Among the Bohemians (24 page)

This inner creativity was also manifest at Alderney Manor.
It seemed to many that Dorelia John only had to choose an object or a colour for it to become mystically endowed with a part of her own beauty, and incorporated in the living work of art that was her home.
Nicolette Devas:

For her, there was no advance blueprint; nothing was bought or made because it ‘picked up the yellow in the carpet’ or matched something else.
Objects in the house had a quality of character and an intrinsic beauty of their own; they were admired and loved as people were; for their personality.

Or Cecil Beaton again:

Here is the dwelling place of an artist.
It would be difficult to find one object in her house that does not fulfil its useful purpose with an inherent beauty.
On her window sill a goblet of daffodils seems to regain the pristine beauty that is lost by overfamiliarity.
With Mrs John, as with all true people, the everyday triflings of life
are noble: a basket of bread, a bowl of tomatoes, a bottle of wine have innate beauty…

and he continues…

No intention to decorate the house ever existed… The colours have gratuitously grown side by side.
Nothing is hidden; there is an honesty of life which is apparent in every detail – the vast dresser with its blue and white cups, the jars of pickled onions, the skeins of wool, the window sills lined with potted geraniums and cacti, while close to the windowpanes tits swing on a coconut shell hung from a tree.
The Modigliani bust stands with a cactus pot on its head.
In the corner of the entrance hall, boxes of apples and croquet mallets are spontaneously thrown together, constituting a picture of life that is full of sentiment and completely lacking in pretension.

‘Mrs John’s Window Sill’ by Cecil Beaton.

*

Beauty, truth, honesty, lack of pretension – these are qualities that are hard to define yet easy to discern.
I have stressed that people like Vanessa Bell and Dorelia were ahead of their time, but if that is the case, where does such a person stand in relation to the advances made by Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco, the Bauhaus, the Jazz Age?
How did they react to chromium-plated cocktail cabinets, tubular steel, unpolished
furniture and beige carpets?
Or might it not be more ‘truthful’ to go for pokerwork fenders and peasant handicrafts from Czechoslovakia?

The answer is that the contemporary mania for smart interior design presented the committed Bohemian with a dilemma, for artists were inevitably implicated.
A single-minded pursuit of beauty put one several steps ahead of the complacent masses.
But being in the avant-garde carried with it the risk of creating a following, and a following soon became a fashion.
Fashion, for the true outsider, is a snare and a delusion.
Fall for fashion, and you are fated to become not an innovator but a victim.
And yet Bohemians needed rich fashionable people to buy their wares.
Over the last century artists have played a cat-and-mouse game with the world of fashion; today this has reached a point where the artist can feel trapped by the imperatives of public relations and self-promotion.
In becoming a fashion leader, the Bohemian had to make a difficult choice between the decadent world of smart society, and the lonelier path in pursuit of beauty and true taste.

You have to be artful indeed to dodge all these influences, and in truth, almost nobody is immune.
So strong was the ‘Bohemian’ look that anyone with artistic aspirations could requisition its components – like Florence Dodd in
The Constant Nymph
(1924).
Doing up their new home in London, Florence calculates the social messages conveyed by its interior with precision:

‘One does produce a definite impression on people, whether or not one makes any conscious efforts about it, so one might as well take pains, and think a little.
I want this house to look like us… pleasantly Bohemian… a sort of civilised Sanger’s circus, don’t you know, with all its charm and not quite so much… disorder.’

Lewis looked very doubtful.

But Florence is resolved to convey to the world that she has married a genius, and relentlessly paints the walls yellow, places a divan piled high with cushions in the drawing room, and adorns the chimney-piece with a Russian ornament studded with coloured enamel.
The dining room is distempered white, its oak cottage dresser ominously decked with
blue plates.
Let there be no mistake, this house says, you are in Bohemia.
But the ‘real’ Sanger children, Tess and her sister Paulina, are deeply sceptical of Florence’s exertions, which they find too bogus for words.
As Beaton said – one’s selection betrays one’s deepest self.
True taste was discernible to the truly tasteful.
It is obvious to the Sanger sisters that Florence is trying too hard,
and that her own appetite for beautiful things has had little to do with her inauthentic selection.

