The Avant-Garde in Interwar England (review)

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground. Michael Saler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. $39.95.

It is modernist subject matter par excellence. Each day, countless passengers on the Circle or the District lines exit the London Underground at the St. James Park stop, resurface through the station, and scatter into the streets near Westminster, passing countless others moving in the opposite direction. More often than not, both groups pass through the station, oblivious to the space they exit and enter and to the building above them, rehearsing the flux of modern, urban living so often excoriated by modernist writers like T. S. Eliot:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.¹

Yet if this particular architectural space fails to arrest the travelers who pass through it--fails to wake the zombies of modernity, so to speak--then, this time, we must fault one of modernism's aesthetic enterprises and not the cultural impetus of modernity, for this space--"55 Broadway," the headquarters of London Transport--is one of the enduring results of a sustained experiment conducted in England in the 1920s and 1930s to link aesthetic modernism with practical utility and public works, an experiment that Michael Saler labels "medieval modernism."

Commissioned to be London's tallest office building, "55 Broadway" was designed by Charles Holden and built between 1927 and 1929. It was the centerpiece of the interwar renovations to the Underground led by Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Underground, chairman of the Design and Industries Association and general impresario of the visual arts, and his stable of modernist designers, poster artists, and architects, including, among others, Holden, Eric Gill, Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Edward Wadsworth, and Edward Johnston. Seen from above, the building is laid out as a cross superimposed on a triangular block of street-level offices and shops superimposed on the railway itself, which lies only meters below. From the street, its transepts of British limestone rise like intersecting ziggurats reaching skyward, counterbalancing the formless, subterranean transportation network penetrating ever more expansively below the surface. Jacob Epstein was commissioned to carve sculptures directly on the building's stone facade and created two massive, controversially primitivist pietas, Day and Night. The building typifies the broader, programmatic tendencies of medieval modernism that were active in interwar England. Pick and his colleagues, who are the focus of Saler's study, saw the Underground as "the modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral, an integrated work of art that would be a joy to both makers and users" and thus serve as an objective, unifying correlative for modern society (92). Analyzing their publicity and polemics, Saler shows how the agents of this strand of modernism--who included Herbert Read and William Rothenstein--worked tirelessly both to integrate and ignore many of the common antagonisms that have come to structure the standard accounts of modernism: formalism and functionalism, fine art and design, Little England and the London metropolis, so-called permanent spiritual values and the secular habits of consumption, high culture and corporate capitalism.

The medieval modernist hybrid of contemporary aesthetic innovation, polemical revaluation, social-democratic populism, and Arts and Crafts ideology testifies to the persistent influences of William Morris and John Ruskin in public discourse about culture well into the twentieth century. "Their mission to democratize art and aestheticize civilization," Saler writes,

extended from large architectural and transportation schemes to the smallest symbolic details--even the foundation stones for the new Underground headquarters were laid by "the people," bearing chiseled inscriptions such as "laid by Walter Wakely, foreman stonemason," and "Thomas Auton, housekeeper." [111]

Equal parts publicist and sermonizer, Pick advocated a version of modern art couched in familiar "English" values such as "utilitarianism, populism, and progressivism" (174). He offered the cultural establishment--to which...