The Great Yorkshire Art Exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery is the first time an English region has presented its own history of art. This follows a pattern set in Scotland, which has successfully disentngled its art history from that of England or 'Britain', and now presents its art history within a European and world context. As such, the work of Scottish art and cultural historians can be seen as playing a key role in the campaign for a Scottish parliament. Whether Yorkshire chooses to have its own parliament remains to be seen, but whatever the outcome of that debate, Yorkshire's art history can no longer be seen simply as within a relationship with that of London. Like their Scottish counterparts, Yorkshire artists have consistently bipassed the London art world and made their own links to Europe and the rest of the world.
These are some of the issues raised by the Great Yorkshire Art Exhibition. It includes works by over forty artists from the past 150 years, ranging from Frederic Leighton and Atkinson Grimshaw, to Laura Knight and Jacob Kramer, to Herbert Read and Bruce Turner, to Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and Patrick Heron and Damien Hirst.
Further reading on the premise for the show can be found in articles in the July 2000 issue of the Yorkshire Journal, the September 2000 issue of The Art Book and the Independent newspaper (London) for 4th August 2000. A fully colour illustrated catalogue is also available from Scarborough Art Gallery (tel. Scarborough in England on 01723 374753). The essay from the catalogue is, however, reproduced below.
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by Michael Paraskos,
Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Hull, Yorkshire, England.
However the notion of a unified search by �the English�, to rediscover who they are, is not wholly accurate. As journalist Gavin Esler discovered when touring Britain for the BBC Radio 4 programme The Brits last year, the English are a diverse people with many affiliations, not all of them to other English people. When questioning a group of Northumbrians about the Scots, Esler found that despite the historic rivalry between Northumbria and Scotland, they felt more affinity with their Scottish neighbours than with the English of the south. But their comments also showed that the Northumbrians� real loyalty lay with Northumbria, suggesting that if there is an attempt by the English to define �Englishness�, it is parallel to attempts by many people to define their identity in far more regional ways. It is within this context of growing regionalism that The Great Yorkshire Art Exhibition is being staged.
Yorkshire, like Scotland, Ireland and Wales, has an historic sense of its distinctiveness, and, like them, often expresses this through physical objects. This is a way of demonstrating our identity to others and reinforcing it to ourselves. To wear a white rose each year on the 1st August, Yorkshire Day, is to proclaim Yorkshireness to others as surely as wearing daffodils on St. David�s Day or shamrock on St. Patrick�s Day proclaims Welshness or Irishness. When a teacake, a curd tart or a treacle sponge become a Yorkshire teacake, a Yorkshire curd tart or Yorkshire parkin, they are physical symbols of Yorkshire that allow us to participate in a concept of Yorkshireness, as much as eating haggis on Burns Night is a way of participating in a concept of Scottishness. Symbols like these, called �signifiers�, are very important as they help us to identify our relationship to others, with shared signifiers acting as signs that we have something in common with our neighbours. Stand on a football terrace wearing the wrong team colours and you�ll soon get a sense of how important signifiers can be.
It is relatively easy to think of objects that signify Yorkshireness, and the examples just given would probably appear on anyone�s list. It is perhaps more difficult to think specifically of artworks that work in the same way, but there are examples which do self-consciously use this type of Yorkshire signifier. The most obvious are on commercial and civic architecture, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was often highly decorated. In the case of the many banks that have their origins in Yorkshire, such as the Yorkshire Penny Bank, which became the Yorkshire Bank, and the National and Provincial Bank, which became the National Westminster Bank, their offices often had Yorkshire roses carved on them. Examples of these can be seen on the National Westminster Bank�s Scarborough office in Westborough, and the Yorkshire Bank�s original headquarters in Infirmary Street, Leeds. Also in Leeds, the Town Hall has Yorkshire roses in the sculpture above the main entrance pediment, carved by John Thomas, and similar examples can be found on the freestanding sculptures in Leeds City Square in the art nouveau figures by Alfred Drury representing �Morning�. These were erected in 1903, and are garlanded with roses which it does not seem unreasonable to presume are the white roses of Yorkshire. The rose signifier also appears in Victorian and Edwardian paintings, such as �My Wee White Rose� by Atkinson Grimshaw. Although it is speculation whether the white rose of the title refers to a Yorkshire rose, a Yorkshireman like Grimshaw would have been very aware of such associations. So too would the artist Mark Senior of Wakefield when he painted another portrait entitled �The Wild Rose�.