There is likewise a fascinating episode in
Antic Hay
(1923) where Aldous Huxley’s character Theodore Gumbril Jr.
(inventor of ‘Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes’, or inflatable trousers) sets out to pick up a girl.
To boost his confidence, he has disguised himself as an Artist, with a false beard.
Thus attired, he strolls down Queen’s Road, and in due course catches the eye of a pretty young woman window shopping.
They engage in conversation in front of an antique shop called ‘Ye Olde Farme House’.
The young woman is so impressed by Gumbril – taking him to be a True Artist – that her own genuine liking for pretentious ‘artistic’ furniture disintegrates under his scorn.
Pretence is heaped upon pretence:

‘How revolting this sham cottage furniture is,’ Gumbril remarked…

The stranger, who had been on the point of saying how much she liked those lovely Old Welsh dressers, gave him her heartiest agreement.
‘So v-vulgar.’

‘So horribly refined.
So refined and artistic’

She laughed on a descending chromatic scale.
This was excitingly new.
Poor Aunt Aggie with her Arts and Crafts, and her old English furniture.
And to think she had taken them so seriously!… In the past, when she had imagined herself entertaining real artists, it had always been among really artistic furniture… But now – no, oh no…

‘Yes, it’s fanny to think that there are people who call this sort of thing artistic.
One’s quite s-sorry for them,’ she added, with a little hiss.

Poor Rosie, disabused of her longing to buy her way into arty circles by getting the ‘right’ furniture from a shop.
It couldn’t be done.

*

Again:
If I choose decorations and colours, it is for their beauty, not because they flatter my social status.
At Alderney, as in so many studios and Bohemian homes of the period, a rebel spirit was abroad among the arty junk, the objets trouvés, the quirky diversity of this ragbag look.
This spirit refuses to ‘match’, to ‘pick up the yellow in the carpet’, or to obey the rules of Mrs Jennings’s ‘grammar of decoration’.
For the inhabitants of these cluttered rooms,
Mr
Jennings and the Home Beautifiers spoke a dead language.
In Bohemian homes your choice of village mugs, of a bleached wooden table, or a jug of daffodils conveyed eloquently your intention to make your own choices, and to live for higher things, for Art.

But the harmony in disparity that Nicolette Devas and Cecil Beaton so
readily recognised and warmed to are qualities of yet another easily recognisable Bohemian scene.
We have moved from the garret, through a cabaret of settings – Russian ballet, exotic treasure chest, Post-Impressionist interior, white studio.
Now we come to the Jumble Sale.

Arthur Ransome felt liberated by his packing-case room in Chelsea, but he also felt a sense of belonging when he was taken by an actor friend to visit a Bohemian Chelsea hostess known as ‘Gypsy’ (‘No one ever calls her anything else’).
Her backdrop was ‘a mad room out of a fairy tale’.
This was clutter with a vengeance, but not the ‘fusty, dusty, musty’ Clementina Burbidge kind.
The room in which Gypsy entertained her circle of artist friends was reminiscent of a curiosity shop, but with elements of exoticism that recalled Gypsy’s obscure West Indian origins.
The walls were dark green, and every available space on them was hung with brightly coloured sketches, paintings and a gigantic double-edged sword hanging from a hook.
Besides bottles of painting ink, strange paperweights, books and portfolios, the room was stuffed with loose sheet music, heaps of crimson silk, and lit with a multitude of candles.
Incense burnt in an urn suspended from the ceiling.
Oriental ceramics and Hindu deities crowded the shelves, along with miscellaneous gimcracks of every kind.
On top of a pile of folders a woolly monkey perched grinning at the company.

