The document summarizes the context surrounding Roger Fry's 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition in London and the modernist movement in art and literature. It describes how the exhibition shocked audiences accustomed to traditional English paintings by displaying works by Post-Impressionists like Cézanne, leading many critics to condemn the paintings. This exhibition helped introduce modernism to Britain and change perceptions of art. The document also provides background on the Edwardian period in England and defines some key aspects of modernism in both art and literature during this time.
2. Manet and the Post-Impressionists
1910 London, England
Most Londoners had never
seen a Post-Impresssionist
painting in 1910 when art
critic and Bloomsbury Group
artist Roger Fry organized an
exhibition for the Grafton
Gallery in London.
Virginia Woolf, also a part of
the collective of avant-garde
writers and artists known as
the Bloomsbury Group,
captured the massive impact
of the show on the British
imagination when she wrote:
“on or about December 1910
human character changed.”
3. Edwardian Period (1901-1912)
• The Edwardian Period in the United Kingdom covers
the reign of King Edward, (Queen Victoria’s son).
• King Edward ruled during a time of relative peace
and prosperity for the nation of England, and a time
of leisure for the elite.
• While some British painters’ work shows the
influence of the Impressionists and Post-
Impressionists, the vast majority of art being
produced during this time period was an extension
of Victorian sensibilities. English painters catered to
middle-class taste and created “traditional”
paintings as taught at the Royal Academy.
4. WHAT THEY EXPECTED
Here are some
examples of the
paintings being
produced during the
Edwardian Age in
England.
Most of the people
who attended the 1910
Grafton Gallery
Exhibition organized
by Roger Fry and
featuring many Post-
Impressionist painters,
were accustomed to
seeing paintings like
these.
What they saw
offended their
expectations and
brushed against their
definition of fine art.
6. How The Critics and the Public Responded to What
They Saw
• Sir Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery and a sponsor of the
Grafton Gallery, asked that his name be removed from publicity
surrounding the exhibit.
• The Duchess of Rutland, another sponsor, was “horrified” at having her
name associated with the exhibition.
• Art Critic Sir Blake Richmond wrote that “Cezanne mistook his vocation; he
should have been a butcher.”
• Critic Robert Ross claimed the show indicated a “wide-spread plot to
destroy the whole fabric of European painting.”
• An anonymous critic wrote for a local paper expressed dismay that “men
of talent… should waste their lives in spoiling good acres of canvas when
they would have been better employed at stone breaking for the roads.”
• And a writer for a London newspaper described the public’s response to
the paintings as follows: “Some who point their finger of scorn, some who
are in blank amazement or stifle the loud guffaw; some who are angry;
some who sleep.”
7. Modernism in Art and in Literature
Modern Period in Art:
1860-1975
Modern Period in Literature
1910-1965
Works created during these years and the period itself are also
referred to as Modernism; the artists and writers are called Moderns
or Modernists.
8. Literature: Modernism (1910-1965)
• A break from tradition
• Experimentation with language was encouraged and pursued
• A deliberate and self-conscious adoption of modernist point of view
• A focus on the inner self and the working of human consciousness
• A vision of decay and fragmentation and alienation
• A new avenue for new voices
• “Modernists gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All
truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated
that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute
destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.”
9. Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style
“What now takes the place of those things, I wonder, those real standard
things? Men, perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of
view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes
Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the
war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope,
will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany
sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth,
leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if
freedom exists…”
• long, complex sentences
• single sentences can contain multiple ideas and tones
• frequent use of commas, semicolons, dashes, ellipses
• syntactic deviance
• associative leaps
• metaphor, allusion, and image are prominent
• narrative subjectivity
• stream of consciousness
10. A Sampling of Modernist Writers, Poets,
Essayists, and Playwrights
T.S. Eliot
Virginia Woolf
Ernest Hemingway
F.Scott Fitzgerald
e.e. cummings
GertrudeStein
Ralph Ellison
Katherine Mansfield
Joseph Conrad
James Joyce
Henrik Ibsen
Anton Chekhov
D.H. Lawrence
Marcel Proust
EzraPound
Ford Maddox Ford
