Herbert Read described it as one of the most meaningless art historical terms there is because Realism
goes way, way back into history. You could
even say it goes back to prehistoric times
when they were trying to draw animals in the
caves.
I mean, what is realistic, what is realism?
It can be applied to anything. I think even
some abstract artists would think that their
work was real or realist in its message. Realism
or realist painting has a very different connotation
between the two World Wars. It wasn’t a
movement per se, but critics were using the
term under many different forms as they tried
to categorise the various styles that artists
were working in.
It was a way of trying to be modern without
being abstract. A reaction partly against
all the horrors of the war and the Vorticists
who’d lauded the machine, the tank, the
guns, the death which was all a part of the
futurist aesthetic. And, with the coming of
peace in 1918, there was a very strong reaction,
not exactly a return to pastoralism, but a
return to very precise figurative painting.
Well, we’re standing in St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster
and this
is probably the most important mural commission
that emerged from the 1920s and 30s. The idea
was that it was supposed to portray
Rome School Classicism, so realistic painting that you
could literally run past and you’d be able
to read the story easily. It’s very clearly
designed and was very admired for its design.
One critic suggested that the figures look
like Slade School students dressed up for
the Chelsea Arts Club ball. The trouble is,
however hard artists try to recreate historical
scenes, they were so often criticised for
being costume dramas, and in some ways the
muted response to this whole scheme saw the
demise of this kind of realist genre. The
next important mural scheme was for the Bank
of England and that showed modern day bank
workers and officials rather than the history
of the Bank of England.
They’re looking at modern day life, most
of them. If you think of the great seaside
posters of the period there is a sort of immediacy
about them, a simplification- if you actually
have to stop and read it it’s lost its impact.
The impact is something that is so spontaneous,
and of course, the 20s was the great moment
of the advertising of London Underground,
Shell, and so that’s certainly an interaction,
both ways, from painting to the poster art,
and poster back to painting.
The increasing access to leisure activities
and holidays provided a boon for figure painters.
There are many paintings of sunbathers, sportswomen
and sportsmen, because this was a period where
people returned to nature and seeing the countryside
as a place for leisure. They very much painted
idyllic scenes of pre-industrial England,
putting to one side factories or industrialisation.
But also a lot of these artists were focusing
on gardens and allotments as a sort of secure
green space counteractive to the horrors they
had witnessed during the First World War.
Mackintosh Patrick didn’t sit in front of
a landscape and paint it, he drew a lot and
he painted a lot in the studio, and he rearranged
the landscape. He was actually creating something
more real than the actual outside world. I
always remember his son, my old colleague
Andrew Patrick talking about a painting that
some American had bought and he remembered
he’d been born in Scotland and he knew precisely
the location of it. This was in fact very
interesting as, in fact, the farm was in one
place, the landscape somewhere else and there
were some trees actually drawn in North Africa,
and yet it was so true to this man that he
felt he knew that landscape, and it was where
he’d been born and brought up. Memory’s
a funny thing, it does lie as much as anything
else.
The photograph was the perfect vehicle for
representing the world as we see it, but they
wanted to give meaning to their pictures.
One of the critics of the period called Frank
Rutter, called it the ‘chocolate box complex’.
He regretted the fact that there were no more
pretty women that lined the walls of the Royal
Academy because artists were so preoccupied
with design, and really, the emphasis was
on the character, the meaning, the thoughts
of the sitter, rather than producing these
very elaborate, exotic portraits that were
associated with Edwardian and Victorian painters.
This is the other portrait by [Meredith] Frampton
we have here at the [Art Worker’s] Guild.
The sitter here is Sir Edwin Lutyens, the
great architect. You’ve got his beautifully
sharpened pencil here; the bit of the architectural
drawing that he’s working on; the burnt
matches. But if you look at the way it’s
painted, the very crisp precision of his jacket,
of his waistcoat, it looks very, very naturalistic
and yet, nobody looks precisely like that,
I mean you never see somebody looking as clean,
as pure, as immaculate, and that is what the
whole of this realism is about.
Their art school training where they were
told to accurately represent what was in front
of them definitely had an influence on the
way that they were painting in a realist style.
Whether they called themselves realists, I’m
not sure. This type of art has suffered prejudice
right from when it was made: as parochial
and conservative and not worthy of serious
attention. But this was the main stream during
these two decades. Most artists were painting
in a realist style or, even if it wasn’t
realist, it referenced life in some ways.
Well I suppose the thing that happened, of
course, was the Second War, which, obviously,
again, changed the world, and shortly after
the realist painters were suddenly part of
a world that was gone. People didn’t want
to have anything to do with it, it was connected
with their parents’ generation or the generation
that had brought the world into the sorry
state it was in at that stage and, I’m afraid
the baby got thrown out with the bath water
at that point. I think it’s [a] very important
legacy, it may have lain dormant for a while,
but David Hockney’s explosion, and Ossie
Clark and those ones owe a lot to that tradition.
A lot of the pop artists of that generation
were actually very aware of the earlier paintings
from the 1930s. There was really a lot of
very exciting work.
