Orage and his friends had made a number of attempts to found a forward thinking arts organisation in the city of Leeds, then an important manufacturing city. The Leeds Arts Club, set up in 1903, was an organisation that mixed radical socialist and anarchist politics with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, SuffragetteFeminism, the spiritualism of the Theosophical Society and modernist art and poetry. It had close associations with the Independent Labour Party, the co-operative movement and the early Fabian Society. At its weekly meetings, members discussed the connections between art, spiritualism, philosophy and politics.[2] The guiding ethos was a kind of existential experimenting dictated by aesthetic concerns where nothing was banned from a moral perspective.[3]
The Club met in rooms on the first floor of Leeds Permanent Building Society on the corner of Park Lane, now Headrow, and Calverley Street.[4] Members included a large number of teachers, many of them women, journalists, architects, artists, photographers, typesetters, printers, clergymen and a few university lecturers.[5]
Orage actively encouraged women members, such as the suffragette and radical editor Mary Gawthorpe, to participate in debates. Gawthorpe describes in her autobiography speakers such as Beatrice Farr, and how the debates led her to appreciate women's experience, such as her friend Ethel Snowden, as well as pointing out the role of Alfred's wife Jean Orage, a textile artist, in challenging Orage to develop his theories and ideas.[6] The pioneer socialist and feminist campaigner, novelist and journalist, Isabella Ford was one of the first supporters of the Club, served as an early committee member and lectured there on 'Women and the State' in 1905, returning to give a lecture in 1907 on 'Women's place in future progress' in the midst of her local and national work on women's suffrage.[7]
Members like Tom Heron, father of Patrick Heron, set up enlightened cooperative businesses, he later set up Cresta Silks following Guild Socialism ideas.[3] The painter William Rothenstein and his brother Charles championed French Impressionist painting, lending examples to exhibitions held at the Club.[8]
In 1906 Orage and Jackson left Leeds and moved to London to edit the hugely influential cultural and political journal The New Age. Albert Wheatley Waddington, an architect and former secretary of Edward Carpenter's Sheffield Socialist Society, and Annie Kennedy, a schoolteacher and Jean Orage's cousin, acted as secretary and assistant secretary, developing links with the University of Leeds.[9] The Club continued to host speakers, as well as arranging summer excursions, a life-drawing group, a musical committee, a book group and lending library.[10] In February 1908, the Club moved to 8 Blenheim Terrace, Woodhouse Lane, a 3 storey house near to the University, despite the fact that members were still largely non-university women and men.[11]
In April 1908, the actress and social activist Millicent Murby lectured on George Bernard Shaw and in December 1908, the actress Florence Farr lectured on 'The Theatre and the Arts', reflecting the debates around the role of theatre in cultural renewal that dominated the Club in these years.[12]William Rothenstein lectured on 'The Possibilities of the Fine Arts in February 1908 advocating the need to develop civic collections in relation to provincial schools of art.[13] Many musical performances took place from 1908 on, including by Misses Beecroft and Appleyard, Miss Lily Simms and a talk on 'Musical Healthy Mindedness' by Kate Whitehead, editor of Musical World.[14]
Between 1909 and 1911, national figures like G. K. Chesterton, Yeats and Edward Carpenter lectured at the Club where theatre, religion, politics and ecological issues dominated, photographs by Frank Sutcliffe and Frederick Evans were exhibited.[15] In 1911, the pioneering Elizabeth Bessle Comedy Company gave three performances.[16]
1911–1923
In 1911 and 1912, the appointments of Michael Sadler as the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds and Frank Rutter as director of the Leeds Art Gallery changed the nature of the Club. Under their leadership the Arts Club maintained its interest in the relationship between radical politics, spiritualism and art, but this was expanded to encompass early psychoanalysis and, most significantly Post-Impressionist and abstract art.[17]
Sadler owned one of the largest collections of Post-Impressionist art in Britain, displayed in his house in Headingley, and had connections to Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter Group.[18] Sadler's son had bought Kandinsky's woodcuts at an exhibition in 1911 organised by Rutter.[19] Using his personal links with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Sadler built up a remarkable collection of expressionist and abstract expressionist art at a time when such art was either unknown or dismissed in London, even by well-known promoters of modernism such as Roger Fry. Most notable in his collection was Kandinsky's abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII, of 1912,[20] which was in Leeds and on display at the Leeds Arts Club in 1913. He also owned Paul Gauguin's celebrated work "The Vision After the Sermon". According to Patrick Heron, Kandinsky even visited the Arts Club in Leeds before the First World War.[21]
Rutter initially had plans to create a modern art collection at the Leeds City Art Gallery, but had been frustrated in this aim by "boorish" local councillors.[22] He co-founded the Leeds Art Collections Fund with Sadler, to help acquisitions and shows, among them, the seminal show in June 1913 of Post-Impressionism held at the Arts Club, with works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Serusier, Kandinsky, Picasso, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Anne Estelle Rice, Ethel Wright and others, lent by Sadler, Rutter and A. M. Daniel, the Lord Mayor of Scarborough.[23] The discussions there about contemporary art, and the presence of Rutter, had a significant influence on the thinking of Herbert Read (1893–1968), who turned 20 in December 1913.[24]
Legacy
