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British art in a century of immigration: Introduction

Lynda Checkettsa a Curator of the Norwich Gallery,

To cite this Article Checketts, Lynda(1991) 'British art in a century of immigration: Introduction', Third Text, 5: 15, 5 10 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528829108576309 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829108576309

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British Art in a Century of Immigration

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Introduction by

Lynda Checketts

Modern thought suggests that 'quality' is subjective, it is conditioned by age, sex, social status and race. Yet the idea of a single, consistent, international means of agreeing quality and awarding value is the foundation of 20th century modern art. Modern artists such as van Gogh, Monet and Picasso are the agreed tokens which represent surplus wealth.' Art now performs the function gold performed for many centuries. The value of gold is not inherent in the metal, it is an attribute that society has agreed to give to it. And so it is with art. Both are rather attractive, not obviously useful token of riches, hoarded as the means of buying power. The 'Art Standard' has proved itself more flexible to deal with the complexities, and abstractions, of international finance than the old 'Gold Standard'. Crucial to both art and gold is the fact they are strictly limited. There are only a certain number of gold mines and a certain number of van Gogh's. The basis on which vast wealth is attached to the value of van Gogh's work rather than the work of another artist, is the universal acceptance of van Gogh's 'quality'. But we began with the idea that quality is subjective. This circular train of thought is one of a number of structures by which the acceptance of quality and value in contemporary art can be seen to be a problem. All contemporary practitioners know that quality is

6 subjective, and that the strict limitation of quality and value to a very small number of practitioners goes against the interests of the majority of worthy artists. The discipline of art history is linked by the process of authentification with the business of selling art; it is less obviously related to the making of art. We have yet to find a means of recording art in the 20th Century which reflects the complexity of what has taken place. We can no longer unquestioningly accept that the selective accounts of art history are adequate to judge what has been made by artists of all races and genders.
1 Lynda Morris & Robert Redford, The Story of Artists International Association 1935-1953, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1983.

to 1953 (AIA),11 suggested the move required was from a 'prescriptive' to a 'descriptive' idea of art history. The AIA exhibition looked at a political tradition in British art in the period that spanned the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the start of the Cold War. It did not accept that 1939 or 1945 were convenient dates to sub-divide this century. A number of areas need further research: Women Artists, Radicalism and Realism, the motives of State Patronage, the relationship between the AIA and the Artists Union in the USA, Picasso's role in the Peace Movement, Communist Party influence in Art, etc... Amongst these topics was immigration, and the work of the Artists Refugee Committee, the Free German League of Culture and the influence of numerous refugee artists who came to Britain in the 1930s, including Meidner, Kokoschka, Schwitters, Heartfield and Moholy-Nagy. A member of the Artists Refugee Committee, and probably the most influential social historian of art working in Britain at that time was Francis Klingender. Research on his role in organising exhibitions for the AIA and the Charlotte Street Centre, showed how his exhibitions and books always began with the illumination of a contemporary issue by a historical precedent. In this tradition, I did not just want to look at the historical picture of pre-war immigration, when post-war immigration is such an important issue today. As a result of the AIA exhibition, I began to correspond with, and eventually visited, Elizabeth Shaw in East Berlin, and Priscilla Thomeycroft in Dresden, two artist members of the AIA who had married German refugees during the Second World War and subsequently returned to live in Germany in 1945-6. like Brecht and Heartfield, they remained in the Russian sector in East Germany. I was staying with Elizabeth Shaw in East Berlin when the riots took place in Brixton in 1985.1 wondered whether the reports were an exaggeration of East German propaganda. On visits to East Germany I met and interviewed a number of artists who had spent the war years in Britain including Theo Balden, Erich Bischof and Heinz Womer. This gave me a sense of the suffering of the Left at the hands of the Nazis. I was piecing this story together at the time of the reunification of Germany. One was learning not only about the past, but also about the contradictions that were conditioning the present, and possibly shaping the future. A number of German art historians are also interested in the subject of the German artists who spent the war years in Britain: in East Germany, Ursula Adam, Michael Krejsa and Barbara Barsch; in West Germany, Michael Nungasser in Berlin and Cordula Frowein at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt whose research appeared in the catalogue Art in Exile in Great

