Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology: Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II

Abstract

Pacifism, Realism, and Pathology:Alex Comfort, Cecil Collins, and Neo-Romantic Art during World War II Mark Antliff (bio) "The lessons of the war" are "the lessons of romantic ideology, of responsibility, of disobedience": so wrote the anarchist, poet, and conscientious objector Alex Comfort in his manifesto Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism published in 1946 in the immediate aftermath of World War II (fig. 1).1 In this book and a related series of wartime essays Comfort declared his anti-Statist, anti-capitalist definition of romanticism the moving force not only behind the aesthetics of his generation, but of the anti-war production of artists as distinct as the contemporary fantasist Cecil Collins—a prominent figure in Britain's wartime Neo-Romantic movement—and the sixteenth century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (fig. 2). Thus in the midst of World War II when the Neo-Romantic movement in Britain was at its zenith, Comfort reconfigured romantic aesthetics as a form of ethical and pacifist protest against all wars, and specifically against what many still consider the most just war in history. As I will demonstrate, Comfort's thesis in Art and Social Responsibility was premised on a complex theory of "romantic realism" and the aesthetics of anarchist resistance, which he brought to bear not only on the work of Bruegel and Collins, but in a cogent critique of surrealism and constructivism.2 In analyzing Comfort's Neo-Romantic project, I will pay particular attention to his writings on the visual arts which have been overlooked despite their centrality to his definition of anarchist romanticism.3 At its wartime height the Neo-Romantic movement [End Page 519] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Frontispiece Photograph of Alex Comfort, reproduced in Art and Social Responsibility: Lectures on the Ideology of Romanticism (London: Falcon Press, 1946). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Photograph of Cecil Collins in front of 'The Joy of Worlds' at Swann Cottage, Totnes, Devon, c. 1937, reproduced in Cecil Collins: Paintings and Drawings (1935–1945) (Oxford: Counterpoint Productions, 1946). [End Page 520] numbered Michael Aryton, John Craxton, John Minton, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Keith Vaughan among its luminaries. Most art historical writing has productively addressed the Neo-Romantic project through a focus on landscape painting as a metaphor for "Englishness," as a form of insular, national resilience under the wartime threat of Nazi Germany, and with regard to the role of government institutions in promoting the movement at home and abroad after 1942.4 Martin Hammer has greatly enriched the literature on Neo-Romanticism through his comprehensive study of Graham Sutherland, arguably the major progenitor of the romantic revival during the 1930s, demonstrating that Sutherland developed an aesthetic language of ambiguity and equivocation in his work so as to resist any singular or one-dimensional interpretation of his painting.5 Tim Barringer, Margaret Garlake, and David Mellor have drawn valuable attention to the more radical aspects of the Neo-Romantic group with reference to such artists as Sutherland and Piper, Moore, the composer Benjamin Britten, and a younger generation of wartime artists including Vaughan, Minton, Aryton, and Craxton. Barringer, in a compelling article on the pacifist Britten, has examined the "creative tension" in Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) and his opera Peter Grimes (1945) between the reactionary and progressive dimensions of British romanticism, evidenced by the dual impact of Samuel Palmer and William Blake on Britten's Neo-Romantic self-fashioning and evolving aesthetics.6 Garlake, citing the Christian anarchist Derek Savage, has briefly noted the links between the wartime "Apocalyptics, Surrealists, Neo-Romantics and Anarchists" as well as advocates of the philosophy of Personalism, but she does not analyze the ideological positions held by these unnamed protagonists.7 Instead she reaches more general conclusions, noting that such thinking partially accounts for the primacy given to the individual in Neo-Romanticism, which took pictorial form in the guise of a particularized, empathetic relationship with a landscape that was alternatively nurturing, overwhelming, constricting, and an imagined place of refuge amidst the chaos of war.8 Thus while Garlake points to "thematic...