Journals and Papers

Selected Journal Excerpts

24 June 1937

[Grand International Meeting on Spain and Culture, in aid of Basque Refugee Children, held by the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. Guests included Virginia Woolf, Ralph Vaughan Williams, H. G. Wells, Ben Nicholson, Desmond McCarthy, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Vanessa Bell, Jacob Epstein, E.M. Forster, Duncan Grant and Barbara Hepworth.] 

… We went on together to the Albert Hall. It was the most impressive meeting I have ever been to, and three and a half hours later when we had to leave to catch the midnight train it was not over and we were sorry to go. Neither Picasso nor Heinrich Mann appeared, but Picasso offered the good reason that he is painting a canvas of the destruction of Guernica for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris exhibition. But the speeches we heard were good, all of them, and the enthusiasm of the audience was terrific. Langevin, for France, put forward carefully all the reasons why fascism must be the enemy of culture and why all the forces of culture must to defend themselves combine now against fascism; Professor Constable summed up the Spanish contribution to European culture and with a passion I had not expected called for its defence; Isobel Brown made the collection and cleverly, as I remember her doing before, played one group or interest in the audience against another and stirred up rivalry in generosity until every profession, each art, and twenty or more nationalities had sent her donations and messages, even Italians and Germans were among them, with words 'in memory of Roselli brothers', 'of international brigade', until our hands were smarting with applauding; but she could not sell the drawing Picasso had given, a recondite little piece of metaphysical abstraction, for which the highest bid was £80. For the programme he had made a fine drawing, agonising; for most people, to buy the other would have been no more than a gesture for the Basques. Paul Robeson was the great man of the evening instead. As there had been some doubt as to whether his broadcast would be sanctioned, as soon as he heard he had flown back from Russia to be here tonight and was properly honoured for it; but apart from such considerations, he dominated the occasion; his personality eclipsed all other as his speech overwhelmed theirs. It was a brave and truly noble speech; the battle front is everywhere, he said, and every artist must take his stand one way or the other, and 'I have taken my stand. I stand in unalterably in support of the Spanish government.' That a negro artist could say that in an international gathering and that those words should evoke rapturous applause which went on and on is of impressive significance. Robeson speaks for his whole race as possibly no international figure does and he bestrode this meeting so that the negroes and the Spaniards seemed the same thing; and then he sang and so easily filled the air and it seemed everything at that moment that he was singing not only for two oppressed peoples but for the oppressed everywhere and all the generous aspirations of the unoppressed as well. It says a lot for Haldane, who spoke after him, that he was able to make a speech which was as courageous and as lofty in its passion and which could still stir a crowd already moved almost intolerably. And this today is the only kind of loftiness that matters. Tonight one felt that even in the awful present, where the forces of the past and of the future overlap and both so much that the present itself seems to have no claim to a place, the dark and negative power had been banished already. I felt happy to have had the chance of being for once where I could feel in the centre of the conflict instead of hovering coldly at the circumference, with so much less hope.

5 July 1937

Canterbury had its dose of fascism today. [Oswald] Mosley at the Forester's Hall. The Keables and all our Peacemaker group except David, with a few reinforcements from Wye College and from Sandwich, went down as an opposition body, determined to remain unprovoked and make no interruptions; in that we succeeded; but three quarters of the audience was opposition which refused to clap for any point of the speech or a penny for the collection, and for the most part remained solidly silent, but some of them could not stand the abuse that was handed out and towards the end of the meeting, after three hours! This led to a few scuffles with the gangster stewards, grimacing at every interrupter as thought they were all dictators already, to a couple of ejections and a blow on the head from a baton for one young fellow. Mosley's speech was a very clever one indeed, facts beautifully twisted, but when he had got his agricultural policies put across he was clearly out to provoke bad feeling and make excuses for abuse and shouting and whipping up his followers to enthusiasm. He never hesitated to call an interrupter a bone-head, village idiot, puppet who was preventing 'this large and intelligent audience' from listening to him. Two-thirds at least must have been bone-heads as they clearly did not like him. The pity was that so much of the heckling was the fruit of exasperation and was therefore disordered and ineffective; but one of our Wye friends was persistent and to the point, and being embedded in a mass of supporters was not put out of the hall even after the twentieth remark … Trickiness is Mosley's greatest virtue; he is not a magnetic personality - even striding down Canterbury's peaceful street with his bodyguard.

17 October 1947

Walk with Victor [Pasmore] and Bill [Coldstream] beside the canal at Peckham between afternoon and evening teaching sessions. We talked about the difference of attitude, especially of attitude to the objective world, between realist painters of our kind and the contemporary romantics or the idealists of the ecole de Paris. Bill, pointing to a crane, folded against one of the warehouses across the canal, stated like this the fundamental divergence between the painter interested first in a world outside himself and the painted interested in a world of his reactions with only the picture as an outside object. 'They start where we leave off. They believe they can draw that crane without any difficulty, the only problem is where to place it and in what picture. We are not sure we can draw it as we see it and the whole picture is our attempt to do so and we consider we have done well if we get somewhere near it'. We continued our discussion at tea in the Queens analysing the elements that are purely sense perception and those that are intellectual and imagine qualities added that make up what we accept as the reality of things outside. Studying the pepper pot and salt pot standing on the table we argued that the retinal image tells us only a small part of what we accept as the reality of these objects. They seem to have weight, and a solidity that is only understood by an intellectual interpretation of tone and colour changes on their facets; they have a space between them only apprehended because the shape of the shadow falling from one on to the other is seen not only as a tonal patch but as a shape defining the space, something one has learned and remembered, and so on. But all this is understood by direct contact with the objects themselves and of the space in which they are sited. This is the material of our paintings. The romantic painter at an early stage of his contemplation of such objects might feel that the two pots looked like two little people, two nuns perhaps walking in a snow covered field and at this stage would become more interested in this analogy and association than in the objects themselves, and try to capture only those aspects of the objects that would help him to express this feeling; or if an expressionist he would concentrate on certain qualities that would give the maximum expressiveness in some sense or another to the forms depicted. Bill says he tries to paint things 'not more nor less expressive than they are'.