In the introduction to the Story of the Artists International Association 1933

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7 Britain 1933-1945, held at Charlottenberg in Berlin in 1986, organised by the Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kiinst. It should perhaps be remarked that before unification there was more encouragement to look at anti-fascist movements in the East than there was in the West. But to look at the subject at all remains a difficult experience for German art historians. A small version of the Berlin exhibition came to the Camden Arts Centre in 1987, which like the large exhibition of Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, held at the Barbican Centre last year, relied on the knowledge and scholarship, prompted by the experiences of her own family, of Monica Bohm-Duchen. Since the 1970s German art has become dominant in European culture, most notably in the work of Josef Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. Their work grew alongside, and was sheltered by, the Berlin Wall. The Wall was a symbol we all understood, of an impending and unimaginable nuclear holocaust between East and West. With the reunification of Germany this interpretation of their work has evaporated. Their work can now be seen to be about the past rather than the future, and that is problematic. A decade ago German art critic Benjamin Buchloh, who now lives in New York, published a critique of Joseph Beuys: What the myth does tell us, however, is how an artist, ...tries to come to terms with the period of history marked by German fascism and the war resulting from it, destroying and annihilating cultural memory and continuity for almost two decades and causing a rupture in history that left mental blocks and blanks and severe psychic scars on everybody living in this period and the generations following it. Beuys' individual myth is an attempt to come to terms with those blocks and scars.2 It is essential in this period of the re-emergence of German culture that the horror of the Nazi period is not seen as a problem only for Germany and Germans. Anti-semitism and racism are related, and the origin of that link is in the inhuman conditions of the slave trade and European Empires in the 18th and 19th centuries; this includes the Portugese, French, Dutch, Belgians and British as well as the Germans. Marcel Broodthaers, the Belgian artist, influenced this debate through his work and his Open Letters to Joseph Beuys.3 Broodthaers is often represented as a surrealist, when he was in fact deeply political. He was of the generation most affected by the Second World War, from a country that has been fought across so often, and he was active in the Resistance. He lived in Brussels, Paris, Dusseldorf and London, and had a broad European perspective. He told the parable of Europe in 1945 being a field of tulips, which the Americans and Russians divided between them. The Russians came into their half with lawn mowers, and very cruelly cut everything down. The Americans in their half, with their cigarettes, chewing gum and popular music, spilt Coca-Cola on their half and their tulips shrivelled up and died. Another season came and the tulips in the Russian half began to sprout and grow again. But the American half could not grow again as the CocaCola had poisoned the bulbs. I have thought of this parable often since November 1989.

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2 Benjamin Buchloh, 'Myth of Origins', Artforum, Jan 1980.

3 Marcel Broodthaers, Open Letters to Joseph Beuys, quoted by Buchloh. ibid.

8 Broodthaers' Museum of Eagles exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf in 1972 traced the eagle as the symbol of regimes: Ancient Rome, Napoleonic France, Tsarist Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazi Germany and the United States of America today. Broodthaers also represented the relationship between bars of gold and works of art and used palm trees as a symbol of the age of empires. The aging ex-colonialists, sipping tea under the potted palms in the Winter Gardens of Margate, Baden Baden, Cherbourg and Ostend are products of the same system. The 'native' population of the Belgium Congo was reduced from 40 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1911 according to figures quoted by Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism* broadened the issues by discussing both anti-semitism amongst the Nazis in Germany and apartheid amongst the Boers in South Africa, to examine the roots of totalitarianism. The juxtaposition reminds us that the genocide in the middle of the 20th century has roots in the inhuman experience of Empire and the slave trade. It was the slave trade that allowed one race to treat another race as less than human, to transport them like animals and to exterminate them as vermin. Racial prejudice is at the root of totalitarianism. It is not just the Germans who exploited their Empire and indulged in the slave trade. This is a problem for all of European culture and the heirs of European thought, in the USA, Australia, Africa, Asia and South America. Another factor determining this project was the interest in the subject of a number of academics in Norwich, not least Willi Guttsman who organised the exhibition of German Worker Artists at the Sainsbury Centre in 1987. He came to Britain in 1939 as an adolescent with his sister, who now lives in Tel Aviv, but his parents remained in Berlin and died in the holocaust. As a mother, the image of that moment of separation is my abiding fear. The desperate decision to send one's children on the Children's Transport, the desire to save them above one's concern for one's own safety, the sense that their lives were still to be lived, knowing one's own mattered less. The fear that the Children's Transport was a trick. The last family meal together, tucking them into bed the last time. The goodbye at the station. The last kiss. The last touch. The last wave. The last sight of them and the train. The tears. The hope of being reunited. The letter that they were safe. Knowing they would live. That precious thought at that terrible death. Juliet Steyn is concerned with the experience of Jewish immigrant artists in Whitechapel in the early years of this century. How does their experience as modern artists and as members of an ethnic community relate to the experience of more recent immigrant groups? More particularly she is asking questions about 'positive discrimination' and the problematic link between political and artistic radicalism. Whitechapel, Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds remind us that Britain has also been a melting pot, bringing together peoples of .many nations in the 20th century. The problem is that the British are less interested in diversity than conformity. Our aim, whether we acknowledge it or not, is assimilation. Nationality and race are no longer adequate to describe the complexity of cultural geography is an idea we need to look at in greater detail. It contains aspects of being both the most significant concept to

4 Hannah Arendt, The

Origins of Totalitarianism, Andre

Deutch, London, 1986.

