This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The title of David Boyd Haycock’s Art-Quake, 1910 is a retrospective coinage. The book concerns the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which opened at the Grafton Gallery in London’s West End in November 1910 and introduced Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso to a British public that was, according to Haycock, largely resistant to “new artistic innovations in Europe”.
Haycock attributes his title to the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell, but the term was coined in 1945 by Desmond MacCarthy (who had co-organised the show with Roger Fry), with the subsequent history of British modernism now behind him.
Its other authorities are no less removed: Virginia Woolf’s celebrated remark that “on or about December 1910, human character changed” comes from a 1924 paper on the contemporary English novel, and Henri Lefebvre’s claim that “around 1910 a certain space was shattered” was made in 1974.
Like its title, the central argument of the book, that the 1910 exhibition was a “breakdown of the old order, the emergence of something new”, rests largely on a proleptic reading of Edwardian history.
Haycock’s attempts at overlaying social history onto the art (suffragette marches, miners’ riots, eugenicist panic about degeneration) are vivid in isolation, but use the Post-Impressionists and their audience as a weathervane for storms they could not have known were coming. The critical hostility they provoked is folded into the supposed ambient crisis of the era.
This is not to say that Art-Quake does not engage contemporary sources, nor indeed that it overclaims entirely: the reviews alone confirm that the exhibition was met with genuine, voluble resistance. Haycock is also refreshingly honest about Fry’s own curatorial misgivings; the portrait that emerges is of a man his own allies called dictatorial, ruthless and, in Wyndham Lewis’s words, “a shark in aesthetic waters”.
One reads the show’s reviews with the melancholy recognition that art criticism used to be good (if only we could still call shows “answerable for some of the most detestable daubs that have ever disgraced a London picture gallery”). One unnamed Academician warned a visitor at the door: “Don’t go in, young man, it will do you harm. The pictures are evil,” which remains largely relevant advice.
Critics, however, are not people. Haycock’s claim of an “insulated British audience” falls apart by his own account: the New English Art Club was founded in 1886 by Francophile painters; the International Society had brought Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Vuillard to London; the Allied Artists Association had exhibited Kandinsky. Haycock himself acknowledges that a show of “Modern French Artists” had opened in Brighton in the summer of 1910 that “could have stolen Fry’s thunder”. There were clearly plenty of collectors, buyers and art organisers interested in engaging with French art in good faith.
The art historical scaffolding to support Fry’s view of “a nation … incapable of the imaginative life” is similarly lopsided: 25 pages carry the reader from the Renaissance to Les Demoiselles, with Vasari invoked as the baseline against which British audiences were measuring the Post-Impressionists, though Haycock never demonstrates this was actually how British viewers were thinking.
What the evidence actually describes is an unevenness between institutions and collectors. No public institution acquired a single work from an exhibition that shifted £4,600 in private sales and the Tate would not own a Van Gogh until 1924; yet cultural figures such as Claude Phillips, Frank Rutter and Edward Marsh had been advocating for Cézanne, Matisse and their contemporaries for years. This picture of a critically engaged avant-garde, a tentatively responsive private market and a reluctant public collecting culture is composed of three very different things that the book’s blunter thesis flattens into one.
Haycock’s attempts at painting the exhibition’s works as “supersensitive” canaries in the pre-war coalmine is a retrospective consolation. The leap to Francis Bacon as vindication of everything 1910 set in motion is enormous and unearned, but revealing: the supposed insularity of British taste was also, apparently, the condition of everything that followed.
In aligning itself with Leonard Woolf’s verdict that the British public were — and perhaps, still are — “incorrigibly philistine”, Art-Quake, 1910 re-treads the pathological view of British art as in dire need of enlightened intervention. In a cultural landscape still adjusting to Britain’s departure from the European Union, the suggestion that the British public’s relationship to Continental art is one of bovine resistance carries a charge Haycock seems content to naturalise.
