UR TV CAST

All the exhibits are telling and some of them are of very high quality. And while an often- told lesson is that British artists lagged behind innovations made elsewhere, the story of our own painting and sculpture does have its brightness. The rediscovery of neglected canvasses reminds us of something often forgotten: what excitement there was – fun too – in becoming a modern artist. You could do things in pictures that no one in England had dreamt of doing before. That kind of opportunity was simply not available to writers of the period, who turn up on the fringes of Robins’s narrative, yet have little fresh to say about literary art.
As for the foreign loans: Robins has sought out pictures that now belong to galleries in Toronto, Budapest, Helsinki, St Petersburg and other places.

So while many of the continental master pictures are familiar, others are not. Matisse’s The Inattentive Reader of course belongs to the Tate, but it has an especial effect in its present company. There’s an interesting wall of Gauguins, a majestic Cezanne landscape, Van Gogh’s very late reworking of a Delacroix, an early cubist Picasso, Delaunay’s orphist masterpiece The Cardiff Football Team, a beautiful Derain of 1912 – which is a windowscape but as grave as a cathedral – and other works by Marchand, Mar- quet, Friesz, Severini, Vlaminck and Vuillard.These paintings alone would make it essential to visit the Barbican. Many people will be glad to enjoy them, rather than to brood over the serious theme of the show – which is the reception of such modern art in Britain It’s a depressing story, told by Robins at some length Inevitably, its emphasis is on Roger Fry. He organised the epochal and controversial exhibition called “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” held at London’s Grafton Gallery in 1910.

He followed this show with the “Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition” also at the Grafton two years later As we know, the effect was dramatic. Modern art was denounced, compared with the work of children or lunatics. And yet, in the long run (or even the short run), Fry’s conviction that his artists were masters was accepted by all.He is still rather a mysterious figure. Every few years, someone turns up with another attempt to demonstrate that Fry was himself a considerable artist I fear that he was not. Many painters of middling ability are inspired by feeling for their times and by the example of greater contemporaries Obviously Fry had this advantage. He was clever, knew what was going on in Paris, and had met Matisse and Picasso. But Fry’s own painting suffers from an indefinable but still unmistakable lack of inner, personal inspiration.

It’s as though he had been painting from a guide book to the modern movement.This said, one can appreciate his feeling that it is better to paint than not to paint. Fry is better when his paintings are least laboured; and at the Barbican there are occasional hints that he was able to seek pleasure rather than settle down to industry. I quite like his Summer in the Garden of 1911, though the occasion could have been helped by drinks and flowers, and less stitching.Fry as an artist is easier to explain than Fry as a critic. Robins does not consider why he retreated from the modern movement. Was it because he was so disappointed by philistine reactions to his exhibitions? Or because of the Great War? I merely note that he did not trouble to keep up with Matisse and that his monograph on the French artist is a slight thing Did Fry understand Cubism? I doubt it. His best-known book is Vision and Design (1920), a selection of 20 years of writing about art. Its description of modern painting is perfunctory, nowhere near as good as the essays on Beardsley and Claude.It may have been that modern French painting was too modern for Fry (who was a Victorian, born 1866) to cope with.