Sussex Modern

Some may think of Sussex as simply a bucolic southern county, home to the sweeping Downs and country pursuits. Yet in the first half of the last century, this most lovely of landscapes was at the vanguard of avant-garde thinking and art – an unlikely cradle of both bohemianism and new thinking.

The point about British modernism – that flourishing of creativity from the 1910s to the 1950s – is that it never followed one single style or movement. Rather it co-opted new ways of seeing things, and resulted in works of art across varied genres and disciplines. The artists involved were not just rethinking what art could be and achieve, they were rethinking ways of living too. Remarkable, perhaps, that so much of the thinking and doing took place in that broad strip of southern England that runs from Chichester in the west to Eastbourne in the east.

A network of communities featuring leading painters, sculptors, writers, photographers, architects and patrons spent significant parts of their lives in Sussex. These “sets” were based at farmhouses such as Charleston, seven miles east of Lewes, home of Bloomsbury escapees Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and later on at Farley Farm House, near Chiddingly, occupied from 1949 by surrealist painter Roland Penrose and glamorous American photographer Lee Miller.

Close to Charleston was Monk’s House, the home of Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf. At the foot of the South Downs near Glynde was Furlongs, the shepherd’s cottage inhabited by designer, painter and educator Peggy Angus (after World War II she briefly taught art alongside Bell’s son Quentin at a girls’ school in Sussex). Furlongs provided the inspiration for the elegantly delicate paintings of Eric Ravilious, who spoke about the place as altering his whole outlook and way of painting, “because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious”. Nearer Chichester lay West Dean House, aristocratic family home of patron Edward James, and Monkton House, the adjoining Lutyens-designed hunting lodge, which both became showcases for surrealist art and furniture, most notably the sofa designed in the shape of Mae West’s lips by Salvador Dalí.

And that’s all before we even get to the county towns: Bexhill-on-Sea with its modernist architectural classic, the De La Warr Pavilion; Rye with its painters Paul Nash, Edward Burra and John Banting; Ditchling with the artistic and religious community formed around sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill. And Chichester, where Walter Hussey, Dean of the Cathedral, amassed a fine collection of contemporary art which he then donated to the city. This collection forms the basis of Pallant House, now one of the most important galleries for British art of this period.

So why did Sussex become such a magnet for these “moderns” and their supporters? “For some modernists, especially in the early part of the period, the move to Sussex was cast as both a retreat and a rebellion: a rejection of ways of life associated with the metropolis left behind,” says Dr Hope Wolf, curator of Sussex Modernism, a recent exhibition that explored the work of the artists of that time. But she makes clear that the show was not full of picturesque Sussex scenes. “There were modernists who barely made reference to Sussex at all in their work. They created enclaves for themselves, bringing influences from the city, Europe and non-Western cultures to their home.”

Vanessa Bell is one of the best-known of these, famed for her abstract works, and portraits of her sister Virginia Woolf and of Aldous Huxley. With fellow painter and sometime lover Duncan Grant and writer David “Bunny” Garnett (lover of both Grant and Bell) she set up house in a beautiful stretch of country at the foot of the South Downs. “It’s absolutely perfect I think,” she wrote of Charleston to Roger Fry shortly after their arrival in October 1916, in the middle of World War I. Grant and Garnett were both conscientious objectors and found nearby the farm work they needed in order to avoid military service.

Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, had met Fry in 1910 and helped him organise the first post-impressionist exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, at the Grafton Galleries in London – a landmark occasion in the history of British art. At the time, the bright landscapes, interiors and still lifes by Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat and Van Gogh were viewed by the public as debauched and provocative, and dismissed by conventional critics as messy and anarchic (when in fact structure and order were at their heart). The experimentation with colour and form they inspired set in motion the birth of British modernism. In the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1912, the British avant-garde artists of the time – including Grant, Bell, Gill and Wyndham Lewis – were invited to show alongside Matisse and Picasso, and the influence of these Continental masters was much in evidence.

The geometric patterning present in Grant’s poster for the 1912 exhibition anticipates the stylistic decoration of artefacts produced in the Omega Workshops, which Fry founded in London in 1913. The Workshops produced a range of objects for the home – textiles, ceramics, furniture – with bold, abstract designs. The blurring between art and decoration was carried into the decorative schemes at Charleston, where whole rooms and their contents were integrated as “art”; paintings appeared on screens and walls, abstract designs appeared as paintings.

The pond at Charleston farmhouse is possibly the setting for a summer scene of languidly posed male bathers – some naked – painted by Duncan Grant in 1920/21. In its colour tones and the application of “stippled” brushwork, Grant reveals his debt to the French pointillist technique of multiple dots, although Grant’s dots have become much larger and more like strokes. Beyond pure style, the homoerotic nature of the painting flags up another possible reason for the withdrawal of artistic bohemians to the countryside at a time when society (and the law) made clear its disapproval of those flouting conventions. Rural – or at least relatively isolated – areas enabled artists to live their lives in the way they wanted, and in the partnerships they desired, without drawing too much attention to themselves.

Eric Gill, living and working in nearby Ditchling, also led an unconventional life, if in a more extreme manner. Accusations of sexual aberrations including incest, abuse and bestiality have belatedly overshadowed his professional reputation as a sculptor and engraver
of note, but he was an important figure in the context of British art of this time. Eight of Gill’s sculptures had appeared in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, and the pared-down carving of his stone figures integrated well with the Bloomsbury artists and the French masters on show. The first sculpture by Gill that Roger Fry owned was rejected for fear that the presentation of the Virgin Mary as a sexual being might offend “a good many people’s susceptibilities”, but he commissioned another as a replacement.