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9
emerge from postmodernism and of being another name for internationalism. Recently Benjamin Buchloh did an interview with Jean-Hubert Martin, published in Third Text, No 6, about Magicians de la Terre exhibition.5 Buchloh's questions implied that the exhibition, like Beuys, was trying to create an abstract experience of spirituality, and that spirituality fills a vacuum created by the rejection of the politics of everyday life. Both articles refer to the German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, and his analysis that: Mankind has reached such a degree of self alienation that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering esthetic. Communism responds by politicising art."6
6 Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer' in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Andrew Arato & Eike Gebhardt (eds.), Urizen Books, New York, 1978.

5 Magidens de la terre, Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle la Villette, Paris, 18 May - 14 August 1989.

7 Roger Fry, The Arts of Painting and Sculpture, Victor Gollancz, London, 1932.

Third Text is an art journal to which we are all indebted for our understanding of art and theory 'outside' of Europe and Europeans. Third Text's articles and special issues relate world events and political geography to art and modernism, and it has given hope for a continuation of intellectual radicalism. As Picasso, himself an immigrant from the South, said in 1945: "Art is not for decorating the apartments of the bourgeoise, it is a weapon for the fight." Third Text has gathered together and presented a new generation of writers, such as Gilane Tawadros and Sarat Maharaj, who have not only explored their own history and identity but made contributions to the study of feminism and to radical art history. They are the first generation of academics, some of the first graduates in modern art history from nonEuropean backgrounds, to provide role models for the future. Those models are not just for other African or Asian art historians but for all of us. In discussing this project with them, I came to realise that my own intellectual experience, the art, literature and history I know about, is based on a limited world view. My intellectual map is like one of those curious 16th century maps of a flat little world based on the Mediterranean. This knowledge is typical of my peers. Bloomsbury was a focus of progressive British culture, and the aesthetic theory behind a permanent collection such as the Sainsbury Centre. Roger Fry's notion of progress is, however, tied to the period in which his ideas were formed at the end of the 19th century at the height of British Imperialism. Roger Fry, like the present day curators at the Pompidou Centre, held up the 'primitive' as something abstract and indefinable, "significant form" shares this idea of a spiritual quality. If I turn to Fry's chronology of the development of art history in books such as The Arts of Painting and Sculpture,7 the Palaeolithic and Neolithic are followed by the art of 'Primitive Peoples'; then civilisation begins its long march from Mesopotamia to Egypt, to Greece and Rome to the Renaissance, to French Impressionism and finally to Post-Impressionism. The problem with this chronology is that the 'primitive artist' was Roger Fry's contemporary, a bushman working in Southern Africa in the early years of the 20th century, yet Fry places him 5,000 years ago in history. Fry is saying that the African is 'Primitive', a throw back to prehistoric times, and as such

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10 he is not human in the same way as a contemporary human being. With this line of thought we are back to totalitarianism and the slave trade. It is deeply disturbing that such progressive ideas have not progressed. Modern Art and the idea of 'primitivism' is still problematic. Rooting out such common distortions of reality is a problem for the white educated middle-class, given that our patterns of learning were established in the 18th and 19th centuries at the height of the Empire. Indeed a case could be made that there would hardly be a British middle-class if it was not for the Empire. As a 'Tate of the East' is proposed in Norwich, let us remember that our national Museum of Modern Art, Tate Gallery, bears the name of a benefactor whose wealth came from the sugar plantations of the West Indies. It is time the name was changed back to Millbank, a name which has only connotations of rural industry, not those of slavery. While working on the exhibition History and Identity with Eddie Chambers, whose parents came to Britain from the West Indies, I began to ask why I do not have an emotional image of a 'moment of separation' between a black mother and her children in Africa as I have of the Jewish child transports. That helped me to understand that whatever one's liberal conscience might believe, racial prejudice remains on a less conscious and more emotional level what Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism identified as the European's inability to identify with Black Africa, expressed in literature by Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It will be through the art, film, music, poetry and literature of black artists that Europeans will eventually have to confront the equal humanity of the black races. I was shocked when I read Frederick Engels' on the hopeless filth and degradation of the Irish population in Manchester in the 1840s. My grandmother's family left a small-holding on the banks of the Boyne where my ancestors had probably lived for centuries, to live in the tenements of Port Glasgow and to work in the Clydeside shipyards. In the first half of this century Britain was a refuge, however inadequate, for the victims of racial, and political, prejudice. Now, towards the end of the 20th century racial prejudice exists in Britain and throughout 'Fortress Europe'. The issues of totalitarianism and racial prejudice are not of the past and not just for Germany and South Africa. They confront us now, not in what we are doing, but in ways we have not yet considered. I am leaving too many questions unresolved. I have put this conference together not from a claim to expertise, but from a wish to learn by looking at artists from immigrant communities in Britain in the last 80 years. This is a mechanism by which we can study anti-semitism, racial prejudice, Germany and Europe, political radicalism and modern art.

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