Bloomsbury’s dead. Long live Hampstead

Lucy Davies discovers how Hepworth, Moore, Nash et al revolutionised British art in the leafy suburb in the 1930s

FCIRCLES AND SQUARES by Caroline Maclean 320pp, Bloomsbury, £30, ebook £25.20

or a short time in the 1930s, London – or more precisely the peaceful, leafy suburb of Hampstead – became a polestar for modern art. Within a knot of streets about a mile square lived some of the 20th century’s most influential minds: the artists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian, Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson; the art critic Herbert Read and the curator Jim Ede; Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus.

In Circles and Squares, the art historian Caroline Maclean brings this charged decade, in which a slice of London bohemia debated endlessly how best to live and love, and shook British art from its stupor in the process, to glowing life. Bar a handful of moments in which the narrative loses focus, she recreates beautifully the strange mix of buoyancy and instability that characterised the decade.

The title is a veiled salute to the modernist set of the 1920s: the writers, artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury

Group (Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell et al), whom the author Dorothy Parker quipped “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”. The book is loosely chronological, tripping from vorticism to abstraction and surrealism via some fairly tiresome-sounding minimovements in between. That said, there is a lot of circling back and forward in time to inflate each individual member of the cast. And while that is deftly done, it is baffling to have to wait until several chapters in before the premise of the book is made clear. Similarly, if the book is about north London, why begin it in Norfolk, and among characters who never reappear?

Hepworth and her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping, were first to spot Hampstead’s potential. The downturn of the 1920s had carved up many of its impeccably rambling old houses into lodgings and workspaces that cost little to rent. In 1928, they moved into Mall Studios, a row of sweet live/ work dwellings that in grander times had been state of the art studios for “gentlemen artists” to stroll across their gardens to after their kipper breakfasts.

The studios’ star attribute was a floor-to-ceiling, north-facing window, and Hepworth later described how happy she was to lie in bed on the mezzanine listening “to a blackbird singing in flight from tree to tree outside”.

The following year, she found digs for Moore (with whom she had studied at college) and his wife Irina, on nearby Parkhill Road. Here, over convivial games of shove ha’penny, the two sculptors bickered over who had thought to put a hole in their pieces first (in 1940, when Moore temporarily took over Hepworth’s studio, he admitted he struggled to tell their work apart).

Other artsy types followed: Nicholson, by now Hepworth’s lover, moved initially to Parkhill Road but soon joined her at

Mall Studios (while maintaining a relationship of sorts with his wife, Winifred – the book is full of open marriages and their fallout); the critic Herbert Read (chief champion of the new style epitomised by Hepworth and Nicholson) and his young girlfriend, Ludo (for whom he left his wife and child), and the architect Wells Coates, who livens the story up no end, ripping around Hampstead and Belsize Park in his Lancia Lambda and hosting Japanese dinners while sitting in the lotus position.

Coates, who was condemned to a thatch of crinkly hair that rose in pomade-drenched zigzags from his forehead, designed the Isokon Building on Lawn Road (near Parkhill), a curvilinear, white rendered apartment block that is considered a masterpiece of the international modernist style.

Gropius and the artists László Moholy Nagy and Paul Nash were among its tenants, and mostly great admirers of Coates’ interior design. He favoured white linoleum, fitted cupboards, and ingenious gadgetry (I covet the wireless that doubled as a cocktail cabinet), all of which was intended to free The People from the burden of clutter and chores, the better to turn their minds to politics, art and love. From 1937,

THEFT

inviting monsters into our hearts. Theft’s problem is that Paul is loathsome without ever being interesting, or inspiring empathy. His peccadilloes are modern clichés: he explains women’s political views back to them. He is intellectually arrogant. He is controlling, particularly of his sister, Amy, and of his two love interests, who happen to be stepmother and stepdaughter. Brown knows that Paul’s a rotter; a character who “hates good guys” while yearning to “be a better man”. But he’s just not compelling enough to get us on side: whether that omission is intentional or not is hard to tell.

What’s more, for a book at such pains to stress its relevance to contemporary life – the changing nature of journalism, millennials as “generation rent” – our protagonist is a little stale. Haven’t we had enough of white, straight male angst, from Updike, Amis, Amis Jr et al?

But just as you’re about to display your prejudices and fling the book across the room, Brown wins you back with a moment of utmost tenderness. When, say, Paul is carrying Emily over a puddle, he notices “how her legs felt against my arms, exactly how her body filled the small space it had in this world, in my arms, right there”. Or else, in his home town, a dying northern fishing port, where the LRB has no cachet and his erstwhile contemporaries work on oilrigs or in supermarkets, Paul recalls his late mother: “When I visited her at home in the summer we would walk along the beach to watch the sunset, standing at the limit of things, the tide out and the sun aflame in the little puddles left in the sand. You could trick yourself out there that endings were beautiful and reversible.” All is forgiven. Whether Brown means to stray this close to the edge is unclear.