London.- The Fine Art Society is pleased to present “The Camden Town Group Centenary Exhibition”, on view through July 14th. Led by Walter Sickert the Camden Town Group was at the forefront of modern art in Britain in the years running up to the First World War. The artists took as their subject matter the everyday lives of ordinary Londoners and the glitter and grime of the modern city itself. Painted in the dry, crusty paint and pulsating Post-Impressionist colour harmonies of Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan, or the darker, sleeker Old Master tones of Walter Sickert the Camden Town Group introduced new modes of painting to Britain, inspired by the work of Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas.
The Fine Art Society’s exhibition will be the only one to mark the Centenary of the Group’s founding (the first exhibition of the Group opened at the Carfax Gallery in June 1911). Works for sale with be accompanied by a small number of loans. The exhibition makes a special focus of such artists to demonstrate the continuity and wider flowering of Camden Town style in a much greater circle than just the original members, something which has not been visible in previous shows.
As a formation the Camden Town Group were short-lived and staged only three collective shows of their work before reconstituting themselves as the much bigger and more diverse London Group in 1913. But they were enormously influential and breaking with tradition and they represented the beginning of modern art in Britain. Their work is vernacular and sympathetic, taking subjects from everyday London life and human experience whether beautiful or banal with which we can still empathise today. The outmoded ideals of Academic art were replaced with direct observation of life as it was really lived, but painted in a highly innovative way. Post-Impressionism was still virtually unknown in Britain and the colourists of the Camden Town Group – principally Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond and William Ratcliffe – took up and adapted this style in canvases painted in pulsating colour harmonies of soft mauves and pinks and greens using broken touches of dry crusty paint.
This was in contrast to Walter Sickert who employed a richer, darker, Venetian Old Master palette in his paintings but nevertheless followed modern French principles by painting the effects of light, whether it be the last glow of afternoon sunlight as the sun slips behind the rooftops of Dieppe in “St Jacques” or the thin daylight penetrating a North London bedroom in “Seated Woman, Mornington Crescent”. Sickert had spent considerable periods living in France and had direct knowledge of French practice through his friendship with Impressionist painters such as Degas, whose example he was able to pass on to younger member of the Camden Town Group.
They were able also to gather theories of Impressionist painting from another slightly older member, Lucien Pissarro, who was a direct link through his father Camille Pissarro to French innovations still largely unknown in London. The decision to form the Camden Town Group was taken over a slightly boozy supper held one Saturday in Gatti’s restaurant in Regent Street in April 1911. ‘We had indulged in a good dinner’, Charles Ginner recalled ,‘with abundance of wine to wash it down’. As they emerged outside, with characteristic theatricality and a perceptive sense of moment, Sickert announced ‘We have just made history!’ Sickert, Gore, Gilman, Bevan and Ginner had gathered to plot the creation of a new exhibiting society that would showcase the progressive modern painting they were developing. In large part it was a reaction to the creeping conservatism of the New English Art Club that had started to refuse their work and to stifle innovation. It was their aim, Ginner recalled, to gather ‘a group which was to hold within a fixed and limited circle those painters whom [we] considered to be the best and most promising of the day’. There were eventually sixteen elected members.
The Fine Art Society is an art dealership with two premises, one in New Bond Street, London (held since 1876, given a new entrance in 1881 by Edward William Godwin, and fully refurbished in 2004-05, with a New Gallery created for contemporary work) and the other in Edinburgh (Bourne Fine Art, established 1978). It was formed in 1876. Its speciality is British art and design from 1600 to the present (with the Edinburgh premises specialising in Scottish art of this period). Historically, the Society is best known as a pioneer in the idea of the one-man exhibition, most famously that of Whistler’s Venetian etchings in 1883. Living exhibitors at the London premises have included John Singer Sargent, Frank Brangwyn, Walter Sickert, Lamorna Birch, Walter Crane, George Washington Lambert, Joseph Southall, Arthur Wardle, Norman Wilkinson, George Spencer Watson, Violet Lindsay and Richard Caton Woodville. Memorial exhibitions have included one to Lady Alma Tadema in 1910. The Society also puts on shows and fairs in New York, Dubai, Maastricht, Hong Kong and London. Its chairmen have included Angus Grossart. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.faslondon.com
