First Post-Impressionist Exhibition
Most British art critics in 1910 were still trying to digest the impressionism of Monet and Renoir, and the new exhibition, by rejecting impressionism as old-fashioned, baffled even sympathetic observers. E. M. Forster wrote that “Gauguin and Van Gogh were too much for me.”[1] Many viewers and critics thought the show a hoax or an offense against English culture. The art historian Charles Harrison has listed some of the words applied to the exhibition: “horror,” “madness,” “infection,” “sickness of the soul,” “putrescence,” “pornography,” “anarchy” and “evil.”[2] A few, however, defended the exhibition, and the consummate Edwardian Arnold Bennett suggested that the scorn heaped on modern art by the British public showed “that London is infinitely too self-complacent even to suspect that it is London and not the exhibition which is making itself ridiculous.”[3]
The champions of modernity in art shared Bennett’s sense that London was woefully behind the times. English artists soon began to absorb the influences of Matisse and the early, pre-cubist Picasso. A second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912 displayed paintings by Bloomsbury artists like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell alongside works
by the major French painters and a number of rather obscure Russians.
- ↑Quoted in Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 22.
- ↑Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 1900-1939, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), p. 47.
- ↑Quoted in Hynes, Edwardian Turn, p. 332.
This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 91-92.