An Extraordinary Outbreak of Talent – The Royal College of Art in the 1920s.

Wednesday 7st July 2000 words

The Royal College of Art was originally founded in 1837 as a school of

industrial design. In 1852 it moved from its original home in Somerset House
to Marlborough House and was renamed the Central School of Practical Art.
In 1863 it moved to new buildings in Exhibition Road but it was not until 1896
that it was renamed the Royal College of Art by Queen Victoria.

The first years of the 20th century for the London art world were largely a
period of stagnation: The Victorian’s continued, portraiture focussed on
aristocratic elegance, Pre-Raphaelite ideas and sentimental subject matter
still held value. Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-
Impressionists’ at the Grafton Galleries, introduced to some the continental
developments across the channel but sharply divided opinion. While a few felt
the work was evidence of ‘the existence of a widespread plot to destroy the
whole fabric of European painting’, those that were inspired by what they saw
formed the vanguard of modern painting in this country and also largely came
from 2 generations of Slade School of Art graduates, including David
Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Nevinson, to name just three. The important thing
was that the seal had been broken, and now young artists looked to what was
happening in Paris with Braque and Picasso’s cubism experiments or followed
the Italian Futurists’ drive for change. The three years before the First World
War were a time of dramatic creative evolution, and though the Inter-war
years saw a widespread return by even the young modernists to traditional
representation and subject matter and a temporary abandonment of the drive
towards abstraction, the way artists thought about their work had irrevocably
changed.

The work of the of young artists during the 1920s particularly in the first half of
the decade, was largely not concerned with abstraction that had been
pioneered ten years earlier and was for more likely to be inspired by the newly
rediscovered renaissance artist Piero della Francesca than Fillipo Marinetti’s
Futurist manifesto. The influence of critics such as Roger Fry, who’s notion of
art was whether the ‘the emotional elements of design’ had been discovered,
and the example of Post-Impressionists such as Gauguin and Cezanne had
ensured that formalism remained an integral component of the new
representation – that the primary subject of a still life, landscape or portrait
was the relationships of the colours, lines and forms within the. The modernist
urge in British art was on hold with the previous generation so disrupted by
the war and the momentum towards abstraction abated, albeit temporarily.

The principal of the Royal College of Art at this time was William Rothenstein,
who had studied at the Slade School of Art during the first of two ‘crises of
brilliance’, as Tonks had put it in the era of Augusts John and Wyndham
Lewis, and brought with him some of the atmosphere to the RCA, surrounding
it with these characters or bringing them in as tutors, as he did with Paul
Nash.

William Rothenstein’s (1872-1945) art education had already introduced him

to some of the developments which hit London with such effect in 1910. He
had studied under Alphonse Legros at the Slade in 1895 and then went to
Paris where he became friends with Whistler and Lautrec and also knew
Charles Conder, the caricaturist Phil May, and Walter Sickert, with whom he
was one of the original members of his Fitzroy Street Group in 1907. His 1906
his picture of Jews Mourning in a Synagogue was presented to the Tate and
Roger Fry commented that it shamed ‘by it’s gravity of design, it’s clear
realisation of form, the high plausabilities and clever sentimentalities with
which it is surrounded.’ But, on the whole, Rothenstein’s work remained
relatively conservative and much of his output was landscapes, domestic
interiors and portraits of the artists and intellectuals of his day. One of his
more intriguing pictures is The Dolls House, where his wife sits on the stairs
by a moody and charismatic Augustus John, Rothenstein’s close friend. The
title, from Ibsen, hints at domestic tension – even if it is just staged. As
Principal of the RCA he particularly encouraged the revival of mural painting
as public art and following his Slade training reinforced the role of life-drawing.
Ever since Alphonse Legros had been made the Slade’s first professor of
drawing, the school had been associated with the French method of teaching.
Students were taught to draw from the model with a swift, decisive use of line.
The staff of Alphonse Legros, and later Philip Wilson Steer, Henry Tonks,
Fred Brown and Walter Russell heavily influenced the succeeding generation
of artists, including later RCA tutors Rothenstein and Nash. The idea that
skilled life drawing was the bedrock of artistic thought underpinned the tuition
that artists received at the Royal College, even if the likes Edward Bawden
and Stanley Lewis skipped much of it to do their own work!

