A critic, a gallery, a deadline
Roger Fry was 43 in 1910 (he would turn 44 on 14 December, after the show opened), an English critic and Bloomsbury-adjacent intellectual who had spent a few years (1906–1910) as Curator of Paintings at the Met in New York and had recently been fired in a row with its president, J. Pierpont Morgan. He had been spending his summers in France and had begun to think England had no idea what had happened in those studios.
In summer 1910 he proposed an exhibition to the Grafton Galleries on Grafton Street, Mayfair. He rounded up Desmond MacCarthy (the show’s secretary, who helped draft the catalogue introduction) and Clive Bell (the young art writer who would in 1914 publish Art and the concept of “significant form”), went to France, twisted arms at dealers (Vollard among them), and came back with about 228 works. Cézanne had the most; then Van Gogh, Gauguin, plus Manet as the borrowed elder, plus the living wave: Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck, Maurice Denis, Redon, Seurat, Signac, Sérusier, Vallotton. (Henri Rousseau, Le Douanier — the self-taught customs officer who painted dreamlike jungles he had never seen — would be hung in the 1912 sequel.)
Fry, late at night against a printer’s deadline, scribbled out the running title Manet and the Post-Impressionists. He later told The Nation (1911) that he had picked the name almost on the fly — he had rejected alternatives like “expressionists” — and needed an umbrella elastic enough to cover all of them without committing to any program. The show opened on 8 November 1910 and ran through 15 January 1911.
The London press loses its mind
The press response was one of the great public freak-outs in art history. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt recorded the show as “either an extremely bad joke or a swindle” — the paintings “the work of madmen.” Robert Ross (Oscar Wilde’s executor) wrote in the Morning Post that the show was a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting. The Times called it “the rejection of all that civilization has done.” The phrase “the work of a lunatic” appears across more than a dozen reviews.
In absolute terms it was a commercial success — about 25,000 visitors over two months, gate around £4,600. Many had come to laugh. The Bloomsbury Group (Fry, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant) coalesced around the defense. Virginia Woolf’s retrospective epitaph, in a 1924 lecture published as Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, has overgrown its own context: “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Woolf meant a whole shift in modernist sensibility, not just the Grafton — but the Grafton was what she had at the back of her mind.
An empire’s blind spot
One thing the outrage did not include. London in 1910 was the capital of an empire at maximum extent — about a quarter of the world’s land and a fifth of its people answered to it. Among the pictures the Grafton crowd was shoving in to see were Gauguin’s Tahitians: nude teenage girls painted in a French colony in the South Pacific, on their way back across the Channel after a sale by his estate. They were trophies of one empire on display in the capital of another, and the press storm — about whether they were art — never quite reached the question of how they had got there. That question was asked in 1910 in Tahiti and Britain (and the Congo, and Bengal, and many rooms a Roger Fry never set foot in). It was not asked at the Grafton.
What Fry himself would later say about these pictures, in his 1920 book Vision and Design, was that the art on the Grafton walls “aimed not at illusion but at reality.”
The category goes international
In 1912 Fry mounted a Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton (5 October – 31 December 1912; poster by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). The French section, selected by Fry, included about 5 Cézannes, 19 Matisses, 13 Picassos, plus Derain, Vlaminck, Bonnard — and Rousseau, hung among the moderns. By Christmas 1912 Post-Impressionism was a known category in the English-speaking world.
The Atlantic crossing happened the next year. The International Exhibition of Modern Art — the Armory Show — opened on 17 February 1913 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, ran through 15 March, then travelled to Chicago and Boston. Roughly 1,250 works by about 300 artists. Within the European third were about 13 Cézannes, 18 Van Goghs, 12 Gauguins, several Seurats, the largest Redon retrospective outside France, plus Matisse, Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (painted January 1912, exhibited at the Armory the year after) was the succès de scandale, mocked by the American press as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” The Armory Show is to American modernism what the 1910 Grafton is to British. American collectors went home and started buying.
They were all dead
End on the strangeness of it. When Roger Fry opened his Grafton show on 8 November 1910, every one of the five painters he had put at its center was already in the ground.
Cézanne had been dead four years — died Aix, 22 October 1906. Van Gogh had been dead twenty years — died Auvers, 29 July 1890. Gauguin had been dead seven years — died Hiva Oa, 8 May 1903. Seurat had been dead nineteen years — died Paris, 29 March 1891. Toulouse-Lautrec had been dead nine years — died Château Malromé, 9 September 1901.
The name was retrospective. The room was retrospective. The category itself was a London critic’s late, improvised umbrella for five French painters who had never met as a group, never written a manifesto, never agreed about anything, and were all in their graves before the umbrella opened. The name stuck, anyway, because the public didn’t have a better one.
What that umbrella covered was the bridge from Impressionism into 20th-century modernism. Without those five painters — and the wider cast around them, the Nabis, the pointillists, the Symbolists — there is no Fauvism (Matisse and Derain at the Salon d’Automne in 1905), no Die Brücke (Dresden, 1905, lit fuse Van Gogh and Gauguin), no Der Blaue Reiter (Munich, 1911, lit fuse Gauguin and Cézanne), no Cubism (Picasso and Braque, 1907–14, direct out of the late Cézanne), and no abstraction (Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911, citing Cézanne by name).
Five painters and a wider cast. Five answers to one question — what comes after Impressionism? — and one English critic, hanging a London show on a printer’s deadline, who needed a name and gave them the only one we now use. The mountain refused to dissolve. The wheatfield kept burning. The Breton women kept seeing things their eyes couldn’t see. The dots kept building the Sunday lawn. The cabaret lights kept catching on the dancers’ faces. And then, around the turn of the new century, the painters all died, one by one, and a generation of younger painters in Paris and Munich and Dresden and London picked up the pieces and ran with them.
That generation’s room is the next door over.
