September 2005 4 September 2005 5

players in the political and social issues Road, 11 p.m., more closely resemble considered in that week’s number. But Sickert’s style, with its dark palette, in 1914, concurrent with the publica- use of emphatic, heavy line and focus tion of images representing the two rival on architectural detail. Titt’s drawings, versions of British “modern” art, Titt’s like those of Sickert, take up the modern contributions took the form of sketches city as their subject matter, but they of London. Illustrating the specifi c do so not in order to aestheticize urban setting where the debates about visual life or to invite their viewers to fi nd art were taking place, these cartoons moments of beauty in routine experi- also offered themselves as an alternative ence. Instead they emphasize that the representational strategy, one that made city is chaotic and commercial, fl ooded everyday life in the modern city into the with advertisements and stray signifi ers object of satire. While drawings like St. that have been detached from their Paul’s Churchyard, which is evocative referents. The vision of urban life that of the futurists in its use of repeated these drawings present is bewildering patterns to capture movement, seem and often threatening, hinting perhaps, to be mocking the new abstract forms at the disturbances to come. of art, others, especially Charing Cross In April of 1914, The New Age abruptly ceased publishing drawings and cartoons; by August of that year, The Dancer | Henri Gaudier-Brzeska with the onset of hostilities in the First World War, debates about representa- tional strategies and aesthetic values and critic T.E. Hulme, who organized a January 1914, just as Sickert’s Enid had become suddenly and completely competing series, called “Contemporary Bagnold made its appearance in the irrelevant to most Londoners. During Drawings” that reproduced geometricist pages of the magazine. In its use of over- the brief period before the war, however, artworks, this time created by London lapping shapes to represent temporally The New Age presented itself as an artists. Although his series includes discrete stages in the body’s movement, idealized version of the public sphere, works by local painters, Hulme was the drawing employs a futurist vocab- offering space in its pages to artists and critical of the narrow focus of the neo- ulary, but it also adopts a “primitive” critics with widely varying beliefs and realists, claiming that their attention to style in its simplifi ed forms and thickly backgrounds. In so doing, The New London life results in paintings that are aggressive use of line. While Sickert’s Age became a place where a broad “full of detail that is entirely accidental drawing of Bagnold permitted its viewer reading public could access works of in character” (NA 14.21:661). Hulme’s a glimpse into the drawing room of high culture from Paris as well as ideal is an art in which all detail is a London artist, Gaudier-Brzeska’s Camden Town, read about Cézanne as transcended, offering its viewer a sen- drawing invites its viewer to consider well as Sickert, and witness fi rsthand sory pleasure grounded in an imagined the primal and masculine energies at the vital contest over how to represent universal human response to aesthetic work in a “universal” way of imagining Study | Auguste Herbin London’s modernity. experience. Deliberate construction and the human psyche. the use of models from primitive and -Dawn Blizard Throughout the period when the African art result in the production of “Modern” and “Contemporary” drawings “monumental” art – one in which purely Charing Cross Road, 11 p.m. | Tom Titt were featured in the center folio of formal relations “might make up an The New Age, each number also included understandable kind of music without John Nicholas Brown Center a second piece of artwork: a cartoon the picture containing any representa- Carriage House Gallery | Exhibition: Sept. 29-Oct. 30, 2005 drawn by J.J. de Roscizewski, published tive element whatsoever” (ibid.). Gaudier- New Art in The New Age: What was Modern? under the pseudonym of Tom Titt. 47 Power St | Providence, RI Brzeska’s The Dancer, printed fi rst in Beginning in 1911, Tom Titt contributed Mon-Fri 1-4pm | Phone: 401.863.1177 John Nicholas Brown Center the series, was a study for a sculpture regularly to the magazine, usually in the For more information, please visit: www.modjourn.brown.edu Carriage House Gallery | Exhibition: Sept. 29-Oct. 30, 2005 exhibited in the Grafton Galleries in form of a caricature of one of the major designed by shraddha aryal September 2005 1 September 2005 2 September 2005 3

The New Age was published under the and artists. Not only did the journal in his choice of subject matter. The opponents intensifi ed with The New editorship of Alfred Richard Orage from reproduce artworks from outside its music hall, which attracted crowds of Age’s publication of two more series. In 1907 to 1922 in London. Calling itself pages, but it also employed its own visitors from every walk of life to view its January 1914, The New Age celebrated “a weekly review of politics, literature artist, cartoonist Tom Titt, to parody dazzling nightly spectacles, was among the New Year by presenting a new and art,” the journal printed articles on and imitate them. Titt’s contributions the popular cultural phenomena that he selection of artworks, entitled “Modern a dizzying array of topics – considering to the aesthetic debates were satirical frequently depicted. Sickert was also Drawings” and edited by Walter Sickert. Fabian socialism alongside women’s rather than serious, but in his refusal interested in routine activities within Featuring the works of a coterie of local suffrage, Nietzcheanism alongside Theo- to take sides, and his willingness to the British home: his drawings showed artists, the series attempted to aesthet- sophism, and the essays of Ezra Pound make equal mockery of all the the domestic relations between men and icize the everyday – to transform the alongside short stories by Katherine magazine’s contributors, Titt’s drawings women of the lower classes, or repre- banal and local details of London life into Mansfi eld. When it came to criticism of perhaps offer the best approximation sented the female nude, as in Amantium high art. It featured works by Sickert the visual arts, Orage’s editorial policy of The New Age’s own position on Irae, in unconventional and sexualized himself, as well as a number of the was similarly inclusive. Featuring pieces “modern” art. poses rather than traditional classical artists who frequented the regular that celebrated as well as critiqued Post- ones. In its depiction of a clothed male Saturday afternoon salon he conducted The years between 1910 and 1914 Impressionism, Cubism, Vorticism and fi gure and partially undressed woman at his Fitzroy Street studio, and his art were selected because of the unusual Neo-Realism (to name only a few of sprawled untidily across a bed, school pupils. Throughout his lifetime, richness of the debate that occurred