There are a number of theories as to why Britain missed out on capital M Modernism. Some say it was because our industrial revolution happened early, others cite a British culture of political moderation, while more point to the overbearing power of the class system that simply could not permit the revolutionary utopian ambition of Modernist ideology.
Whatever the reason, those Modernist buildings that did somehow turn up on this side of the channel were somehow anemic, as though Modernisms radicalism had been confiscated at customs. These few buildings appear as a fashionable set for the fashionable set. Like British Cubism, it is sadly polite – disconnected from the joyful, ugly, dangerous and rude experimentalism that was happening on the continent.
We can see just such a prime example of this British modernism in a feature in the August 1930 issue of ‘The Studio’, in an article called “The 1930s look in British Decoration”.
The pictures show some listless tubular steel tables and a few inert rugs that are determinedly un-revolutionary. Rather than devices that might emancipate the proletariat they look like a handy spot for a Bertie Wooster type to park a Gin and Tonic.
But hold on – before reaching for Corb’s Oeuvre Complet for a fix of the hard stuff – there is something that makes you double take. It seems these are the works of Francis Bacon. That Francis Bacon. The one, who if you are to stand in the middle of the Tates current retrospective, seemed to possess a uniquely clear view of the dark heart of the modern soul.
“Extremely bad copies of Le Corbusier” was his own verdict on the things he produced in this period. And he was right. At best they are pedestrian rehashings of the tropes he’d seen when in Berlin and Paris in the 20s. But, taking a look around, bad copying of continental design doesn’t necessarily hold everyone back. It’s interesting to think what might have happened if Bacons design business had taken off. What if London of the 1930s had been as flush as it is now with design fairs, swarming with trigger fingered bloggers, or laced with shiny design magazines staffed by hip young gunslingers as it is now. Would Bacon have made a passable career as a Nicky Haslam type? Got his own TV show? Brought out a range of homeware?
Bacons failed career as a Modernist is a backstory that sheds light on his later work. Perhaps through his attempts at creating utopian design or his struggles with industrial-technique-as-aesthetic, he found something different. In searching for the utopia at the heart of Modernist design, he found something horrific. Perhaps it’s exactly this horror that we see in ‘Crucifixion’ which he exhibited just three years later where a ghostly, spindly figure emerges from gloomy black space. It seems to depict something that could, if you squinted, resemble a chrome-tubed coatstand but one that’s mutating into an X-Ray industrial-psychic object-figure.
Perhaps what we see in Bacon is an articulation of central Modernist concerns, but with an opposite intention. The objects and figures we see isolated in abstracted space might well be versions of the drawings made by Corb and Mies. All these images talk about the relationship of the body to space, but for Bacon space doesn’t liberate the figure in light and space. Instead the figure is distorted, dissolved, and recombined to accentuate its lumpen, moist, palpitating bodiliness – as though the isolation and abstraction of space has turned flesh in on itself.
In Bacon, just as with JG Ballard we see examples of a peculiar British-variant Modernism. One fascinated with dystopia rather than utopia. It is a variation that feels the full force of distortion and alienation that the base conditions of industrialsation exert – the manner in which industrialization abstracts value and meaning from the landscapes we occupy and sucks the humanity from our marrow.
Be careful next time you approach a tasteful, polite British designer. Deep down, below that eager to please exterior, that timid formal expression and that care to maintain the status quo might well lurk the exact opposite – the full, clear, wild, destructive violence of modernity.