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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Velvet revolutionaries

Modern Painters: the Camden Town Group
Tate Britain, until 5 May

Ginner’s ‘Leicester Square’ (1912) hangs nearby, with its pleated and braided thick paint, its remarkable density of expression. Robert Bevan’s ‘Belsize Park’ is an altogether cooler affair (and a later painting, from 1917), lucid and less assertive in its paint matter. But the revelation for many, I suspect, and even for those who are familiar with the Camden Town Group, will be Malcolm Drummond (1880–1945). His work is not often shown (only two solo exhibitions in 45 years), so when it does appear it has a freshness of impact lost to better-known artists. His masterpiece ‘St James’s Park’ (1912), loaned by Southampton City Art Gallery (a very fine provincial collection), is an English version of Seurat’s ‘Grand Jatte’, done out in luscious pinks and greens. It gives the lie to anyone who accuses Camden Town painting of being dreary, all brown and grey.

In fact, vibrant colours such as mauves, pinks and greens are part of the signature style, though its driving force, Walter Sickert, personally preferred a more muted Old Master-ish palette, often with a Venetian richness to it. The visible dabs which characterise so much Camden Town painting do not disguise the thrilling colours and bold forms. Look, for instance, at Spencer Gore’s ‘Mornington Crescent’ (1911) or his later sumptuous paintings of Letchworth. Neither Gore nor Bevan use the fat paint of Ginner, whose ‘Piccadilly Circus’ is a marvel of dragged and impasted oil, churned like a muddy lane but ringing with colour. Bevan’s horses are his great strength, as in ‘Horse Sale at the Barbican’, quite a contrast to Gilman’s ‘An Eating House’ or Sickert’s music halls.

The exhibition is full of old favourites, classics of the movement, such as Gilman’s pictures of Mrs Mounter, the housekeeper at his lodgings, and Sickert’s ‘Ennui’. The room devoted to Portrait/Figure/Type is, however, the least sympathetic to the ethos of the Group, so move swiftly into the next section, entitled Sex, with its red-painted walls. Gore’s nudes are interesting, but this theme quickly debouches into Sickert and the Camden Town Murder. Aren’t we all tired of this topic by now? I’d be tempted to leave it out, especially as the Courtauld’s exhaustive examination of it has only just ended at Somerset House. The exhibition really takes wing in the next section, Modernity/Man-Made Environment, with a whole wall of fabulous Gores, from ‘Brighton Pier’ to the Letchworth series. This moves into a lovely group of landscapes, rather unhelpfully labelled Anti-Modern, as if you can’t be modern if you paint landscape — a ridiculous notion. The Bevans are particularly good here. Among other things of note, look out for William Ratcliffe’s Hampstead painting and Walter Bayes’s vast Elephant & Castle Underground panorama, considerably predating Henry Moore’s Tube shelterers.

More articles from: Andrew Lambirth | this section

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