The influence of art the Arts Club extended into later institutions in London. When Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson left Leeds in 1906 they moved to London and began editing the weekly cultural and political journal The New Age. As Tom Steele has argued, this was a self-conscious attempt to expand the reach of the philosophy developed at the Leeds Arts Club to a national audience. Under Orage and Jackson The New Age became, in Steele's words, 'the most influential journal of literature and politics in the country, with regular articles from established writers like G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc and Arnold Bennett, reviewing from Ezra Pound and Herbert Read, art criticism and theory from T.E. Hulme and illustrations from Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and others. It was the cradle of the modern avant-garde in Britain.' A number of these writers had given lectures at the Leeds Arts Club previously – or, like Read, were members – and Steele's argument is that the lively cultural debates that took place at the Leeds Arts Club under Orage and Jackson were effectively continued in the pages of The New Age.[25]
The Leeds Arts Club also became the model for Alfred Orage to establish a new arts club in 1906, this time in London, under the name of the Fabian Arts Group. As well as emulating the cultural, philosophical and political predilections of the Leeds Arts Club, the Fabian Arts Group was an attempt by Orage and others to influence the political outlook of the early Labour Party through one of its founding organisations, the Fabian Society.[25]
A third legacy of the Leeds Arts Club occurred in London in 1947, after the Second World War, when former Leeds Arts Club member, Herbert Read co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts, or ICA, again directly emulating the model, combining avant-garde culture, philosophical discussion and political mission, established by Orage and Jackson when they established the Leeds Arts Club.[26]
The Leeds Arts Club was also the starting point for the community theatre project that eventually grew to become the West Yorkshire Playhouse. This began in 1907 as an offshoot of the Leeds Arts Club, called the Leeds Playgoers' Society, and organised both performances of modern plays by writers such as Ibsen, Shaw and Chekov, and lectures on drama, which continued to be held in collaboration with the Leeds Arts Club.[27] This later evolved into the Leeds Playhouse, the forerunner to the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
THE LEEDS ART CLUB A highly influential forum for the avant-garde in politics, philosophy, art and literature met here from 1908. Ground-breaking exhibitions included the 1913 Post-Impressionist show and Cubist and Futurist Art in 1914. Famous speakers included G.B. Shaw and W.B. Yeats. 1903–1923[28][29]
It has been argued by the art historian Michael Paraskos that the Leeds Arts Club was the closest England came to a genuine expressionist art movement. This is evidenced partly by the Arts Club's, artistic, philosophical and political interests, which mirror those seen in German expressionist art groups of the time, and through its direct links to Kandinsky in Germany. It also produced its own expressionist artists, including Jacob Kramer and Bruce Turner.[30]
It also was the seed ground from which the anarchist poet, art critic and art theorist Herbert Read emerged, and Read's basic dialectical theory of art, which became one of the main methods to understand modernism between the 1930s and 1960s, has its roots in the understanding of art expounded at the Leeds Arts Club.[31]
Notes and references
1 2 Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.1.
↑ Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923 (Mitcham, Orage Press, 2009) 65f and passim
1 2 Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.2.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.65.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.4.
↑ Gawthorpe, Mary (1962). Up Hill to Holloway. Michigan. pp.194–196.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. pp.33, 78–79, 95, 139–141.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.6.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. pp.37–38, 136.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club. The Orage Press. p.136.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.144.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. pp.148–49.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.152.
↑ Steele, Tom (1909). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.154.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.157.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.165.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. pp.177–79.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.7.
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. p.179.
↑ Michael Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 52
↑ see Heron interview in B. Read and D. Thistlewood, Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art, London 1993
↑ Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923 (Mitcham, Orage Press, 2009) 227
↑ Steele, Tom (2009). Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. The Orage Press. pp.189–191.
↑ Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923 (Mitcham, Orage Press, 2009) 218f
1 2 Tom Steele, 'From Gentleman to Superman: Alfred Orage and Aristocratic Socialism' in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (eds.), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) p.112
↑ Nannette Aldred, 'A sufficient Flow of Vital Ideas: Herbert Read and the Flow of Ideas from the Leeds Arts Club to the ICA' in Michael Paraskos (ed.) Re-Reading Read: New Views on Herbert Read (London: Freedom Press, 2008) p.70
↑ The Stage Yearbook 1918 (London: The Stage Publications, 1918) p.75; Andrew Thacker, 'That Trouble: Regional Modernism and Little Magazines' in Neal Alexander (ed.), Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013) p.27
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odesa, where he graduated from Odesa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat —Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30.
