Modern Painters

At the risk of sounding like that indefatigable man about town Jeffrey Archer, I have been to see this exhibition, which has been sniffily, if not witheringly, received by the critics, who seem to be embarrassed by the whole Camden Town Group phenomenon. Well, they have a point, in as much as the Group does ultimately boil down to Sickert (a great English painter) and the rest (fitfully brilliant, but mostly playing with a Continental modernism they couldn't make their own).
One of the things that occurred to me, looking around what is actually a fascinating exhibition (for all its shortage of really really good paintings by anyone other than Sickert), was that London is peculiarly resistant to being painted. Whereas Paris virtually throws herself onto the canvas crying 'Paint Me!', London is an odd, rebarbative prospect, driving painters out to the suburbs and into edgy, marginal situations to find a subject that will really work. Even the best of painters have generally been unconvincing when it comes to London itself - the centre, the capital. Perhaps this is because London really doesn't have a centre or a single identity - as has often been remarked, it has the nature more of a string of villages than a city.
In the grimy, sooty, wanly lit suburbs of north London, the Camden Town Group certainly found their subject(s) - more convincingly than in their city centre paintings, which seem to be exercises in style. Continental modernism and London never made for a convincing fit - the various modernist tropes seem applied, not assimilated. What the Tate Britain exhibition does demonstrate though (even if the exposition makes heavy weather of it) is that Edwardian England was a darker, edgier and nervier place than might have been expected. It is another light on what seems to me (and, I'm pretty sure, to Bryan) an endlessly fascinating period, in which, in so many ways, we achieved some kind of optimal (if, of course, hugely flawed and socially unjust) model of what high civilisation could be. And then, of course, lost it all.