in the disparate and varied movements Amantium Irae calls attention to the Sickert held an abiding interest in the the magazine at the time, but the period discussed), The New Age presented itself sordidness of prostitution and poverty. principles of art instruction, and the was also noteworthy for the circulation of as a public forum for debate about the Intimately concerned with local detail drawings of his students evidence the European (especially French) paintings nature of modern art. For some of its and the patterns of line and color to be transmission of Sickert’s own theories in England and for resulting develop- critics, who saw “newness” in the kinds found inside the English household, of art. Images in the “Modern Drawings” ments in British art. We can see Amantium Irae | Walter Sickert Portrait of Miss Enid Bagnold of abstract painting being developed on Sickert sought to create a “modern” art series tend to highlight details in the this in the public response to Manet and Walter Sickert the continent, foreign objects were to appropriate to his climate and his daily routines of working-class London- the Post-Impressionists, which opened be brought into the city’s gallery spaces ness for truly novel developments in city – one that was not based on the his work “attains an abstraction which ers, and to present scenes of the London late in 1910, and was considered by and their styles and aesthetics were to painting, suggesting that such art was continental models to be found at the to [the artist] is the soul of the subject, street life that Sickert so highly valued. many critics to be the fi rst major show be imitated by British artists; for others, appropriate only for a Parisian audience Post-Impressionist shows. though this subject be composed only Drawings like his Portrait of Miss Enid of modern art in London. Organized by contemporary London was to be repre- because Paris was a kind of cultural of ordinary objects” (NA 10.4:88). For its Bagnold, which opens the series, also Bloomsbury Group member Roger Fry, In November of 1911, Huntly Carter, sented as realistically and truthfully as capital that London could never be. advocates, abstract art offers a way of exemplify Sickert’s belief that sketches the exhibition featured works by more the writer of a regular art column in The possible, and the modernity of the city, It was this question – about the nature imagining an object world possessing as should highlight interactions between than two hundred continental artists, New Age, began editing a series of his translated into art, would remake it as of “modern” art for a British viewing much interiority and complexity as the fi gures and their surroundings. In this including Cézanne, Gauguin, Herbin, own – designed to bring the magazine’s “modern.” public, which The New Age would human subject, and offers to reproduce drawing, the painting hung behind the Manet and Picasso. This show provided readership a vastly different concep- concern itself with in the years to come. this complexity in a manner that is both artist’s head works as a geometrical This exhibition includes works most Londoners with their fi rst tion of the latest developments in timeless and beyond the bounds of framing device, calling the viewer’s printed in The New Age between 1910 opportunity to see continental avant- In one view, a “modern” aesthetic modern art, one in which all innovation convention. Also included in this series attention to the relation between the and 1914. Closely following develop- garde painting in person. Greeted with should represent the contemporary city emanated from the continent. Featuring is a curious satire – supposedly a artist’s body and the room that contains ments in the London art scene during indignant outrage by some critics, and as accurately as possible, in accordance reproductions of paintings by Picasso, reproduction of a Study by M. Ben Zies, a it. This compositional technique is used these years, and exposing its readers to celebrated by others for enacting a with the latest theories of perception. Herbin and Segonzac, as well as the Scottish art teacher interested in to call attention to the situatedness of works currently being shown (and radical break with Victorian conven- This was the position of Walter Sickert, Italian Futurist Russolo, this series turning a quick profi t by jumping on the fi gures by other artists in the series as offered for sale) in local galleries, The tion, Fry’s show opened the fl oodgates a regular contributor to The New Age presented various forms of abstraction, bandwagon of the new abstract style. well. Although the included works are New Age provided a crucial stage upon of debate about the value of modern art in the period following the fi rst Post- from Picasso’s labyrinthian fi gurative As the only British contribution to the varied in terms of form and content, which the nature of the “modern” could in the London press in general – and in Impressionist show. The fi rst series of style, to Herbin’s mechanized geometri- series, the spoof’s inclusion relegates taken together, they represent the be contested. In its pages, a reader could the pages of The New Age in particular. drawings that the journal included cism, to Russolo’s use of pattern and English art to a curiously liminal position efforts of a group of artists determined fi nd the neo-realist drawings of Charles The weekly magazine’s in-house art during these years was comprised solely vivid color (impossible to reproduce in with respect to continental abstraction, to defi ne themselves as “new,” even Ginner and Walter Sickert along with the critic, Huntly Carter, offered an impas- of his work. Begun in June of 1911, the The New Age’s black and white format), suggesting that truly innovative work while eschewing the kinds of nonrepre- experimental art of Jacob Epstein, Henri sioned defense of the show, claiming it series continued on a near-weekly basis which attempts to present the frenetic came from outside Britain, and local sentational abstraction practiced by the Gaudier-Brzeska and David Bomberg. anticipated the aesthetic “principles of until August of that same year; a energy of the modern city in an unmedi- artists were capable only of insincere cubists and the futurists. These works were reproduced within the future,” while disgruntled readers second series ran from January to June ated form. While Sickert called Picasso’s imitation and parody. several weekly series, each of which can complained of the exhibit’s “vulgarity” of 1912. Interested in portraying every- art “an academic formula which is the But Sickert’s series could also be be understood as presenting a particular and “decadence.” Other correspondents day life in the bustling metropolis of salvation of all arrivistes without talent” The contrast between Carter’s viewed as a polemic – one that was polemic in the debates between critics questioned the British public’s readi- modern London, Sickert was “modern” (NA 14.18:569), Carter contended that position and that of his neo-realist quickly answered by the philosopher