Review: Modernity at the Seaside

Reviewed Work(s): Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside by Lara Feigel
and Alexandra Harris; Sargent and the Sea by Sarah Cash
Review by: Christiana Payne
Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2010), pp. 239-241
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40856517
Accessed: 03-01-2022 13:15 UTC

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Modernity at the Seaside
Christiana Payne
Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (eds), Modernism on Sea: Art and
Culture at the British Seaside (Peter Lang: Basel, Oxford, 2009), 32
b&w illns, 272 pp., 10 colour plates.
Sarah Cash (ed.), Sargent and the Sea (Yale University Press in
association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art: Washington DC, 2009),
170 pp., 180 plates, mostly in colour.
As so many recent commentators have emphasised,
attitudes to the seaside have changed enormously over the
last two centuries. For Shelley in the early nineteenth
century, the sea was 'brackish with the salt of human tears',
a place of danger and death by shipwreck and drowning.
This is the image of the sea which features in so many
paintings by Turner. But in the same period, the seaside
holiday was gradually becoming established, creating a new
range of associations with pleasure, healthy open-air
exercise, gaiety, and freedom. Novel patterns of leisure
contributed to a breaking down of class barriers, in a liminal
space where the usual rules and hierarchies could not be
maintained. The tourist seaside provided opportunities for
flirtation and glimpses of the body. It also lured artists,
photographers, and illustrators, who combined a search for
recreation with an appreciation of tempting subject matter,
whether this lay in human activities or in the elements of
water and sky. By the end of the century, artists were
congregating in seaside colonies, such as Newlyn and
Concameau, painting fisherfolk and tourists - the
traditional beside the modern - and revelling in the sense
of space, light, and air that the coast provided. The seaside
holiday gradually extended its way down the social scale,
becoming the chosen destination of the masses, celebrated
in postcards and music hall songs. In the late nineteenth
century, it was the perfect location for plein-air painting. In
the twentieth, it also became a site for light-filled
architecture and introspective fiction. In these respects, it
could be seen as essentially modern. However, vestiges of
its past connotations remained, particularly in Britain, in the
seaside's heritage of symbolism and emotion, in its
associations with patriotism, warships, shipwrecks, and
sublimity, and these arguably limited its appropriateness as
a site of high modernism.
These two very different books celebrate the contribution
of the seaside to modernity in art and the wider culture.
Modernism on Sea originated in an interdisciplinary
conference, held at the De La Warr Pavilion at
Bexhill-on-Sea. Its contributors include scholars of English
literature, novelists, and film-makers alongside historians of
art, architecture, and design. Sargent and the Sea also has
essays by a number of different authors - in this case all
are, or have been, museum curators - but there the
similarities end. The book is not an exhibition catalogue but
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Reviews
a volume 'published on the occasion of an international
travelling exhibition, which began at the Corcoran Gallery in
Washington, travelled on to the Museum of Fine Arts in
Houston, and will be at the Royal Academy in London from
10 July till 26 September this year. It is the perfect
accompaniment to a summer exhibition, spaciously
produced and sumptuously illustrated, with full-page details
giving a tactile sense of the texture of canvas and paint, or
of the transparent luminosity of watercolour on paper.
Modernism on Sea is sparsely illustrated, and the
illustrations are small. This is of little consequence for the
contributions which focus on literature, but it is a great
shame that Nicola Moorby's excellent essay on the Camden
Town Group illustrates only one painting, or that Svetlin
Stratiev's entertaining study of the comic seaside postcard
is accompanied by just one example. The contributions on
film and architecture are rather more generously illustrated,
and it may be that considerations of copyright fees limited
the number of paintings that could be illustrated - an all
too common problem with texts on twentieth-century art.
Instead, the authors have to resort to ekphrasis, which
Moorby, in particular, does brilliantly. Sargent and the Sea,
by contrast, has almost too many illustrations. A number of
paintings are reproduced several times, and slight sketches
are given lavish treatment, enabling the reader to study
Sargent's working methods in great detail.
