London: Modern City

To the form of the new means of production, which to begin with is still dominated by the old (Marx), there correspond images in the collective consciousness in which the new and the old are intermingled.¹

–Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris – the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ 

There was a time in the study of nineteenth-century art, when the city and modernity were synonymous with Paris, which in the words of Walter Benjamin was ‘the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’. The rebuilding by Louis Napoleon of the centre of the city was harnessed to the painting and literature of the period to create a powerful and persuasive version of the culture of urban modernity. Over time, this art historical account lost some of its edge, had its corners rubbed off, so that the equation between art and history, painting, and politics became assumed and unproblematic. In its simplest format, the images simply illustrated and verified the changes in the urban fabric of Paris.

This was the time, around the turn of the millennium, when the wisdom and insights of Benjamin were left behind and Parisian modernity became formulaic. The dependence of the new on the old and the knotted relationship between images and the means of production were set to one side as nineteenth-century French painting continued to assert its irresistible influence on the history of art.

Things have been changing, however, and now London vies with Paris in the academic literature and stakes its own claim to being the capital of the nineteenth century and if the numbers of books on modern London do not yet equal the numbers on Paris, then there is at least the beginnings of a challenge to the primacy of the French capital. But does the scholarship on London's modernity do anything to challenge the dogmas of Paris criticism; does it offer a new and helpful way of seeing the relationship between urban life and modern visual culture?

In March 2012, Yale University Press published two major books on the cultural history of London. One, City of Gold and Mud by Nancy Rose Marshall, is published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and is an embarrassment of riches, with well over 200 illustrations, many of them are in colour. The other, Nights Out by Judith R. Walkowitz, is part of Yale's History list and has around two dozen illustrations, with some colour plates bound in the middle. So, they come out of different academic disciplines – history of art and cultural history – the books look different, they read very differently, but both are part of the resurgence of interest in modern London and its social and visual environment.

City of Gold and Mud works on the apparent paradoxes of Victorian London: the wealth and the poverty; the splendour and the squalor. In her introduction, the author emphasises the unique characteristics of British modernity, its attachment to and dependency on the historical past, its concern about the treatment of the poor and disadvantaged, and its anxiety about class and race and imperial ambitions. This much is clear; more difficult, however, is to account for the ways in which Victorian painters engaged with – or, possibly, disengaged from – these issues and debates. Marshall characterises the painting of this period as predominantly realist, an art ‘that encourages the viewer to believe that it “speaks for itself”, to forget that no painting is what it represents.’ (p. 3; emphasis in original). So, the paintings are not transparent illustrations of social change; they are more complex than that. Marshall is deeply committed to the complexity of Victorian painting as a way of rescuing it from its low status within the canon of modern European art. It is not straightforward, it is complicated, and its apparent simplicity masks a deep ambiguity that makes it as significant as abstract art: ‘the very intensity of their attempts to produce stable, transparent renderings of the world butted against their own limitations and revealed the anxieties of their producers’ (p. 3). It is difficult to argue with this reading of realism; it speaks of ambiguity and uncertainty and yet Marshall seems to offer a singular and fixed analysis. Complexity in art is good and it reveals anxiety. Would these paintings still be interesting if they revealed complacency or a sense of security? Whose anxiety is expressed and how do we know?

The book examines images of the public sphere (the author's terminology), rather than of domestic life. It avoids the subjects of the fallen woman and the Thames since they have already generated substantial analysis; it focuses on the spaces and representation of the crowd and of types within the crowd, but does not ‘lose sight of the pleasures of the aesthetic’ (p. 9). And in the end, it is those aesthetic pleasures that triumph, as the reader is drawn to pore over the rich and fascinating images that are reproduced in the book and that can be so easily overlooked or overread.

Judith Walkowitz's Nights Out takes up, chronologically, roughly where Marshall finishes, beginning in the 1890s and concluding in the 1950s. Walkowitz's London is topographically much more restricted than Marshall's city, focussing on the small number of streets in the area of Soho, in the centre of London. In the seventeenth century, it had been a mixed but fashionable neighbourhood, with a pattern of streets that included larger roads as well as courts and alleys. This blend of spaces continued into late-Victorian and Edwardian London, in spite of changes to the built environment and the social composition of Soho. The map, for Walkowitz, imposes a kind of order on an area that has always been ‘mobile’ and ‘fluid’ (p. 18).

