Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (review)

The radical change in London's artists and writers in the years leading up to the First World War can best be seen, Rupert Arrowsmith argues, as "an unprecedented engagement and dialogue between tradition and the rest of the world" (199). Yet the histories and literary and artistic studies of the period have, he notes, largely been written by scholars with little knowledge of cultures outside of England. This lack of trans-cultural knowledge has led to "a distorted view of Modernism as essentially a European invention" (1). Many studies of modernism are then, Arrowsmith charges, geographically, culturally, and aesthetically myopic.

Arrowsmith, given his own extensive travel in various parts of Asia and his study of European and Asian sculpture, is eminently qualified to make the charge, but it is not new. We have read the Eurocentric argument before in the writings of Edward Said and in the work of Astradur Eysteinsson, who notes that "While everyone seems to agree that as a phenomenon modernism is radically 'international' . . . this quality is certainly not reflected in the majority of critical studies of modernism."¹ What is new in Arrowsmith's study is his rigorous research and his focus on a small canvas, the sculpture of Jacob Epstein and the poetry of Ezra Pound, who were part of a coterie of London avant-garde artists. Arrowsmith's premise is that a vast mass of new aesthetic experience, mainly from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands, was transmitted to artists through the developing collections of several London museums. Consequently, other aesthetics were mapped onto the so-called British modernist aesthetic without acknowledgment. Sculptors, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Eric Gill, and writers, like W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, James Gould Fletcher, D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and T. E. Hulme, were bricoleurs who absorbed foreign techniques and perspectives that animated and renewed their art.

Arguing for the influence of London museums, Arrowsmith illuminates Said's theory of "orientalism" in demonstrating that a nineteenth-century Eurocentric narrative was structured into the layout of the British Museum: "a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient."² He physically traces where the "foreign" art of India or China or Japan was positioned in the museum—far from the sacred space of Greek and Roman art, considered the pinnacle of "civilization". Other art with other values was often deemed rubbish, reinforcing England's comforting cultural polarities of civilized and barbarian art. The fine sculpture of India, Japan, China, and Africa was classed not as art but as artifact, and jumbled together on the second floor of the museum with non-sculptural and anthropological findings. Spaces for art, largely designed by curators with archaeological rather than aesthetic backgrounds, notes Arrowsmith, established a hierarchy of aesthetics based on Western "superiority".

But it is the argument of this book that newly-hired curators such as Laurence Binyon challenged this hierarchy. Binyon, Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, was a leading expert on the art of Japan, China, and Korea and began to introduce the visual art of these cultures into the British Museum Print Room. This room was the most exciting division of the Museum in terms of acquisition as Binyon built a world collection on a shoestring between 1900 and 1915. Arrowsmith's ingenious research in the Visitor's Book of the British Museum Print Room has verified that Ezra Pound first visited in 1909 and returned in 1912, a period during which Asian art was often exhibited. Arrowsmith produces original research on Pound to complement the extensive work of Zhaoming Qian, and illustrates that Pound was engaged in the aesthetics of China and Japan, intrigued by the diminishing boundary between word and image, a possible future for Western imagism.

Jacob Epstein, in seeking new paradigms for his work outside Greek and Roman bounds, also became engaged...