In
Ragged Banners
Ethel Mannin takes her poet hero Starridge to visit Lattimer, a jumble-sale Bohemian living in a kind of madhouse in Camden Town.
Lattimer’s room is so stuffed with miscegenated objets d’art that Starridge can hardly breathe, let alone cross from one side to the other.
Busts of Wagner and Beethoven are crammed in with ivory Buddhas and a Chinese fertility goddess.
The centre of the room is taken over (inevitably) by a huge divan covered in every kind of cushion from hand-woven linen to oriental embroidery.
Everywhere, you trip over magazines, gramophone records and books.
There are objects of great beauty and others of undeniable junk: ‘The room looked as though its owner had bought everything on a world tour and finished up in Tottenham Court Road.’

Mrs Jennings would have had an apoplexy.
The drawing room, as she saw it, was a good place for the modest collector to display his or her acquisitions.
These need not be priceless majolica, but she insisted that they must have artistic value – small items of Sèvres, Meissen or Crown Derby were ideal to display in glass cabinets, or perhaps on a shelf running over the dado rail.
Above one hung appropriate engravings, watercolours ‘by
well-known
artists’ (my italics), or ‘framed autograph letters of eminent people’.
Furnishing one’s home from antique shops has a respectable pedigree, and has always been acceptable in circles which revere relics and
heirlooms.
Furnishing one’s home with junk, however, lacked social cachet – no wonder Bohemia took to it so enthusiastically.
We take it for granted today that ‘a bit of driftwood’, or ‘something I picked up off a skip’ can be an object of pride.
Not so in the early twentieth century, when browsing the flea market was a déclassé occupation for those who could afford nothing new.
The Bohemians were pioneers of the ‘puces’.
From bottle racks to garden sheds, bits of bicycles to human ordure, the artist has for many decades now been foremost in looking at society’s detritus with fresh eyes.

Junk had all the advantages; it was cheap, cheerful, and individualistic.
Carrington’s happiest hunting ground was Mr Jarvis’s shop in Newbury, which combined secondhand books with a number of unusual pieces of china, glass and musical instruments.
The singular Mr Jarvis persisted in claiming that all his antique violins were Stradivari and, recognising an art lover in his keen customer, would often draw her attention to his latest acquisition: ‘… a charming Rembrandt I picked up last week.
You recognise the master hand in the drapery?’ A letter to Gerald Brenan in 1921 tells of a trip with Lytton Strachey and Ralph Partridge to Jarvis’s shop, only to find the shutters down and reports that the poor man had suffered a stroke.
The party were devastated, their misery compounded by a frightful lunch in Newbury’s White Hart.
Fortunately after lunch Carrington’s mood rallied, and she tracked down Mrs Jarvis, who took pity on them:

She let us go into the curiosity room and choose some china.
I selected 5 exquisite old coffee cups, of finest china, with saucers, all sprigged and different.
Three without handles.
Then we found two large decanters square shaped, which cost 6s each; very old glass.
A deep Spanish bowl for salad and 8 very old liqueur glasses of great beauty and I am sure of much value, which only cost 3/6 each.
And 3 very heavy glass drinking tumblers for 4/- each, one which was dated 1720.

And they carried their handleless, non-matching coffee cups home in triumph.
It was still a time when bargains were to be had, for the general public had not yet caught up with the idea that yesterday’s rejects very quickly turn into today’s valuable collectables.

Carrington’s predecessor at the Slade, Edna Clarke Hall, also had a keen eye for beauty in unlikely places.
She discovered a lovely, unwanted 1820 Clementi piano in a pub, and an inlaid pearwood writing desk only waiting to be stripped of its brown paint.
Rummaging in her own sheds, she was able to assemble the components of a four-poster bed from some oak posts and a bed frame that she found there, together with some canopy irons
which she got the local blacksmith to make, and some ancient hangings.
This improvised but much-loved bed made its appearance in Edna’s drawings for years afterwards.

Innate taste, such as that of Dorelia, Carrington or Vanessa Bell, went a long way to superimpose harmony on the jumble sale.
These women were home-makers par excellence.
Vanessa Bell claimed that moving furniture around relieved frustration.
A great deal of their energy was expended on thinking about and arranging their domestic surroundings.
All these women had enough help in their homes to keep the clutter relatively clean, and over time, as they became more financially secure, they were able to equip their homes with modest comforts, even central heating.