garden that was

Bloomsbury,” New York Times, June 2, reviewing the exhibition at the Yale Center

for British Art. He calls Grant’s In Memoriam Rupert Brooke (1915, Yale Center for

British Art) a “hauntingly beautiful abstract image.”

48 Shone (1999), 192.

49 Tickner (2000), 29. The quotation is from Barbara Herrnstein Smith, whose version

of pragmatist aesthetics she endorses in her conclusion. See Herrnstein Smith (1988).

Documents

A Companion to British Art (1600 to the Present) || English Art and Principled Aesthetics