This now-forgotten female artist suspended time and space in these uncanny works of Classical Modernism
The style known as Classical Modernism boomed in Europe between 1919 and 1939.
Billed as “reactionary” and “escapist” by some critics, it was a movement characterised by the “Return to Order” which broke away from the abstraction of Cubism to champion instead new works of figurative art and a renaissance of the classical values in Western civilisation.
This new movement manifested itself in many different ways — including loose approximations of what classical art had once looked like centuries before, leading to a divergence in aesthetic styles.
One style known as the pastiche came in vogue as naive reinterpretations of classical art flourished.
Return to craft! It will not be an easy thing. It will take time and hard word… When it comes to matter and skill, Futurism has given the final blow to Italian painting…With the downfall of the hysterical, more than one painter will return to craft, and those who have already understood will be able to work with freer hands. — Giorgio de Chirico, Valori Plastici, 1919
This new movement was politically charged and was spearheaded by the already established posterboys of modernism including Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger and Giorgio De Chirico.
One lesser known artist who slipped through the cracks was a young British artist Winifred Knights…
In 1920, Knights (1899–1947) won the Prix de Rome for a work called ‘The Deluge’ which blended the classical and the modern in a way that defied the laws of space and time.
Her modernism sought to proffer reactionary values and visual anachronisms in distinctly modern works of art that took the viewer down the rabbit hole into the uncanny.
She took the traditions of folkloric, decorative painting that existed in Britain up to this point and fused them with disruptive, self-conscious modernist aesthetics to create a style of art that was then and is still today, totally unique.
Her work occupies a place in a time of flux, punititive self-reflection and socio-cultural malaise as ther German commanders signed the Treaty of Versailles and the mechanised horrors of the war gradually began to reveal themselves to the public at large.
The war ends; everything is ordered — Amédée Ozenfant, Après le Cubisme
Traditionally, the immediate post-war years in British art had concerned itself with a distinctly male reconciliation of the world around him, following his harrowing experiences in Europe.
Classical Modernism, with its cal authority, meticulous compositions and rich ornament was the soothing band-aid that tried to impose order on the chaos that had engulfed Western civilisation from 1914–1918.
Knights had been under the tutelage of Henry Tonks — a professor at the Slade school between 1892 and 1930. Her early work at the school was conventional and unremarkable but in 1920 she turned a corner…
The work received rapturous applause for blending a biblical tale with the jarring, angular forms of post-war modernism.
Taking the subject of the flood that engulfed earth and wiped the majority of living creatures of the face of the earth — the painting struck a chord on two levels.
Knights had watched as German Zeppelins bombed her London suburb of Streatham in 1917 and was afflicted with PTSD from the trauma for the rest of her life.
In a tightly packed frame, clustered figures scramble for higher ground, reaching skywards in dismay as the sludge of industrial colours around them create an allegorical dystopia.
The austerity of colour in muted browns, moss green and gunmetal grey only adds to the terror-scape that Knights has created.
Her prize for the work was five years of study in Italy to build on her craftmanship and study the art of the Quattrocento on site.
The idea being that the recipients of this prize would return to Britain to execute public art art in the Italian style.
Nostalgic art and the pastiche was always meant as a tribute to the past but in the age of Fascism it became ideologically dangerous.
Classicism in particular was bent towards Totalitarian regimes; whether communist or fascist and contemporary artists of Knights often fell victim to these corrupting influences in the emergence of Mussolini...
But Knight’s work stood on its own two feet but still fell victim to the obscurity that the poisoned chalice of the Prix de Rome caused artists on several occasions.
Knights’ teacher Tonks would later tell the artist Rex Whistler specifically not to apply for the Prix de Rome on the basis that it was for an artist a burial ground for two to three years and that success afterwards was improbable.
Whilst in Rome Knight’s produced her next large format work:
In the Marriage at Cana, the bridal party witness the miracle of water turning into wine in front of Jesus. Jesus stands awkwardly to the right, not the centre of attention as he is usually shown to be.
The party are waiting — the event hasn’t happened yet.
We are frozen in time, anticipating the moment with a steadfast gaze, eyes squinting, hands clenched…
The aura is one of disquiet and the style of the painting only adds to it.
The grid-like composition flattens the perspective, like an old photograph; otherworldly and metaphysical.
Bright pink watermelon sits on the plates in front of the diners.
It feels out of place…
Their gaunt feet dangle from the bench, not quite touching the ground.
In the forest out the back there are people resting; one reads a book, the sleeps by the water, his straw hat resting on his face; they are oblivious to the miracle that is about to take place.
When she returned to England in 1925, Knights had become increasingly discontent in her search for perfectionism.
As her health declined she struggled with commissions for frescoes around the country and as a result finished very few projects.
The Santissima Trinita (1924–30) is one of the last complete works she produced.
In the fields below, a gang of female pilgrims take rest in the shadows of the hillside.
Here, unusually for Knights, the landscape predominates the subjects.
Knights had been studying Renaissance mural cycles during her time in Vallepietra, Orvieto and Pediluco and recorded the vast landscapes she saw along the way, unchanged for millennia.
It was a return to the order of the past in the most literal sense.
There is an ethereal tranquility in this painting.
It does not have the adrenaline-infused trauma of The Deluge, nor the hyper-consciousness and attention to detail of The Marriage at Cana.
If it weren’t for the contemporary blue parasols, in vogue with travelling ladies of a middle-class background at this time, and the muted pastel clusters of amorphous land it could all too easily be a B-roll from the Renaissance.
During her short-lived career, Knights’ branch of Classical Modernism invited the spectator into a suspended conception of temporal space — a retreat from the tensions of the world around her.
With one eye on the future and one irrevocably fixed on the past, she bridged the the physical and the metaphyiscal worlds like a magician performing a slight of hand trick that never ends…
Ultimately her limited number of works, and inevitably her role as a female artist operating in a world of male artists, has affected her reputation.
Nonethless she is an artist whose work deserves to be seen in a new age of self-reflection and global disruption…
Freddie Kift
I write about flow states, conscious travel, and navigating the lived experience.
