Two Temple Place is a remarkable hotchpotch, an overwhelming
ragbag of decoration in what produces an incoherent muddle for the viewer. Created at
the end of the 19th century for a fabulously wealthy but tasteless American, it suffers from that period’s strange belief that
covering every surface with decoration was somehow better than simplicity. You
feel it was buildings like this that led to the severe, stark modernism of
concrete buildings. This is a building that cost a vast amount to put together.
The building is worth mentioning, because it seemed to clash
with the paintings and sculpture displayed within. The art displayed (perhaps any art exhibited in this space would be the same) appeared to be overwhelmed by the cacophony of impressions being sent by the
building and its decor.
What was this show about? The charity behind the exhibition,
the Bulldog Trust, sets out to “support the development of regional museums and
galleries”. This show reflects that aim, but notice that the aim is to support
galleries, not to present anything about the region in which those galleries
are situated. To a large extent, this show ignores the landscape of Sussex.
Here, then, is the first of the exhibition’s paradoxes: it claims to be about a place, but celebrates
the work of a group of artists who largely ignored that place. Eric Gill moved away from Ditchling because
of comments from the locals, the exhibition tells us. Mendelssohn and Chermayeff were widely
criticised by xenophobic locals complaining that British architects should have
been given the commission to build the De La Warr Pavilion. To comprehend the show, you should rename it
”various early 20th-century artists who were based in Sussex at some point”.
Even that description doesn’t account for a photo of Picasso, shown visiting
Sussex – we aren’t told for how long. The
closest this show comes to depicting the Sussex landscape is a few humorous
photographs by Lee Miller, such as one where US cartoonist Saul Steinberg is
photographed in such a way that he appears to be drawing the Long Man of
Wilmington. It is a response to the landscape, but hardly one worth
celebrating. This is a show about townies having a laugh at the strange
primitivism they encounter outside London.
So was the show “modernist”? The subtitle of the show,
“retreat as rebellion”, seems a somewhat defensive qualification of the term
“modernist”. The captions do their best
to suggest this art as challenging, but in reality, there was a great deal of
far more challenging art taking place at the same time outside of Sussex.
To call the show “Sussex modernists” suggests some kind of
group, and the artists in this group were widely disparate. There was very
little connecting Duncan Grant, the surrealists, John Piper, Eric Gill, and Serge
Chermayeff, except that they all spent some time in Sussex. That is hardly a
theme. The show tries to make a case for
the participants being unconventional and challenging in their attitudes. For
example, Duncan Grant painted a crucifixion for Berwick Church that showed a
naked Christ with a visible penis. Yet somehow this radicalism begins to
dissolve when you read how Virginia Woolf used to enjoy dressing up in rustic
clothes as a model for an Annunciation. It seems very close to Marie Antoinette
pretending to be a milkmaid in her pretend farm at Versailles.
All in all, the show strikes me as a pleasant wander through
nine regional collections, pulling out interesting things, many of which have
not been shown before (there were some interesting photographs of natural
objects on beaches). But that’s not “Sussex modernism”; it’s “Some interesting
works of art I found in galleries in and around Brighton”. This is not to detract from the works
themselves; it’s just that there is nothing to pull them together. Just as Two
Temple Place, the building that houses them, has no connection with the
pictures either. It’s a muddle.
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