The accompanying exhibition is based around two key
works by Sargent, En Route pour la Pèche (Corcoran
Gallery) and Fishing for Oysters at Cancale (Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston), both exhibited in 1878, along with related
studies and sketches. The first of these was shown at the
Paris Salon and the second - a smaller version of
the same composition - at the inaugural exhibition of the
Society of American Artists in New York, where it was an
immediate critical success. Richard Ormond, in his
introductory essay, states the thesis of the exhibition, and
hence of the book, that in the years 1874-1879, Sargent
was primarily a marine painter. Sarah Cash's essay in the
book investigates the relationship between the two key
paintings and their associated studies. A further essay by
Marc Simpson considers a smaller painting, Neapolitan
Children Bathing (1879, Sterling and Francine Clark Art
Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts). All three paintings
give the impression that they were painted in the open air,
though in fact Sargent followed traditional practices,
constructing them in the studio from sketches made on the
spot. Nevertheless, the dazzling light effects put them firmly
in the camp of the new painting of the Impressionist
movement. In subject matter, similarly, they combine the
modern with the traditional. Depictions of fisherfolk have a
long pedigree in French and British art, but by the later
nineteenth century, they were giving way to modern scenes
of middle-class tourists in the paintings of Boudin and
Monet. On the other hand, Winslow Homer continued to
make them a focus of his art in his work at Cullercoats in
1881-1882, and Sargent, like Homer, concentrates on the
attractive young women, with their menfolk barely visible in
the distance.
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.2 2010 239
Reviews
Neapolitan Children Bathing also combines the old and
the new, with putti-like younger children accompanied by
older boys whose placement and demeanour suggest a
homoerotic reading and look forward to Henry Scott Tuke's
work. Marc Simpson's discussion of the painting is very
thorough in its consideration of patronage and technical
matters, but resists sociological or psychosexual
interpretations. Despite the contemporary critics he cites
who refer to the boys as 'cupids', he asserts that the
painting lacks sexual energy and that this is the reason that
it was exhibited in 1902 as 'Innocents Abroad'. Yet the
'Innocents' could be the two young boys, clearly
distinguished by contemporaries from the older and browner
boys, whose poses hint at the reputation of Capri as a place
for homosexual encounters. This reluctance to engage with
deeper psychological issues is very much in keeping with
the general tenor of Sargent scholarship, which is strongly
connoisseurial and extremely respectful towards the artist.
Two of the authors of Sargent and the Sea, Richard Ormond
and Stephanie L Herdrich, are well known as cataloguers of
Sargent's work, and many of the paintings and drawings
illustrated in this volume have already been reproduced and
discussed in Ormond's Complete Paintings and Drawings,
Volume IV (co-written with Elaine Kilmurray and published by
Yale University Press, 2006) and in Herdrich's catalogue of
the watercolours and drawings (published by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2000). Herdrich's
essay on the Metropolitan Museum's scrapbook from the
1870s does, however, introduce some new material.
The case for Sargent as a marine painter is made very
convincingly. Richard Ormond shows how his family
background predisposed him to take an interest in the sea,
in the construction of boats and in the activities of sailors
and fisherfolk. Erica E. Hirshler and Stephanie Herdrich
document the drawings he made on his first transatlantic
crossing in 1876, which include dramatic studies of the
deck sloping at a sharp angle while mountainous seas
threaten to overwhelm the ship. The resulting paintings,
probably made in the studio, confirm Sargent's admiration
for Turner and for the Impressionists. This section includes
three recently discovered marine paintings which have not
been exhibited before. The heart of the book, however, lies
in Sarah Cash's essay on the two pictures, at the Corcoran
and Boston, of the oyster gatherers of Cancale. She shows
how carefully Sargent selected his titles and styles to suit
his exhibition venues, exhibiting the more finished work at
the Salon, while the smaller, sketchier version was
calculated to impress the younger, European-educated
American artists at the Society of American Artists.