Alfred Richard Orage was a British influential figure in socialist politics and modernist culture, now best known for editing the magazine The New Age before the First World War. While he was working as a schoolteacher in Leeds he pursued various interests, including Plato, the Independent Labour Party and theosophy. In 1900 he met Holbrook Jackson and three years later they co-founded the Leeds Arts Club, which became a centre of modernist culture in Britain. After 1924, Orage went to France to work with George Gurdjieff and was then sent to the United States by Gurdjieff to raise funds and lecture. He translated several of Gurdjieff's works.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar.
Stass Paraskos was an artist from Cyprus, although much of his life was spent teaching and working in England.
Sir Herbert Edward Read, was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
Anarchism has long had an association with the arts, particularly with visual art, music and literature. This can be dated back to the start of anarchism as a named political concept, and the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on the French realist painter Gustave Courbet. In an essay on Courbet of 1857 Proudhon had set out a principle for art, which he saw in the work of Courbet, that it should show the real lives of the working classes and the injustices working people face at the hands of the bourgeoisie.
George Holbrook Jackson was a British journalist, writer and publisher. He was recognised as one of the leading bibliophiles of his time.
The New Age was a British weekly magazine (1894–1938), inspired by Fabian socialism, and credited as a major influence on literature and the arts during its heyday from 1907 to 1922, when it was edited by Alfred Richard Orage. It published work by many of the chief political commentators of the day, such as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and Arnold Bennett.
Michael Sadleir, born Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler, was a British publisher, novelist, book collector, and bibliographer.
Jacob Kramer was a Russian Empire-born painter who spent all of his working life in England.
The Leeds Art Fund (LAF), formerly the Leeds Art Collections Fund (LACF) is one of Britain's oldest supporting art gallery "friends" organisations. It was founded in Leeds on 11 November 1912 by Frank Rutter, who was the newly appointed curator of Leeds Art Gallery at the time, with the support of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, Michael Sadler. The LACF was established to encourage the visual arts in Leeds and, most importantly, to provide a source of funding that was independent of the municipality for the purchase of contemporary and historic works of art and design for the people of Leeds. Other founding members and sponsors included Sydney Kitson (1871–1937), a well-known local architect and collector, and Frank Harris Fulford, director of the family firm C. E. Fulford Limited, which manufactured Bile Beans.
Sir Michael Ernest Sadler was an English historian, educationalist and university administrator. He worked at Victoria University of Manchester and was the vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds. He was also a champion of the English public school system.
The "Sonderbund" — as it is normally called; its complete name being Sonderbund westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler, and also known as Sonderbund group — was a "special union" of artists and art lovers, established 1909 in Düsseldorf and dissolved in 1916. In its first years, the Sonderbund mounted some landmark exhibitions, successfully introducing French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern Art to the western parts of Germany.
Francis Vane Phipson Rutter was a British art critic, curator and activist.
Mary Eleanor Gawthorpe was an English suffragette, socialist, trade unionist and editor. She was described by Rebecca West as "a merry militant saint".
Michael Paraskos, FHEA, FRSA is a novelist, lecturer and writer on art. He has written several non-fiction and fiction books and essays, and articles on art, literature, culture and politics for various publications, including Art Review, The Epoch Times, The Guardian newspaper and The Spectator magazine. In the past he has reviewed art exhibitions for BBC radio, curated exhibitions, and taught in universities and colleges in Britain and elsewhere. He has a particular focus on modern art, having published books on the art theorist Herbert Read, and he is also known for his theories connecting anarchism and modern art. He lives in West Norwood in south London.
Isabella Ormston Ford was an English social reformer, suffragist and writer. She became a public speaker and wrote pamphlets on issues related to socialism, feminism and worker's rights. After becoming concerned with the rights of female mill workers at an early age, Ford became involved with trade union organisation in the 1880s. A member of the National Administrative Council of the Independent Labour Party, she was the first woman to speak at a Labour Representation Committee conference.
The Allied Artists Association (AAA) was an art exhibiting society based in London in the early 20th century.
Leeds is known for its culture in the fields of art, architecture, music, sport, film and television. As the largest city in Yorkshire, Leeds is a centre of Yorkshire's contemporary culture and is the base for Yorkshire's television and regional newspapers.
The Stass Paraskos obscenity trial was a notorious court case held in the northern English city of Leeds in 1966 involving an exhibition of paintings by the Cyprus-born British artist, Stass Paraskos.
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