Although there are numerous examples such as these in art, far more common signifiers of Yorkshire are images of actual Yorkshire scenes. Grimshaw and Senior are great representatives of this, but others from the nineteenth century include William Etty, Henry Carter and Austin Winterbottom. Similar works to theirs by Scottish, Irish and German artists have often been viewed as indicative of particularly romantic and nationalistic attitudes towards nature. A strong self-identification with nature and the land was seen by many writers from the eighteenth until well into the twentieth centuries as a key feature of national as well as cultural identity. Often this was based on the belief that certain people, usually peasants, fishermen or others who lived off the land, had a spiritual empathy with a particular landscape, and this finds echoes in the work of Staithes Group artists, such as Laura Knight, Harold Knight and Mark Senior.
Such representations of the Yorkshire landscape and its inhabitants continued into the early twentieth century with artists such as Philip Naviasky, Bruce Turner and Owen Bowen, and is still evident in artists working today. Yet unlike Scotland or Ireland, in Yorkshire the nature tradition sits more readily alongside a history of urban subject matter. Yorkshire�s identity is as much defined by industrial landscapes as natural ones. Once again this can be seen in works by Grimshaw such as �Lower Briggate, Leeds�. Similar themes are taken up in the early twentieth century by Charles Ginner in his painting �View of Leeds�, and Stanhope Forbes in the work �Sheffield River and Smoking Chimneys�. More recently it is seen in Edna Lumb�s dramatic images of factories, and Peter Brook�s painting �Old Building�. Two works which make this point most strongly, however, are Jacob Kramer�s �Coal Miners� and Edward Wadsworth�s �Slag Heap�, both of the 1920s, which were part of a series of sketches by various artists that were intended to become painted murals in Leeds Town Hall. We have already seen that Leeds Town Hall is sculpted with the white roses of Yorkshire which act as emblems of the region�s identity. The proposed inclusion of images of industry suggests a belief amongst some at least that part of the region�s identity is urban and industrial and that this too should be represented in the building.
Yorkshire�s identity in art is a complex thing that involves the combination of different, often oppositional, elements such as nature and industry. But it also involves the question can Yorkshire art only be made by Yorkshire-born artists? Although several of the region�s most celebrated artists, such as William Powel Frith, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Patrick Heron, would have passed the old Yorkshire County Cricket Club test for Yorkshire nationality, all having been born within one of the three Ridings, many of our artists would not. Laura Knight, who helped define an enduring vision of the Yorkshire coast fishing communities at the turn of the century, was not a Yorkshirewoman. Jacob Kramer, with his powerful evocation of the Yorkshire coalfields, was a Russian Jewish refugee. And Charles Ginner, with his post-Grimshaw images of Leeds, was a Londoner. Yet to acknowledging these facts is not to diminish the idea of a Yorkshire identity in art. When we speak of English art, for example, few are concerned with the fact that three of the greatest English artists of the last century, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Lucien Freud, are not English-born at all. Regardless of their birthplaces they somehow embody a concept of English identity in art, as surely as Knight, Kramer and Ginner embody concepts of Yorkshire identity. Similarly the work of Frederick Leighton, Albert Moore and Barbara Hepworth shows that Yorkshire-born artists do not necessarily fit into a concept of Yorkshire art. Despite their extremely strong Yorkshire lineage Leighton, Moore and Hepworth are more comfortably located in international concepts of classicism. In searching for Yorkshire�s artistic identity, therefore, we are not looking for grand theories that include all Yorkshire artists, nor necessarily exclude non-Yorkshire-born artists, rather we search for ways in which the specific locale of Yorkshire impinges upon the minds of certain artists, some native and some not.
It is possibly Herbert Read who does more than anyone else to define Yorkshire�s artistic identity in this way. Although he is more often associated with the industrial aesthetic of International Modernism, Read was born close to nature, at Muscoates Farm in the North Riding of Yorkshire in 1893. This origin may have been responsible for the paradoxical situation that despite championing Modernism, Read saw a relationship with nature, and specifically the nature of Yorkshire, as central both to his personal identity and that of a number of artists with whom he became associated. This shows Read was a child of his age, being born when the concept of a distinct Yorkshire identity was increasingly being articulated. The foundation of the Yorkshire Dialect Society and the work of the Yorkshire folklorist F.W. Moorman all dates from this time. In their activities they parallel the work of German folklorists such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose aim in collecting what we now call the Grimm Fairy Tales was not to find stories to amuse children, but to discover true German national identity. Like their German counterparts, Moorman and the Dialect Society linked identity to nature, looking to the remote rural parts of Yorkshire for evidence of their theories.