Research on oyster fishing and consumption, both at
Cancale and in New York, indicates that Sargent was initially
disappointed when he found that he had come to Cancale
at the wrong season, but was able to capitalise on the craze
for oysters in New York. The women and children in his
paintings are 'oyster fishers' in that they live in Cancale and
spend much of their year harvesting oysters, but in the
actual paintings, they are simply going to collect fish from
sandpools left behind by the tide: shrimps, perhaps, or
240 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.2 2010
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mussels. Sarah Cash is able to reconstruct Sargent's
working practices in admirable depth: details from the
paintings are illustrated alongside preparatory drawings and
sketches, and superimposed outlines show that he used a
mechanical method of enlarging (or reducing) and
transferring outlines, probably a magic lantern since no
traces of grid lines or graphite underdrawing have been
found in either painting.
Modernism on Sea is a very different book, concerned
with the place of the seaside in cultural history rather than
with the minute details of an individual artist's practice. The
editors, Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris, argue that the
seaside has been important in twentieth-century British
culture, that there is a continuous tradition of seaside art,
and that there are unsung artistic centres, including
Margate, Brighton, and Bexhill, which deserve more
attention. The case is made most persuasively for
architecture, starting with the De La Warr Pavilion itself,
which is seen as one of a series of modern buildings by the
coast, which responded to the craze for fresh air and
sunshine, and took on many of the characteristics of the
ocean liner. As several contributors point out, Le Corbusier
explicitly singled out a ship's cabin as an example of a
good, economical design. Essays by Michael Bracewell,
Bruce Peter and Philip Dawson, and Fred Gray all contribute
to this picture of the seaside as a locus for functional and
streamlined buildings, and Frances Spalding shows that the
nautical style was also admired by John Piper, affecting his
collages of the 1930s. In other art forms, however, there
was a tension between the austerity of high modernism and
the emotional pull of the seaside, its associations with
gaiety on the one hand and melancholy on the other. As
Nicola Moorby shows, Brighton was the site of an
avant-garde exhibition in the winter of 1913-1914, but
Sickert's painting of pierrots on Brighton beach was
produced when he felt that the Cubism of Wyndham Lewis
had gone too far. Piper, similarly, made his seaside collages
when he had moved away from abstraction. Curiously, the
one example of thorough-going modernism in the visual arts
which was located at the seaside is mentioned only in
passing: this is, of course, the work of Ben Nicholson and
Barbara Hepworth at St Ives.
Many of the contributors to Modernism on Sea are literary
scholars. Deborah Parsons' essay on the Sitwells, William
May's piece on Stevie Smith, and Edwina Keown's on
Elizabeth Bowen, all show how writers drew on their
childhood experiences of seaside holidays. In each case, the
seaside has connotations which are far from modernist,
including the faded world of Edwardian grandeur and
Victorian complacency, associations with nostalgia and
national identity, and complex class relationships redolent of
an earlier age. Further essays by David Bradshaw on Virginia
Woolf, and Ben Morgan on Sylvia Plath, show how the
formlessness of the sea, its ability to wash everything away
with the tide, can seem analogous to the experimental
nature of their writing; but at the same time, the deep
emotions it evokes go beyond the bounds of the austere
modernism advocated by T.S. Eliot. There are competing

definitions of modernism here. For some of the contributors,
nostalgia and excess are all part of the modern seaside; for
others, these are in conflict with a more avant-garde vision
of austerity and abstraction. There is a distinction, too,
between the sociable world of the seaside holiday,
celebrated in many of the contributions, and the elemental
world of sand and water which figures in others.
Inevitably, the contributors to the volume find much in the
cultural milieu of the twentieth-century seaside that is not
modern. For the novelist and art critic Michael Bracewell, it
is characterised by 'an intense, endlessly renewing contract
with nostalgia' (p. 43); while the earliest seaside memories
of filmmaker Andrew Kötting were of 'old people shuffling
around with cups of tea, Rod Hull and his Emu, Brass
Bands, Toby jugs and winceyette tights... not modern1
(p. 45). David Bradshaw points out that, by the end of the
First World War, the seaside was associated with a
discredited, patriotic view of history, which made it less than
appealing to many modernist writers. Alan Powers' essay on
the background to the Aldeburgh Festival presents it as the
arrival of modernism, but it had its origins in Benjamin
Britten's reading of George Crabbe's poem, The Borough,
first published in 1810. On the other hand, Paul Rennie
shows effectively how the idea of the seaside as the ideal
modern space made it a suitable model for the Thames-side
walk of the Festival of Britain in 1951. Its camivalesque
egalitarianism also produced an 'art of excess' in films such
as Hiñóle Wakes (1927), discussed by Lara Feigel.
