I managed the Giotto, the Mantegna, the Poussin. Then I was shown an elegant scoop of doorway. A strangely familiar arts and crafts entrance to some public building. Was it Berlin? Vienna? I didn't know. "Sorry." Bowness smiled. He wouldn't hold it against me that I couldn't identify the Whitechapel Gallery on Whitechapel High Street. That marvel of inspired patronage, by Canon Barnett and his wife Henrietta, was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend and built in 1901. Barnett believed that exposure to fine art would help to eradicate the local viruses of poverty and ignorance. Coming off the seething street, into this challenging space, would inculcate a sense of civic responsibility and inspire the adoption of values of the other world. With an obvious but unspoken subtext: move on, move out.
The formal balance, the managed volume, that understated decorative band, holds such promise. Vegetative detail is a subtle link with the adjacent library. The Passmore Edwards Library was designed in 1892 by Potts, Sulman and Hennings. The entrance hall featured a panelled remembrance of the hay market, wagons trundling into town by way of Whitechapel High Street. Pastoral emblems invoked a romantic notion of place, the passage of hops to thriving breweries.
Angela Carter has described the disturbing strangeness of finding herself on the north side of the Thames, as she stepped out from Aldgate East station, with its memories of blitz-era sleepers. "Everything was different ... sharp, hard-nosed, far more urban ... People spoke differently, an accent with clatter and spikes to it ... The streets were different - wide, handsome boulevards, juxtaposed against bleak, mean, treacherous lanes and alleys ... I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End."
The Whitechapel Gallery has always drawn culture speculators into territory where they are tempted, in a fashion as blinkered as my own failure to recognise a much-loved landmark, to patronise the aspirations of the place to which they have ventured. Michael Holroyd, writing about Mark Gertler - one of the artists featured in The Whitechapel Boys, a launch exhibition for the renovated gallery, which has expanded into the old library - restates the established Bloomsbury position when faced with unmapped eastern parts (anywhere on the wrong side of Grays Inn Road). "Gertler spent a miserable childhood in the slums of Whitechapel." The now demolished Spital Square was no slum, and properties in Elder Street where Gertler also lived and worked are, even now, worth a million or more. Gertler's mother proudly pinned to the wall of her kitchen the letter of encouragement sent to her precocious son by Sir William Rothenstein. The child artist had the support of his family; the bite of poverty didn't devour him until he came into contact, after the Slade School of Art, with comfortable Bloomsbury bohemia, its effortless malice and reflex snobbery.
Racehorses (1913) by David Bomberg
Banknotes in the post, or penitential weekends in the country, were another kind of venom, a method for asserting social superiority. Lytton Strachey, the elongated and stork-like object of obsession for Gertler's lover Dora Carrington, was prepared to buy paintings for which he did not care: as a way of asserting the privilege of being able to do it. "You are an artist," he wrote to the handsome East End boy, "and being that is worth more than all the balances at all the banks in London." Wyndham Lewis, unpersuaded by such sophistry, reviewed Gertler's memorial exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in July 1949. He regretted the location, reading this homecoming as an eviction from the hub of metropolitan culture. Was it not a crime to show important work "where few people will see it"? Few of the right people, obviously. Gertler, according to Lewis, "gassed himself, quite simply because no one would buy his pictures, and he had no money".
Bitterness festered among many of the heroically self-regarding, undervalued and slighted Whitechapel painters. They were not a manifesto group, though many of them were friends, fellow walkers who welcomed their neighbourhood gallery as a site in which to promote their own undoubted genius. David Bomberg, an inspiration to Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, was just 24 when he selected the Jewish section of a substantial Whitechapel Gallery survey called Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements in 1914. As the art historian Juliet Steyn has pointed out, making race a category now looks like a device for sanitising a ghetto within the ghetto. The fracture of modernism was foreign to the English temperament; it was hysterical, perverse, psychotic in form and colour. A Jewish conspiracy in which these Whitechapel Jews colluded. If Bomberg's work was "tainted" by abstraction and the kind of ground-breaking attack that drew the attention of Lewis and the vorticists, he repudiated any such alliance.
While the Whitechapel Gallery fulfilled its mission statement, and brought in nervous socialites from elsewhere, the Passmore Edwards Library was celebrated as "the university of the ghetto". A myth that should be treated with caution. As Arnold Wesker, who grew up in neighbouring Fashion Street, said: "It's a trap the East End, to be sentimental and full of cosy longing for 'the good old days' ... hoarding the past as though it were food for a time of famine." The history of longing projected into the dark recesses of the library was too much of a burden for the building to sustain. The secular synagogue where Isaac Rosenberg rubbed shoulders with Gertler, and the poet John Rodker plotted bombshell books alongside Jacob Bronowski and the Yiddish visionary Avram Stencl, is the best kind of fable. It's true where it needs to be. Argument between study partners was an orthodox Jewish tradition, the business of library rooms where poets met and tested passionate alliances and strategic friendships. Image-making for the adjoining gallery was unorthodox, heretical, a passport of difference. Not all the potential writers from the warren were as elevated in their interests. Emanuel Litvinoff recalls, in Journey Through a Small Planet, how, aged 15, he was sacked from his job and spent his days "in the public library reading detective stories".
