Robert Upstone

Modern Painters is published to accompany the first major exhibition of The Camden Town Group for twenty years.

The opening essay is most interesting; setting the scene politically and socially for the period, it provides a glimpse into the artists' circumstances. It describes the formation, the running and the activities of the group, and even gives precise details of the annual income some of the artists received from the sale of their works over a period of years. The next essay discusses the group's work in artistic terms along with the influences; this is followed by several short or very short essays. These include introductory essays to the various sections of the plates, which discus individually among other subjects portraits and self portraits, working class portraits, modernity (under three distinct and separate headings), murder, and Sickert's, Gilman's and Gore's sexualy explicit depiction of woman in their paintings.

The book concludes with a Chronology, Transcripts of the three Camden Town Group exhibition catalogues 1911-12, a Bibliography and an Index

The artists in the Camden Town Group are most notably Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner and Walter Sickert; but also include Walter Bayes, Malcolm Drummond, James Dickson Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, James Boliver Manson, Lucian Pissarro, William Ratcliffe, John Doman turner and later Duncan Grant.

The main section of plates, which starts on page 55, is divided into specific categories, each section having a short introduction and with each illustration accompanied by a sizeable paragraph of information or explanation. There are in total I00 colour and 20 black and white illustrations, the quality of the images in many cases is superb, conveying the texture of the paint and the brilliance of the colours, some positively shimmer on the page; but by the nature of the paintings this cannot be said of all, Sickert's paintings for example are often typically dark and sombre. While there are a few full page images including a detail of a painting at the opening of each section, most of the images occupy half a page or less. Often the image is unnecessarily small, perhaps this is in an attempt to convey the relative size of the paintings, but it is frustrating to be confronted with a small picture when there is so much space available on the page.

Altogether this is an interesting and informative publication, attractively laid-out and well produced, and in addition to a few well known pictures includes many unfamiliar paintings.… (mehr)