Some of the essays in Modernism on Sea are quite slight,
others are closely argued and scholarly, but all are readable
and thought-provoking. The collection closes with an
impressively interdisciplinary essay by Alexandra Harris which
draws on art, music, literature, and film to argue that the
ongoing battle between man and the elements at the seaside
breeds a tradition of ritual ordering, of semi-magic practices
that serve to define the limits between the human world and
uncontrollable nature - as if invented to hold back the tide.
This essay refers back to many of the writers and artists
covered by earlier chapters, but also introduces new
examples, including the seaside surrealism of Paul Nash,
Derek Jarman's garden at Dungeness, and Graham Swift's
1996 novel, Last Orders. It provides a fitting conclusion to a
stimulating and wide-ranging volume. Sargent and the Sea is
much more narrowly focused, but no less enjoyable, both as
a visual feast and as a thorough exploration of an important
episode in the history of marine painting.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcq021
National and Notional Spaces
Daria Santini
Peter Mclsaac, Museums of the Mind. German Modernity and the Dynamics
of Collecting (The Pennsylvania State University Press: University Park,
2007).
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Reviews
This study of the relationship between museum culture and
modern German literature begins with a discussion of the
opening passage of Peter Weiss's novel Die Ästhetik des
Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance, 1975-81). The
setting is the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, where a group of
young militant antifascists is standing in front of the
Pergamon Altar. In a famous example of ekphrastic prose,
Weiss describes the ancient frieze as the characters see it
and his sentences, which reproduce on the page the
movements of the statues and the fragmentation of the
marble, convey the spectacle of the great battle between
gods and giants in all its compelling dynamism. As Mclsaac
points out, 'Weiss's narrative makes the reader into [. . .] a
person who can challenge the myths constructed by the
museum display in order to find Herakles in the mind's eye'
(p. 5). The idea of the mythical hero as we see him in our
mind is a suggestive one. It is also an apt introduction to
the central premise of this book, since it evokes two
concepts of crucial importance for any examination of
the role of museal imagery in the literature of the
German-speaking world: the significance of 'Bildung' as the
cultivation of the self according to the neo-humanistic
tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
the existence of an internalised vision of external reality
which is comparable to the organised environment of a
museum space.
The theme of the presence of the museum as a 'cultural
paradigm' (p. 11) guides the author through a series of
literary texts that span from Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften
(Elective Affinities, 1809) to the work of the contemporary
poet and essayist Durs Grünbein. Mclsaac applies to
Germany a set of categories that has already been
employed to illustrate the links between visual and literary
culture in England and France. In his first chapter, he
acknowledges these antecedents1 and explains the
distinctive features of his own project:
What distinguishes my work from these allied approaches are
three related points: the German-speaking traditions I work on,
the time frame of my study (1800 to the present), and the
theoretical framework (the museum function) I develop to gain
access to inventoried consciousness in the age of the public
museum (p. 11).
The author is right to underline the peculiarity of the
German context, and his book is the first extensive study on
this subject. As his research shows, the discourse of
collecting and museum culture was central to the
construction of a German national identity in a way which
only partly resembles similar developments in the rest of
Europe and still reverberates today. As for the period on
which Mclsaac has chosen to concentrate, his main guides
are Goethe and Walter Benjamin, thanks to their
contributions in the fields of aesthetics and the cultural
history of collecting in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, respectively. In order to illustrate the theory
behind the idea of a modern philosophy of collecting, in his
introductory chapter, he refers not only to Benjamin but also
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.2 2010 241