In Ditchling, Gill set up home and a series of workshops providing space for stone carving and a press for printing designs and illustrations of religious scenes. Artists such as the Catholic painter and poet David Jones were attracted to this way of life, as were those in search of the lay religious community led by Gill as a tertiary of the order of St Dominic (Jones briefly became engaged to one of Gill’s daughters).

By the early 1930s, Gill had left Ditchling for Wales and the painters at Charleston had been eclipsed by younger artists such as Paul Nash. His depictions of Sussex have a darker, slightly menacing edge to them, and can perhaps be linked to his own experiences on the Western Front.

The dramatic perspectives and strange juxtapositions that appear in the views painted from Nash’s studio at Iden have been interpreted as statements of mourning: fallen trees as a symbol for the dead was common in the art and literature of World War I. Landscape at Iden from 1929 is unpeopled, distilled into a composition of forms, its disparate elements brought together as if in a nod to surrealism – a landscape so real that it looks unreal.

The years leading up to the World War II also saw an influx of artists and architects from the Continent escaping fascism. The German-
Jewish émigré Erich Mendelsohn and Russian-born Serge Chermayeff found a sympathetic supporter in the socialist Earl De La Warr, who commissioned the two architects to build the De La Warr Pavilion on the seafront at Bexhill in 1935. This construction of concrete and steel, with large windows and cantilevered balconies, has the clean lines and curves of classic modernist architecture, and is now celebrated as one of that decade’s most remarkable buildings. (Chermayeff found another admirer in Eric Gill, who discussed with him setting up an “Académie Européenne Méditerranée” – a school dedicated to the modern – which was never realised.)

Inside the De La Warr, the design included a curving staircase, chairs by Alvar Aalto and a mural by Paul Nash’s contemporary Edward Wadsworth, who had moved from London to Maresfield, near Lewes, in 1929. Wadsworth’s art is inspired by the sea and everything nautical: anchors, sails, flags and ships’ propellers. The inanimate objects are linked thematically but remain separate, a tension underpinning them in the manner of a surrealist composition, although Wadsworth never had any formal links with the surrealist movement in Britain.

At the other end of the county, collector and patron of the surrealists Edward James lived in his opulent family home, West Dean House. Having accused his dancer wife Tilly Losch of adultery with Prince Serge Obolensky (she countered this by accusing him of homosexuality) they had divorced, and in 1934 James left London for West Sussex where he attracted a number of surrealist visitors including Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. Dalí at the time was in dire financial straits, so James offered him a monthly salary for a year in return for everything he made. As a result, Monkton House, the hunting lodge on James’s estate, completely subverted the traditional English interior, creating a theatrical fantasy where anything became possible: a sofa resembling lipsticked lips, a telephone in the shape of a lobster…

Another Sussex resident, Roland Penrose, was instrumental in promoting surrealism in England. In 1936, he organised the first International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in London, which included work from James’s collection. Penrose and his wife, Lee Miller – an accomplished photographer, war reporter and model – invited the cream of artists from the continent to stay at their home in Chiddingly. The likes of Picasso, Miró, Ernst and Man Ray all visited and left their mark.

One of the keys to the flourishing of modernism in Sussex is that it was rarely parochial in outlook. The artists travelled widely and were engaged with developments happening on the Continent. The painter Edward Burra was born and lived most of his life in the Sussex countryside on a hill overlooking Rye, but he explored Europe and beyond, finding inspiration in the religious iconography of Mexico and the vibrant street life of New York’s Harlem, as did his friend and fellow Rye resident, the surrealist painter John Banting.

Burra’s Sussex-inspired landscapes are not presented as pretty rural ideals. There are dark, menacing skies, fishermen either bent
by hard work or inactively lurking (described as “uncomfortable presences” by Sussex-based art historian Norbert Lynton). In other Burra paintings, farm machinery lies abandoned and shrubs are blown by harsh winds. This is not an art to comfort and reassure. Like the skeletons of trees painted by Nash (Burra’s friend and neighbour), nature and humanity can refer to something darker and unsettling.

Intriguingly, the legacy of the Sussex moderns lives on. Coastal towns in the south of England are again being marketed as a hub of creativity for artists. The Folkestone Triennial attracts internationally renowned artists; the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne is an award-winning contemporary art museum, while Turner Contemporary has provided a focus for the regeneration of Margate. If celebrity artist Tracey Emin abandons London and settles back in her hometown, as she has indicated, maybe more will follow, as artists continue to rethink the ways in which they make art, and the ways in which they choose to live.

Sussex Modern
Sussex Modern is a partnership of nine galleries and museums in Sussex – including the De La Warr Pavilion, Farleys House and Gallery and Jerwood Gallery – that contributed to the Sussex Modernism exhibition at Two Temple Place earlier this year. sussexmodern.org.uk

Eric Gill: The Body
An exhibition of the work of the sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker, runs until 3 September at the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft. ditchlingmuseumartcraft.org.uk

Pallant House Gallery
Home to one of the best collections of 20th-century British art in the UK, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester holds works by a number of Sussex artists in its permanent collection, including Ben Nicholson and Edward Burra. pallant.org.uk

Charleston House
The former home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Charleston, near Lewes, is open to the public from Wednesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays until 29 October. charleston.org.uk

Ravilious & Co:
The Pattern of Friendship
An exhibition focused on the working collaborations between Eric Ravilious and artists such as Paul Nash and Peggy Angus is at Eastbourne’s Towner Art Gallery until 17 September. townereastbourne.org.uk

This article is taken from the Goodwood magazine, Summer 2017 issue