Ordinary art

IN 1911, 16 painters founded the exhibition society The Camden Town Group, named after the area of London in which many of them lived or worked.

Although its life was brief - it only held three exhibitions and was defunct by 1913 - its name continued to denote a tendency within Edwardian art which was realist but which adopted French modernist styles.

Walter Sickert, the group's driving force, had long acted as a bridge between French art and its more staid British counterpart. Close to Degas since the 1880s, he had followed Baudelaire's call for artists to find poetic beauty in contemporary life.

This modern beauty was to be found, above all, in the then fast-expanding city.

As fluid with pen as brush, Sickert wrote in 1910: "The more our art is serious, the more it will tend to avoid the drawing room and stick to the kitchen."

Like many realists, from Caravaggio to Courbet, the group depicted life as they found it, in its variety, ordinariness and contrariness. Unlike the fashionable painters of their day, they refused to avert their eyes from the dingy or the familiar.
We see kitchens, markets, lodging houses, Tube stations and modest tea rooms. We encounter the unassuming, realistic gaze of the charladies, shop assistants or clerks who worked in them or used them.

Unidealised nudes occupy seedy rooms furnished with iron bedsteads, none too clean sheets and unadorned chamber pots. At the musical hall, we join those in the gallery, not those in the stalls.

Yet the group did not seek to moralise or proselytise. Indeed, the lack of narrative was partly what baffled their audience, which had been reared on the sentimental didacticism of the Victorian predecessors which the group rejected.

They had no single style. Sickert mostly favoured a dark palette dominated by earth colours. His modernity consisted in the odd viewpoints informed by photographic images and the use of fluid, visible brushwork with which to echo the fast-moving modern experience.

The others adopted aspects of French post-impressionism. Embracing van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat's vivid, non-naturalistic colour, flattening of space and shape, bold outlining of form, simplification of tonal contrast and visible, broken brushwork, they conveyed the modern beauty to be discovered in the mundane.

"The artist is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses," wrote Sickert in 1914.

Even Harold Gilman, who proudly professed his socialist beliefs, avoided overt social comment. Nevertheless, like van Gogh, his non-patronising depictions of working-class people can be interpreted as an affirmation of a psychological depth and complexity of character in his sitters which had hitherto been commonly accorded only to portraits of the ruling class.

The group was not radically avant-garde. Unlike contemporary Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists and Abstractionists, they avoided the fragmentation or loss of contact with the subject implied by Cezanne's late works.

Yet most of the public would have agreed with the contemporary review titled "Art Anarchists," which warned that their work "looks as if a naive child has run amok with a box of crayons."

They found a middle ground between cutting-edge experimentation and the traditional illusionism which still reigned in most Western art. They concentrated on producing well-crafted pictures which explored the potential of colour, form and line without losing touch with the material world.

For example, Gilman composed An Eating House with horizontals and verticals as rigorously as any abstract painting. Yet, since these describe the closely packed, pew-like cubicles, chalk board, wooden panels and kitchen doorway of the establishment, the rectangular shapes are visually satisfying in themselves, but they also convey the establishment's intimate, almost claustrophobic ambience.

The use of impastoed paint and singing colour - salmon pinks, ochres, yellows, reds, greens and mauve - communicate a pleasure in pattern, colour and texture while also suggesting the conviviality of the dining room.

The curating of this exhibition is exemplary. Underpinned by first-class scholarship, it manages to be informative without being either overdidactic or overpopulist.

By focusing on the core members of the group - Sickert, Gilman, Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan - it avoids information overload. The works are hung with plenty of space between them and organised around aptly selected themes so that we gradually familiarise ourselves with each of these artists' works while also acquiring an understanding of the era.

Contemporary photographs, posters, post cards, novels, film and sound recordings provide sociopolitical and cultural context so that we leave the exhibition having understood the paintings but also the preoccupations which defined and formed the painters and their public.

It is a pity that this fascinating documentation is excluded from the catalogue, which is otherwise excellent.

The experience of viewing the exhibition echoes perfectly the measured pleasure with which the Camden painters responded to their world.

Shows until May 5, priced £9/£7 concessions. For more information phone (020) 7887-8888.