Dear Harold,

In early 2018 I took the decision to begin painting with oils. I had spent the previous five years painting with acrylics: I’m not saying for a second that I think I had mastered the medium, far from it, but I sensed a need to try something new, accompanied by a longstanding conviction that great work is only ever produced by people striving beyond their capabilities.

Painters I know and respect work in oil, and swear by its superiority – its vividness of colour, its textural possibilities. However, my early forays seemed largely to reveal it as intractable – slow to dry, hard to navigate and control, eager to turn to mud. And whilst the colours are undoubtedly vivid, I also found them to be far more complex that their acrylic equivalents, and so demanding of much more careful attention when mixing and juxtaposing.

I wanted to get a sense of what I was dealing with, and how to avoid at least some of the pain of learning from scratch what I needed to know.  I ran across your book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials – first published nearly 100 years ago, in 1920[1]. Contemporary reviewers find much to like – that it remains available after all this time is testimony to its value.  However, some were struck the most by your opening chapter in which you launch a powerful attack on ‘modern’ art. I was intrigued, and so I bought it.

You tell us that you can call to mind “no time in the past history of painting, when any considerable body of artists have deliberately set aside the traditions of fine craftsmanship in order to express themselves more freely; or when there has been such a fashion for the crude methods of savages or primitive peoples”. Many so-called pictures are shoddily made, you suggest, and in time will elicit only boredom. And you compare what you call the “violent use of colours and forms adopted by so much so-called advanced art nowadays” to swearing. Such violence you attribute, at least in part, to “Puritan austerity, a love of destroying pleasing things, and a dislike of seeing things going too comfortably”.

Your offence appears rooted, at least in part, in your distaste for a changing world – you lament the effect on art of democratisation and the empowerment of the many, as expressed through universal education and suffrage. There are too many exhibitions, you tell us, press coverage is ill-informed, and there is an attendant departure in painting from romantic glamour to an overly scientific and intellectual approach (a reference to Impressionism and the growing understanding of light and its workings). Curiously, though, you make no mention of World War One, or the social revolutions in Europe and elsewhere.

I have been unable to find much information about your life, Harold. I know that you were born in London in 1872, and that your father was an architect. Having planned to follow in his footsteps, you instead studied painting at the Royal Academy Schools.  You travelled widely in Europe, which some consider to have given your work a ‘classical European nuance’[2]. You exhibited widely, won scholarships and prizes, and were admitted to prestigious societies. You lived in London for much of your life, and then in Oxfordshire.

I hesitate to assume that you were wealthy, but if the early 20th century (and the war years in particular) engendered in you an expectation of continuity and comfort then it is safe to assume that yours was a fairly privileged experience. Reading Siegfried Sassoon’s WW1 book Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, I was struck by the dissonance between his accounts of life on the front line and visits back to the UK for leave or recuperation. Back in Oxford, or London, or wherever, the clothes of the well-to-do might have hung a little more loosely on them, but his account suggests that it was still quite possible to live well through wartime if you had money. Indeed, it seems that for some the war might have meant little more than the occasional sighting of a distant troop train and the frustration of a lack of cream to augment one’s strawberries. Not every soldier returning after the war, however, would find comfort, continuity and ‘the old ways’ waiting for them – artists included.

Manet and the Post-Impressionists

Whilst Sassoon examined his grim experience as a junior officer on the front line and concluded that there was no justification for the continued slaughter, you fixed your sights instead on Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso and others, whose work collectively you describe as “about as violent a change of front as one can well imagine.” And you single out the critic Roger Fry for particular scorn. It was Fry who curated the 1910 exhibition at Grafton Gallery in London, Manet and the Post-Impressionists in which the work of those artists was first shown in the UK. The exhibition provoked an uproar, with some claiming that it was part of a plot to destroy the fabric of European painting. Clearly, you were not alone in your distaste.

You would only have been in your late thirties when the exhibition was staged, a young man still, and yet you seem curiously out of touch with your own time. Did it not occur to you to seek context for the work you decried with such energy, to seek to understand rather than condemn? There was so much there for you had you only looked for it.  And yet, even as I prickle at your acid and narrow analysis I find some sympathy for your defence of what you consider to be the virtues of traditional painting. Here, you show yourself to be a thoughtful and sensitive man, and I get the sense that you would have been a good teacher.

You write that the technical underpinnings of modern art can be traced to Impressionism, with attention to light and colour opening up new aspects of nature to painters. This, you concede, offered a wonderful freshening of the palette, although this came at the expense of advancement in ‘true’ representation. Overall, your expectation seems to be of Impressionism adding to the repertoire of traditional techniques, but all you really seem to see as the fruit is ugly iconoclasm. A “sense of touch” had been lost, you tell us, with a focus instead on “flat visual impression alone”. Despite this, you are able to find grudging praise for Cézanne, for his concern for the ‘third dimension’ in painting – for weight and depth.

You write compellingly of the virtues of “rhythmic expression”, and of art depending on “emotional perceptions that open up the vision of a world ‘charged with spiritual values’”. Art, you say, puts us in touch with things transcending the material world, and opens up a correspondence with the world of ultimate realities”. By the time you died much of the western world had lost its faith in the idea of ultimate realities, however; indeed, when your book was published the idea had pretty much had its day. That is not to say, of course, that there was, and is, no appetite for transcending the material world – only that the focus had shifted from eternal verities to more subtle, slippery truths that attended the rise of secular humanism and the social sciences. In the same year that your book was published, the world was also delivered two new offerings from Sigmund Freud – An Introduction to Pychoanalysis and Civilisation and its Discontents. Our gaze had been dragged from the heavens and a settled social order, and to ourselves and the conditions into which industrialisation and its effects had pushed us.

