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.