The body of this building, its dark hallway, the magnificent staircase with decorative iron balustrade, composed its own fictions. The latest of which, The Whitechapel Boys, lays out a coherent and attractive memory map. The "rescued" room in which this happens seems to bask in its recovery from somewhere worse than death: disregard, irrelevance. The heritage treacle of festering nostalgia and bureaucratic neglect. Now, thanks to the £13.5m development package, and the good will and good offices of a team of curators, architects, imaginers and technicians, the light of the real pours in through restored windows. The dimensions of the archival gallery are properly modest. The long Victorian library tables, admired by Rachel Lichtenstein in her fond survey On Brick Lane, have been retained. The walls of "a sickly lime-yellow colour with bits of grey concrete peering through in diseased patches" have been improved and given a contemporary radiance. Research materials sit on unthreatening shelves in a glass-screened area that encourages the student to cast a relieving gaze at the artworks exhibited on the far wall.
The curator, Nayia Yiakoumaki, offers a group of drawings with a narrow tonal range - old tobacco, dead-photograph sepia, foxed paper - to invoke the spirit of the lost library. A ghostly response to an overwhelming density of cloth and leather and dust: the dispersed language hoard. These images float, unshelved, a history of words and ideas that have decided not to congeal into books. The processional robed figures in Jacob Kramer's Day of Atonement (1919) appear, from the distance of the research room, to be wrapped books, spectral volumes stacked together like the reversed library of Rachel Whiteread's Judenplatz memorial. Kramer has moved the realism of Rothenstein's paintings of the Spitalfields Synagogue, such as Kissing the Law (1906), towards hieratic abstraction. Rothenstein's son, John, was to accuse another Whitechapel Boy, Gertler, of betraying his Jewish roots and inspiration and thereby succumbing to "tortured self-doubt and ultimate suicide".
The Gertler chosen by Yiakoumaki fits the muted colour scheme of the frieze of drawings that represent the "people of the book". Rabbi and the Ribbintzin (1914) is sombre, sculptural in its modelling, domestic: on the edge of modernism, but still within a kitchen consciousness, human shapes echoing teapots and loaves of bread. Gertler gestured towards his inheritance in a way that his Bloomsbury patrons could still approve. There was enough of the mediated primitivism, but none of the savage, gypsy abandon over which they would later tut in their teacups. They required him to look like a curly-headed, impetuous pirate, but not to paint like one. Even DH Lawrence, excited by Gertler's Merry-Go-Round (1916), called it "terrifying" and "obscene".
Yiakoumaki's fastidious hang catches a significant moment, as her Whitechapel Boys (joined on this occasion by Clare Winsten, née Clara Birnberg) evolve from traditional to modernist, from representation to abstraction. The artists are all Jewish; a number of them featured in Bomberg's selection at the Twentieth Century Art show. There are unemphatic correspondences and collisions: the theatrical groupings of Winsten's Attack (1910) carrying through to the weightless "flow of form" in Bomberg's Racehorses (1913). A tangled geometry of rearing beasts who seem to have been startled by the noise of Jacob Epstein's vorticist Study for The Rock Drill. (Epstein was included in the Twentieth Century Art exhibition, but was not placed in the Jewish section.)
Linking word and image, library and gallery, Yiakoumaki uses a limited number of display cases to present treasures to make any book dealer go weak at the knees: manuscripts, letters, drawings casually stored by surviving relatives of the artists. Here is a copy of Rosenberg's self-published booklet of poems from 1915, Youth, with a pencilled dedication to Gertler. Here is the much-amended typescript of Winsten's unreliable memoir, in which the Whitechapel Boys circle around her in hypnotised fascination.
It all began on the wide pavements, with the famous Saturday-night "monkey parade", when buffed and polished gaggles of youths and young women sauntered and gossiped, flirted and disputed. The drift was west towards the City and the Bank of England, down to the river, to Tower Bridge, and back like newly arrived "greeners" to Whitechapel. There were darker expeditions, too: Wilfred Owen came like a sleepwalker, shortly before leaving for France for the last time, to find Rosenberg on his own turf. The smell of the bodies, the coffee stalls, the open-doored public houses, alarmed and aroused him.
When Angela Carter travelled across the river, it was to visit the Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley, a beacon of anarchism. I remember one night in the late 60s bringing a Dutch Provo here and discovering, on the other side of the yard, where the new Whitechapel Gallery has its smart café, a warehouse space in which packed bodies, lit by lamps and candles, slept on mattresses. The performance artist Brian Catling staged his first shamanic manifestation in the same space, a "Miltonic Ghost Dance" in which wax dripped from treated light bulbs on to open books.
The reimagined gallery and library shame the monolithic and self-serving developments that are currently invading east London in advance of the 2012 Olympics. There is a respect for memory, for the skein of historic narrative that is unbroken, as well as a necessary opening out of space, new windows on the surrounding panorama of corporate greed and reefs of threatened ghetto. It is astonishing, but true, that a pair of forcibly conjoined buildings can live up to all their PR boasts. "The century-old institution is the artists' gallery for everyone," claims Iwona Blazwick, the gallery's director. In the early 70s, I worked with Catling in the ullage cellars of Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. We strolled in off the street and asked if we could have a room in which to show our work, as local poets, painters, myth-makers. "Why not?" they said. The small gallery where Albion Island Vortex was exhibited no longer exists. It was the space given to Bomberg's Jewish section for the Twentieth Century Art survey in 1914.
Text by Iain Sinclair for the "Whitechapel Boys" exhibition at Whitechapel gallery,
Curated by Nayia Yiakoumaki
The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009
