Magic and Modernism - art from Cornwall in context 1800 - 1950
Rupert White 2023
On the back of this book it says it ‘throws light on the links between art, folklore and tourism, as well as the Celtic revival and the occult’
Rupert White certainly seeks to write about his chosen period, not isolating the fine art as is so often done, but showing a wide web of connections between people and places and various activities.
I would have liked a contents page to show me what sort of scope the book had and regretted that the photos are rather grey being on matt paper.
Rupert White must have done an immense amount of research and I learnt a lot reading the book.
I found some quotes such as John Harris’ account of the dangerous descent into a mine at Dolcoath very vivid.
Some books were mentioned whose content I would have liked to have read more about,
There however is a useful bibliography.
It does occur to me that most of those described were very well off individuals free to indulge their quirky interests in unusual directions.
The idea that Gothic architecture was not, like ancient classical buildings, built by slaves, was interesting and my own study of the carvings at Southwell Minster Chapterhouse suggest that medieval masons had considerable freedom rather than following a strict plan.
That the Newlyn painters sought to authentically represent the workers who they depicted and their labour I thought well worth explaining.
I had not read before that Havelock Ellis , who lived and worked at Carbis Bay, had described ideas for an nhs in 1897.
Rupert White evidently does not consider psychoanalysis a science and commends Ellis for giving free marriage guidance sessions.
However the assertion that the St Ives modernist artists embodied ambivalence towards industrial and technological progress surprised me and I would have liked more information to back this up.
The people who became famous and were most accepted in the cannons of art and literature such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and D H Lawrence were those who concentrated their efforts on being modern and innovative rather than the host of others mentioned who were more zany or esoteric.
Ben Nicholson disliked surrealism apparently and Henry Moore spoke of a serious quarrel between modernism and surrealism. The latter encouraged an uncensored anti bourgeois disorder whereas modernist abstraction aimed to make a more harmonious world after the chaos of war. This distinction made sense to me.
Rupert White acknowledges that it was the fame of the modernists that lead to the St Ives Tate being established 1993.
I felt sometimes the author was loth to sufficiently sift his researches and an example is the inclusion of, as the very last item in the book, the plaque on St Ives RC church commemorating the execution of John Payne in 1549, alongside the terrible slaughter of hundreds of Cornish people who objected to imposition of the English prayer book.
This is a topic rather outside the scope of the book and it sent this reader off at a tangent.
I would say ‘Magic and Modernism’ is a compendium of interesting research that gives an awareness of the times described.
I enjoyed this account of developments in Cornish culture and thank Rupert White for writing it.
