Seeing into Modernity: Walter Sickert's Music Hall Scenes, c. 1887-1907, and English Modernism

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The French tradition beginning with Baudelaire's writings on art and the work of Manet has seemed to generations of scholars to be the most compelling modernist work there is. In the earliest historiography of modern painting this art was conceived as possessing an inherent drive towards abstraction, the full realization of which was understood to occur only with the passing of the modernist baton to New York in 1945. The dominant concern of modernist art was said to be the pursuit of a pure painting, a preoccupation with pigment and the surface of the canvas, and a consequent denigration of the importance of subject matter. Associated above all with Clement Greenberg and Alfred Barr, this style of thinking has been widely criticized from the 1970s onwards and largely replaced by an alternative reading which privileges engagement with social modernity. ¹ Stemming from the thought of Walter Benjamin, a very specific reading of Baudelaire, and, most immediately, from the popularity of T. J. Clark's powerful analysis of Impressionism in The Painting of Modern Life, this approach defines a modernism in painting that is engaged with the society of the spectacle and the social consequences of modernity. ²

However different these accounts may be, they share a fascination with the art and thought of France as central to the project of understanding modernism, and hence provide a norm upon which any definitions must explicitly or implicitly be built. ³ One consequence of such a situation is historiographical hesitancy about the status of modern visual art made in other places and under other circumstances. In the case of English art, the evident differences from French norms have obscured the possibility of evaluating the modernity of work produced from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. ⁴ With very few exceptions, such as that of Vorticism around 1914 or the revivified continental abstractionism of Ben Nicholson in the 1930s, English art has seemed continually at odds with ideas of modernism derived from France, whether it is conceived as abstraction or as socially responsive. An artist like Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is problematic in this way. Evidently occupied with the subjects of modern life, he is also committed to exploring the idea of a purely formal painting. But in neither aspect is he readily imaginable within French norms except through interpretative violence.

The question of the modernity of late nineteenth century English art has only recently begun to receive attention. Debate has focused around two issues: the possibility of understanding the ways in which the art produced in England in these years responded to cultural modernity in Britain; and how far it can be related to modernist art made elsewhere. ⁵ These questions open up the possibility of reading the modernism of an artist like Sickert within the historical circumstances and concerns which formed his art. But Sickert's modernity continues to be judged by the degree to which he can be brought within the definitions of French modernism. In 1970 Wendy Baron concentrated on Sickert's interest in formal matters and argued that his work can be understood as the accommodation of a succession of French styles via Manet, Whistler, and Impressionism to an earlier, "pre-Impressionist" French tradition which she characterized as "the climax of Sickert's history." ⁶ More recently art historians have begun to explicate Sickert's art by adapting the concerns which the social history of art finds in French modernism. Anna Gruetzner Robins, the foremost commentator in this vein, has suggested that we must understand Sickert as a flâneur, integrating him into an interpretation of "modernist strategies and modern life" which derives from the preoccupations of current readings of French experience. ⁷

These commentators seem to share a certainty that the developments to be found in France are ineluctably prior to any which could have taken place in England. If Sickert's...