Harold, meet Vanessa…

You see the language of painting as emotional. Like you, I am wary of concept, of art that looks to theory for its foundation. I appreciate being made to think if it is done gently, but I insist on being moved and seduced by pictures above all else. I find much to love in the work of Vanessa Bell. She was a contemporary of yours, and you may have run across her work. You both studied at the Royal Academy Schools, although you left not long before she took up her place. You may well have known some of the same people.

A further symmetry, she was one of several British painters to feature in the second post-impressionism show at Grafton Gallery in 1912. You make no mention of this in your book, however. Part of me thinks you would find little to enjoy in her work: she was heavily influenced by Matisse (one of those you single out for opprobrium from the 1910 exhibition), and is unlikely to satisfy your interest in the ‘real’, and in solid three-dimensional representation. That is not to say that it was beyond her (I would argue that there is rock solid structure to be found in her paintings). Rather, her work seems to me to be tugged always towards the abstract, the obtuse, the incomplete.

And her reach has been long. I see her in David Hockney (a modern British painter, still working), or at least some of her in some of him. I add this qualifier because her painting style shifted around greatly. There is the picture of her sister Virginia reclining that, to my eye, appears rich and stylised – a hint of Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau. The lines are fluid, the palette classy and restrained. And then there are the paintings from the same period, quite different, that send my heart to my mouth – the palette alien and incongruous, the brushwork neurotic. Here is someone who can ‘paint’, but sees another way, and something different to both explore and communicate. Hockney’s recent work, the late portraits, has precisely the same quality – painted scratchily with acrylics (though alleviated with just enough painterly gestures to remind us of what he can do). I suspect you would have admired his facility, but perhaps not the rhythms employed; these can be stabby and jarring – there is little here to sooth, to lead the eye neatly around the canvas. The effect is unsettling yet familiar, and it seems wondrous to me that the rhythms felt and expressed by an Edwardian upper-middle class woman could influence so very powerfully the painting of a working class Yorkshireman living in Los Angeles nearly a century later.

The granting of permissions

I find the question of permissions a compelling way to look at a painter’s work – perhaps to ask not only whether I like what I see, but also what it encourages others to do that they might not have done before, for whatever reason. In my own work I feel very conscious of the importance of this – in being impulsive, and not feeling faithful to a style, a subject matter, or a particular kind of coherence across my output. Sarah Milroy sees Vanessa Bell also as offering a new kind of permission[3], and I agree (and maybe David Hockney would as well). I see her as a painter who responded to what felt big and important in her at any particular moment, however uncomfortable and ambiguous it might have been.

Her c.1915 self-portrait is a case in point. The more I have read about her life, the more I see her self-portraits – and this one in particular – as a kind of self-interrogation that, consistent with the currents of modernity, yields no reliable answer. She paints herself – a figure whose gaze is directed not outwards but inwards, an inhabitant of a world where, increasingly, we must look to ourselves if we are to make useful sense of it, with the caveat that what we find may do the job only fleetingly, if at all. This, I would suggest, is a modern day Mona Lisa – mysterious, magnetic and emblematic of a world turned on its head.

It is, of course, quite unlike the Mona Lisa. The colours are mucky, the brushwork approximate and provisional. To those who admire and seek craft, it is likely to seem unfinished (you might have considered it ‘shoddily made’).  This should not be seen as a failure, however. Indeed, I like to see the ‘carpentry’ in a piece of work – evidence of accidents, of changes of mind, of things going awry and erasures, of work undertaken both carefully and rapidly as an idea starts to grip. And of the fragile, provisional nature of things.

All is not lost

I wonder what you would make of the fact that many of the painters from Manet and the Post-Impressionists remain an established part of the canon and are still considered worthy of major shows? As I write, an exhibition in London of Picasso’s work from the year 1932 has just closed. Last year, an exhibition of Matisse’s work was held a short walk away at the Royal Academy. This might annoy you, or it might vindicate you – the picture is nuanced.

Harold, you found modernity in painting a source of dismay. But I want to tell you that all is not lost, that for all of the rejection of comfort and the associated craft virtues that you so lament, even the most outlandish exponents of the new could feel the same as you about the fundamentals of art. Picasso, who went on to dominate western art in the middle of the 20th century, and in so doing ripped up the rule book like no other, made some observations that might have had you nodding your head in appreciation. Like you, he considered painting, and specifically colour, to be highly emotional. Nor was he a slave to the theoretical or scientific. Cubism is widely attributed to a desire to disrupt the idea of fixed perspective – hence Picasso’s portraits sporting both eyes on the same side of the figure’s head, and so on. But he also said “When we invented Cubism, we had no intention whatever of inventing Cubism. We wanted simply what was in us.” Everything, he proposes, is of the moment. There is no ‘progress’, no ‘step towards an unknown ideal of painting’, just the selection of modes of expression, for better or worse[4]. Thus, Picasso granted us permission to reject the demands of the Academy – its orthodoxies and comforts – and to paint what we feel.

[1] Speed, H. 1920. Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.New York: Dover

[2] http://www.burlington.co.uk/artist-biography/harold-speed.html

[3] Dejardin, I. and Milroy, S. (Eds). 2017. Vanessa Bell. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery.

[4] Chipp, H. 1968. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, University of California Press.


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