An artist on whom Rothenstein and the Royal College had a big impact was
Cyril Mahoney(1903-1968)- It even changed his name when his fellow-
student, Barnett Freedman, re-christened him Charlie and the name stuck for
the rest of his career. He attended the RCA from 1922-6 after a period at
Beckenham School of Art. In the catalogue to an exhibition of his work his
daughter writes about the artist’s time at the Royal College under William
Rothenstein:
Under Sir William Rothenstein my father’s love of drawing flourished.
He came to see life drawing as the most challenging of exercises for
the student, for if you could draw the human body, you could draw
anything. Drawing in turn he believed to be a vital basic skill which
underpinned other disciplines and which would be of use whether an
artist worked figuratively or not.

She also gives us a glimpse of what life was like for the students, and the
atmosphere that Rothenstein created at the college at this time:
He and Lady Rothenstein frequently invited students to their home,
where leading figures in the art world might be met socially, where
conversation was stimulating, and books could be borrowed. Sir
William assisted students in finding commissions and outlets for there
work. Scholarships at that time were very small, and considerable
financial hardship was common among the students, with those
temporarily better off loaning money to friends for such necessities as
 rent, fares, and decent clothes for interviews. Charles was commonly
assumed to live on a diet of tea and treacle.

Mahoney went to teach at Thanet School of Art after leaving the college but
wasn’t happy so far removed from the creative circle he had been a part of
and gratefully took up a post as Visiting Painting Tutor and returned to the
Royal College in 1928. That year he also was commissioned to paint murals
for Morley College with his friends Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. The
commission came about after Rex Whistler then at the Royal Academy
School was commissioned to paint a mural for the Tate Restaurant.
Rothenstein wanted a similar commission for a Royal College student
persuaded Sir Joseph Duveen to commission a set of murals for Morley
Working Men’s College Lambeth. Mahoney pictured the Pleasures of Life as a
backdrop for the stage while Bawden and Ravilious filled the refectory with
fantasy images from Shakespeare, mythology, punch and Judy and even a
doll’s house. The murals were very well received but unfortunately were
destroyed during World War II. The work led to further murals: at Brockley
School, Kent, with Evelyn Dunbar; and at Campion Hall Lady Chapel, Oxford.
His oil paintings are frequently of a religious nature. He was a skilled botanist,
and many of his drawings depict his garden. These themes are combined in
pictures such as Adam and Eve in the Garden.

Early on, Mahoney established a reputation as a conscientious teacher was

noted there for his concern for academic discipline. He stayed until 1953
when he moved to the Byam Shaw School of Art having been the Senior
Painting Tutor since 1948. Mahoney is now increasingly recognised as an
influential figure alongside his now better-known contemporaries, Edward
Bawden and Eric Ravilious.

When Bawden and Ravilious joined the Design School of the Royal College in
1921, they had entered a school very much considered the lesser partner to
the painting school of the Royal College - not least of all by the college
principle William Rothenstein. The college had been established to improve
the quality of industrial design, but its focus was painters heavily trained in
figure drawing and the importance of public murals. The ‘designers’ who
hadn’t required a drawing examination to get in, mixed with the sub-standard
painting applicants who having failed Rothenstein’s drawing exam were
‘kicked into the design school’, but there they found could much do what they
liked unlike the compared to the ‘elect’ of the painting school, as Douglas
Percy Bliss observed, with there solid diet of figure drawing.

They also had access to Paul Nash had been appointed by Rothenstein to
work in the Design School. Bawden and Ravilious were both big admirers of
his work and there approach to watercolour owes much to Nash’s technique.
Nash was also an advocate of wood-engraving, which Ravilious took up with
strong strong effect. It was Nash who coined the phrase ‘an extraordinary
outbreak of talent’ about Bawden and Ravilious, and he provided a link to the
Curwen press which played such an important role in the development of
Edward Bawden, initially with book design, but also too Eric Ravilious and
Barnet Freedman.