As well as becoming a member of the Dialect Society in later life, Read was taught by Moorman whilst a university student, and even became close enough to send him a series of now lost North Riding dialect poems. The reasons for this relationship are clear when one realises that Moorman was particularly interested in the part of Yorkshire that Read came from. Moorman believed that this was the heart of Yorkshire which, unlike the rest of England, was not settled by the Angles or Saxons, but by a different Germanic tribe, the Geats from southern Scandinavia. Therefore the people of Yorkshire and specifically Read�s ancestors were a distinctive tribe amongst the English. What is more remarkable, however, was Moorman�s belief that Beowulf, that ancient English poem we met earlier, was not written in Northumbria, as many academics claim, but in Yorkshire by the Geats of the North Riding, not far from Read�s childhood home.
This strong emphasis on a Germanic Yorkshire culture gave Read an outlook towards Modernist art which was generally more pro-Germanic, and anti-French, than was common in England during the twentieth century. Also, he viewed English art as being at its best when it followed what he called its �native sensibilities�, which were expressly Germanic. This outlook was reinforced by Read�s involvement between 1911 and 1918 in another early twentieth century society, the Leeds Arts Club. This too went against the mainstream in English art at the time by promoting German cultural ideas as opposed to the dominant pro-French attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Members of the Arts Club debated regularly the ideas of German Expressionist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, whose seminal text on Expressionism, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, was first translated into English at the Arts Club by Michael Sadler, later called Sadlier. They were also in direct contact with several German Expressionist artists, and paintings by Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Gabrielle Munter, amongst others, were collected before the First World War in Leeds by Michael Sadler�s father, also called Michael. These works included abstract paintings such as �Composition VII�, which in terms of avant-gardism was far in advance of anything on view in London at the time. Indeed, the art on display in Yorkshire makes Roger Fry�s celebrated 1910 London exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which most art history books claim introduced Modernism to the English, seem positively reactionary.
Yorkshire artists such as Jacob Kramer, Bruce Turner and Phillip Naviasky were effected strongly by this cultural environment. They were all members of the Leeds Arts Club and adopted styles and working beliefs rooted in the Expressionism of Kandinsky. Each was influenced by Kandinsky�s theory, expressed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, that the artist did not paint the physical world, but images from a parallel spiritual world. Such ideas are not simply imports from Germany however, as they echo those of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Inchbold, who was born in Leeds. No doubt they were in fact generally acceptable in Yorkshire at this time because of the strength of occultism and spiritualism in the region; but it is also notable that the origin of Kandinsky�s ideas had been another book, called Thought Forms, written by Annie Besant who was also involved in the Leeds Arts Club.
Clearly the general tenor of culture in Yorkshire in the early twentieth century was distinctive to mainstream England partly because it did not look to France for inspiration, but to the Germanic lands of northern and eastern Europe. Following on from his involvement in the Leeds Arts Club Read continues to use many of these ideas in his art criticism. In particular the influence of nature is important in his writings on Moore. In his 1964 monograph Henry Moore, Read writes of Moore having lived as a child not far from the �wild romantic scenery� of the Yorkshire Moors and Pennines, and of going into the countryside �bird nesting and gathering wild flowers�. This is despite Moore�s childhood actually being spent in the urban and industrial environment of Castleford. Such links with nature are further enhanced in the opening paragraphs of Read�s book when he notes that Moore�s great-grandfather, someone quite distant in his family history, had �worked the land�. The reasoning behind this emphasis on nature lies in Read�s specific association of his own Yorkshire identity with the Yorkshire landscape. When writing about his Yorkshire childhood at Muscoates Farm in the book The Innocent Eye, Read uses as a model William Wordsworth�s romantic description in The Prelude of an idyllic rural childhood. Although Wordsworth was not Yorkshire-born, Read identified himself very strongly with the Lakeland poet and notes that Wordsworth�s parents were of Yorkshire stock. In writing on Moore Read uses this same source as a model, thereby implying that the sculpture of Henry Moore the Yorkshireman must be rooted in a profound experience of Yorkshire�s natural environment, rather than by the urban setting that would have been more familiar to him as a child.
Although it might seem like sophistry on the part of Read to claim Moore was a child of nature and imply that Wordsworth was a Yorkshireman, his underlying principles are sound. Read followed German philosophers such as Friedrich von Schelling and Wilhelm Worringer in believing that art was a record of the encounter between the artist�s senses and the mystery of the external world. Nature in this scheme simply becomes a synonym for external reality, and the artwork is the struggle of the artist�s intellectual and emotional faculties to comprehend and express this reality. If we are to search for a relationship between diverse art and artists and Yorkshire, this theory seems a promising way in which to do it. The artists� attempts to comprehend an external world that is in this case specifically Yorkshire, may result in different physical forms, but all have been influenced by the �spirit of place� that is Yorkshire, and therefore they all produce distinctively Yorkshire art.