The historical forces with which Walkowitz is primarily concerned are material and imaginative. She uses the phrase ‘imaginative construction’ to describe the diverse written, visual, and oral sources that she draws upon and, referring specifically to oral narratives, she writes: ‘their factual veracity may be less important than their imaginative construction – through fantasy, symbolism, and desire – of historical and recollected states of mind.’ (p. 10). This is a useful and evocative formulation, suggesting the work of the imagination in all kinds of historical representation. Not exactly Benjamin's ‘images in the collective consciousness’, but pointing to the imaginative work that is involved at all levels of historical reconstruction.

For Walkowitz, the heterogeneous population of Soho tells much more than a local story; it condenses and concentrates more general social and political histories. Thus a fascinating chapter on ‘The Italian Restaurant’ unravels the history of Italian immigration to England and the level of Fascist activities amongst the Italian colony in the interwar period. The story of one immigrant, Peppino Leoni, Soho's most prestigious restaurateur, becomes the filter for understanding ‘the material and social consequences of Fascism on London's urban spaces’ (p. 123). Not just a case study, Leoni becomes one of ‘our principal guides through Soho's culinary evolution and fractured political landscape’ (p. 94). What the reader is being offered here is a really fascinating methodology, in which the individual and the crowd are drawn into focus at different points and where close analysis is strategic and illuminating.

The rich and often picaresque cast that peoples Walkowitz's book includes businessmen, burglars, gangsters and movie stars, Jewish market stall holders and retailers, waitresses, and chorus girls. This array of cosmopolitan types is at its most vivid in the last two chapters on the nightclubs of Soho and specifically the Windmill Theatre. Unlike some of the more explicit and extreme displays of transgression of other Soho night spots, the Windmill catered for ‘1930s middlebrow suburban values in an urban setting’ (p. 254). It dealt in borderline eroticism and risqué respectability and was thus able to become a symbol of British national resilience during the Blitz, when it boasted ‘We Never Closed’. Walkowitz presents a subtle analysis of feminine style, dance, and choreography and the history of modern leisure spaces to situate the Windmill precisely within the ‘liminal geography’ of Soho and the West End.

Visual images are drawn into Walkowitz's narrative throughout the book. In the Windmill Theatre chapter, the reader is shown a photograph from the Sketch of Windmill girls washing and sleeping in their dressing rooms during an air-raid; an image that Walkowitz acutely identifies as a cross between a ‘shelter scene’ and a ‘pin up’. At times, and in contrast to Marshall's approach, the images are under-used and could withstand further analysis. A full-page reproduction of a photograph of a Jewish woman in Berwick Street Market in 1923 is defined in terms of the fashionability of working-class girls of the 1920s, but little is said about the source and dissemination of this image, or about whether this self-possessed young woman is one of the smart new working-class shoppers that Walkowitz describes, or ‘a ripe young Rebecca’ (1927) who worked on the stalls and in the stores of the predominantly Jewish market.

In the end, however, Walkowitz, is concerned less with ‘the visual’, than with ‘visualisation’; in making her diverse sources vivid and allowing them to do their work of the imagination. Here is an example, it comes in the chapter on ‘The Italian Restaurant’, when the author is describing the young and inexperienced Peppino Leoni watching wealthy English tourists dining in an upmarket Italian hotel:

These strangers always dressed for dinner: the men in evening jackets, the women in evening gowns and sparkling jewels. Peppino watched the progressive, hierarchical sequence of dishes unfold, accompanied by an intimate silver service of silent deferential waiters who assisted the guests in their bodily performances. (p. 95)

These ritualistic performances were far removed from Peppino's own food habits, but he recognised in them a style of ostentatious consumption that he would bring to London and make famous in his Soho restaurant, Quo Vadis. The account of the well-fed English tourists and their hushed, deferential Italian waiters is based on Leoni's autobiography, tourist handbooks, and recent cultural histories of continental dining, but Walkowitz wears this research lightly and uses it to visualise the style of dining and its impact on the young Italian entrepreneur who was later to become a formative part of interwar cosmopolitan Soho.

The point is this: rather than examining and interrogating visual images for complex signs of anxiety, we might consider the work of imagination and of visualisation in the many forms of historical material that we, as art historians, are inclined to work with. This, it could be argued, would be a discipline about the visual and visuality, where less can be more and 25 illustrations can say as much as 200.

Notes