Moore & Hepworth

When Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth came to London in 1921 to start
scholarships at the Royal College, they arrived at a time when non-
European sculpture was just beginning to be taken seriously in artistic
circles. There had been a chapter in Roger Fry’s 1920 book Vision and
Design on ancient American art, and exhibitions at the Chelsea Book Club
in 1920 and at the Goupil Gallery in 1921. The collections at the British
Museum and the Hornimann Museum also provided a valuable resource to
those that that found beauty and inspiration these forms, so different from
the Greco-Roman tradition that was still dominant.

Back in Leeds Moore had devoured Fry’s book and already had contact with
African carvings and the European avant garde’s responses to non-
European sources when Sir Michael Sadler, the Principal of Leeds
University’s and holder of one of the finest collections of art in the country
took the young sculptor under his wing. Hepworth, five years younger than
Moore, and as a 16 year old female sculptor not taken so seriously had not
benefited from such favouritism. But they both arrived with certain ideas
about carving directly and truth to materials.

Hepworth and Moore had provoked the spontaneous and generous interest
of Rothenstein and both young artists were regulars at the ‘at homes’ that
Mahoney’s daughter spoke of. It may have been through these that they
came into contact with the former Tate man H. S. Ede who was looking after
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s work after the talented sculptor had died during the
First World War and whose work had undoubted influence on their early
work.. Ede was only to keen to show his work to all interested and was
through him that Gaudier’s reputation maintained. Rothenstein introduced
Moore to his brother, Charles Rutherston who collected works by Jacob
Epstein and Frank Dobson as well as Chinese, African, Siberian and
Egyptian works. Rutherston bought two of Moore’s early carvings and
pieces such as relief head show how these influences were taking shape in
his private work he began to keet separate from his Royal College diploma
work.

While the social atmosphere around them, the ideas conversed about, and
the art world contacts they made were extremely valuable to their
development, the teaching on the whole was pretty conservative. The
professor of sculpture was a good example of this. A Royal Academician to
his fingertips, Derwent Wood, was of the ‘old school’. One task he set Moore
was to create an exact copy of a 15th century marble relief of the Virgin with
Child at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which shared the building with the
college. The method he proscribed was that of plaster moulding which
would then be ‘pointed’. This was process was based on the Victorian
standard that saw the creative endeavour at the modelling stage and the
copying in marble as ‘mere craft’ for the assistants. Moore wanted to carve
directly and had an, if not sympathetic ear, than at least a pliable one in
carving tutor Barry Hart, whom he persuaded to let him carve the piece
imitating even the marks of a pointing machine in order to deceive Wood.
If in Hart they had some to support for their almost moralistic belief in the
integrity of carving, in Leon Underwood they had another forward thinking
influence. Although he was actually the drawing tutor, Underwood, was also
a sculptor and was passionate about Mexican sculpture, which resonated
with Moore very strongly. He felt there was a connection with the 11th
century stone carvings on churches back in Yorkshire and that Mexican
carving was just so very ‘right’.

1924 brought the end of Moore’s diploma, but not the end of his time at the
Royal College. Derwent Wood also left and Rothenstein asked Moore to
‘look after’ the sculpture school until a permanent replacement could be
found. Ernest Cole was to become the new professor of sculpture but Moore
stayed on as his assistant for the next 7 years before moving on to Chelsea
School of Art.

Hepworth was runner-up to John Skeaping for the 1924 Prix de Rome, but
travelled to Florence on a West Riding Travel Scholarship where she
married Skeaping and immersed herself in the cool modelled figures of early
renaissance masters and then newly re-discovered masters Pierro della
Francesca and Masaccio. She was so busy just taking everything in, she
didn’t produce any of her own work and the scholarship board decided that
they would never again offer a woman a scholarship. But Hepworth returned
to England and entered a period of work that although initially figurative, with
sculptures of doves, a mother and child and her new born son, developed
through working experimenting with Skeaping and later Ben Nicholson and
went far further than Moore was to go, with Pierced Form of 1931 allowing
her work grow from an emotional response to pure shape, form and
relationships in space.

While these are by no means the only important artists to have gone to the
Royal College, with John Piper the most notably absentee. However, these
most clearly show the teaching in and the atmosphere around the Royal
College of Art in the 1920s.