A Modern Art Education

Post‐Impressionism: Universal, British, Global

“…Fry's limited understanding of cubism, for instance, which either assimilated it to post-impressionist aims or dismissed its offshoots as overly 'literary', was rapidly challenged by others who saw a need to give a more responsible history of recent events. 49 Frank Rutter, possibly 'the first critic to have used the word "postimpressionist" in print', set this out in two major exhibitions of 1913. 50 Fry had used the term post-impressionism as if it designated an identifiable style underwritten by shared aims.…”

“…51 Though Wyndham Lewis and Camden Town had exhibited together, and despite many stylistic tendencies being subsumed in the London Group, it became clear to Lewis in particular (as Anna Gruetzner Robins points out) that it would be necessary to create a distinct 'ism' with its 'own inherent individual social, political and cultural identity'. 52 The result was first Lewis's much-publicized break from Fry's Omega Workshops design collective, then the foundation of 'vorticism', with its self-conscious adoption of an aesthetic, a tone, and a set of theories, that marked itself out as distinct from anything put forward by Fry. 53 Clive Bell had in 1913 moved away from his universalizing tone to attack British artists exhibiting at Rutter's 'Post-Impressionists and Futurists' exhibition (such as C. R. W. Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth) who in Bell's eyes were doing no more than picking up the 'mannerisms' of French painters.…”

“…53 Clive Bell had in 1913 moved away from his universalizing tone to attack British artists exhibiting at Rutter's 'Post-Impressionists and Futurists' exhibition (such as C. R. W. Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth) who in Bell's eyes were doing no more than picking up the 'mannerisms' of French painters. 54 Bell's attack relied on his judgement that too consciously following the styles of others would create merely derivative work. The same concern would soon be turned back against Fry and Bell in quips such as Walter Sickert's that 'what Paris says to-day, Bloomsbury, as the saying goes, will endeavour to say thirty years hence'.…”