If a pro-Germanic outlook is a feature of Yorkshire�s historic artistic identity, this was very much maintained in the post war period. One of the strongest ideas to emerge out of Expressionism in Germany was that art has a strong social purpose. In Germany this led to the creation of the Bauhaus school of art. Although the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, its ideas lived on. It formed the basis for the creation in 1949 of the Gregory Fellowships, funded by Peter Gregory, the owner of the Bradford printers Lund Humphries. The fellowships were the first artist-in-residence schemes anywhere in the world and involved painters like Dennis Creffield, Terry Frost, Alan Davie and Trevor Bell; sculptors like Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage, Austin Wright and Neville Boden; and poets like John Heath-Stubbs, Peter Redgrove and Martin Bell. During the 1950s and 60s they worked at the University of Leeds, which was still at the time a highly technical institution. Gregory�s aim was to encourage scientists and mechanics to interact with his artists, in the Bauhaus-like belief that this would somehow lead to the improvement of art, science and technology, and therefore society.
At the same time at Leeds College of Art, Harry Thubron was creating a new form of art education based on the same Bauhaus ideas, which led Patrick Heron to describe the College as �the English Bauhaus�. This too involved students from the Art College and Leeds College of Technology working together on experimental projects. This scheme formed the blueprint in the late 1960s for the creation of the polytechnics, many of which grew from the merger of local art schools with colleges of technology. Also in the 1950s and 60s Thubron, with the help of figures such as Tom Watt and George Hainsworth, created a new type of introductory course for art and design students, again based on Bauhaus ideas, which became known as the Foundation Course.
Such radical ideas were not just centred on Leeds however. In Scarborough, the foundation of England�s first artist studio co-operative, Crescent Arts, provided studios for artists in a space run by artists. The social mission of art that can be seen in so many of the developments in Leeds, can also be seen in the strong educational emphasis of the Crescent artists.
As all these examples show, ideas which originated in Yorkshire and can be rooted specifically in Yorkshire cultural traditions, had wider ramifications. Indeed, the post-war period can be seen as a time when Yorkshire�s artistic ideas became internationalised, and as so often happens, in the process had their origins obscured. Artist-in-residence schemes are now common throughout the world, polytechnics became a national and then international phenomenon, versions of the Foundation Course are the standard entry qualification for art colleges in many countries, and studio co-operatives exist in most of England�s cities. Patrick Heron, the son of the co-founder of the Leeds Arts Club Tom Heron, was by the 1950s a national figure, both for his paintings and his art criticism in the Observer newspaper, and Read was seen as the most significant art critic in the world. Moore�s sculptures too were in demand internationally.
The 1950s and 60s also saw the beginnings of Yorkshire becoming more overtly multi-cultural, and from the outset this fed into its art. Stass Paraskos is one such example. An immigrant to Leeds from the British colony of Cyprus in the early 1950s, Paraskos was soon encouraged by Tom Watt and Thubron to take up painting. This resulted in 1966 in an exhibition at the Leeds Institute Gallery being raided by the police after Paraskos was accused of displaying obscene paintings in public in contravention of the Vagrancy Act 1838. At the trial luminaries of the artworld, including Herbert Read and Norbert Lynton, spoke for the defence, but still the case was lost. Despite this the painting, �Lovers and Romances�, was not destroyed and survives to this day. More recently artists from Yorkshire�s strong Asian community, such as Shanaz Gulzar, are starting to emerge as significant Yorkshire artists.
It would be easy to see the successes of Yorkshire art in the past as indicative of decline since then. Yet this is not necessarily the case. Today many of �English� art�s most well-known artists have Yorkshire roots, including David Hockney and Damien Hirst. Also, two of the most dominant approaches in art criticism, social history of art and feminism, have their origins in Yorkshire in the work of Arnold Hauser and Griselda Pollock. Individual artists, such as Clive Head and Tom Wood who are based in the region, are successfully exhibiting regionally, nationally and internationally, and artists groups are active in every city in Yorkshire. Even in smaller places such as Scarborough new artist co-operatives such as 'Smacme Arts' are being born, suggesting that art is, at least at a grass roots level, still a vital force. It is almost impossible to say what, from amongst all this, will emerge as the next significant chapter in Yorkshire�s art history. History suggests that Yorkshire art is at its most interesting and influential when it does not follow the mainstream artworld of London, but draws on its own environment, history and traditions, and makes its own connections with the wider world. Somewhere in Yorkshire right now, someone is doing just that.
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