Rith Cribb

The typographer, sculptor and engraver Eric Gill is a problematic and inconsistent character but there is no denying his skill, his vision or the remarkable clarity of his line.

This short British Museum Guide to his work, high in images and succinct in text, is as good an initial introduction as you will get – and it refuses, in the chapter on ‘The Body’, to deny Gill’s very sexual imagery its rightful place in his work.

Gill was one of the few Western artists who was able to make show more sexual drive an integral element in an aesthetic that could encompass the spiritual (he was a committed Catholic convert) and (though indirectly) the political (as a committed traditionalist).

Since Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of 1989 we have learned that his sexual drive was not absorbed by his work but was actual, involving not only many mistresses but his own daughters.

In our current culture he would have been exposed and jailed for a long time for the latter. Whether this affects how his work should be seen is a matter of fine judgement.

I reserve full judgement until I have read MacCarthy and understood the degree to which the sexual culture of his workshop and home was non-consensual and exploitative but we cannot pretend that we do not know what he did.

The superb erotic artistry cannot be denied – especially in the subtle eroticism of his illustrations for Chaucer and of scenes and images from The Bible.

Gill is not just about sex at all – he is also ‘about’ artisanal skill, typographical innovation and homage to the past as well as a cheeky subversion of his commercial patrons – but the clarity of line and his aesthetic of the erotic are what makes him interesting.

The Belle Sauvage III of 1929, engraved from a life drawing of one of his mistresses, is exquisite as are the ‘Naked Girl Lying on a Grass’ of 1924 and the Eves of 1926 and 1935. Works based on the theme of ‘ecstasy’ used the same forms for erotic and religious purposes.

The moral ambiguity of the superb Westminster Cathedral Stations of the Cross (1913-1916), being the work of an artist who slept with his own daughters, is in itself interesting.

I have not heard of any plans to remove them as ‘inappropriate’ probably because they are imbued with sincere Catholic spirituality.

But, while ‘In My Mother’s house’ of 1930 might have been seen innocently at the time, it looks less so now as Gill’s erotic imagination places the young man in sensual embrace with Mother Church.

Gill’s ability to take classic and medieval models and transform them into the institutional language of late British imperialism is only matched by Lutyens’ architecture. It is arguable that the Imperial Britain of the 1920s and 1930s was artistically a high point of Western culture.

This book is full of illustrations from a master whose work is the logical development of Arts & Crafts into a simplification of form and line in order to express the essential without excess decoration. It is, bluntly, beautiful.

His politics were as confused as his sexual ethics. What the book fails to bring out (due to lack of space) is the close link between the two. Aesthetics is a branch of politics.

Gill was deeply influenced by the traditionalist Ananda Coomaraswamy who brought a greater understanding of Hindu art to the West in the Edwardian era.

Gill’s anti-industrialism, anti-socialism and anti-capitalism not only led to his romantic adoption of Catholicism but represented a wider disillusionment with socialism within the artisanal movement.

Socialism (or rather Fabianism) became associated with a struggle over control over industrial modernisation rather than its curtailment. The new Labour Party may have rejected revolutionism but it did not reject planning, factories and bureaucracy.

The socialism of William Morris, Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter, with its orientation towards the personal , the small community and the libertarian, was displaced.

For Gill and others, the idea of a sexual and artistic freedom operating within a traditionalist spiritual framework offered a reasonable alternative, especially if the masses seemed always to need to have someone telling them what to do.

Thus a catholic critique of capitalism emerged and it was found attractive to disillusioned aesthetes who had no place in the ‘scientific’ labour movement concerned solely with redistributing wealth.

This was a European-wide phenomenon that seeded the fascist movements of the 1930s to greater or lesser degree.

It was expressed in Gill’s circle by the ideas of Father McNabb who offered an authoritarian distributism in which social inequality was regarded as reasonable to ensure economic ‘fairness’.

Petit-bourgeois writers like Belloc and Chesterton stood out against their scientific materialist counterparts, whether Marxist or Wellesian. Eric Gill was comfortable amongst their number – arguing against City and socialists alike.

It now strikes us as highly absurd or self-deluding that a sexual rebel should join the ranks of the Catholic Church but there was a certain logic in the decision when the official Left had proved itself as sexually prim and proper as any Calvinist.

The famous exchange between Lenin and Kollontai over free love probably represents the last time that sexual freedom was taken seriously as an option for the socialist Left. Gill’s clerical patrons made no totalitarian judgements on his eroticised religious imagery.

While family-oriented and condemnatory of sexual pleasures to the masses, this lack of totalitarian (as opposed to authoritarian) interference in private life and a general predisposition to silence about such matters predisposed the ‘sexual’ to the Right, and not without reason.

When we look at German rightism in the 1920s, we see a cultural struggle between the gay-hating Hitler and the militarised homosexual culture of parts of the SA reaching its brutal crescendo with the Night of the Long Knives.

The victory of Hitler’s ‘modernisers’, however, tells us that there was something to be victorious over – and the defeated Rightists were both ‘catholic working class socialists’ (represented by the ideas of the Strassers) and representatives of freebooting licentiousness (represented by Rohm).

The crushed alternative to the black shirts had owed a great deal to Catholic social distributism and to the rough and ready tolerance of the trenches.

A theme of this period in history is thus one of the steady repression of sexual dissent under economic modernisation and war under both fascisms and socialisms.

Indeed, the revival of the more authoritarian aspects of the church, alongside an emergence of a triumphant liberal modernism outside the Communist bloc, even came to infect the democracies as Catholic morality allied with the rising democratic and anti-communist Left.

Eric Gill is thus an interesting and subversive cultural figure during a key period of European modernity, one who was lucky to live in a culture of tolerance and of blind eyes - or rather of refusals to see.

We mentioned at the start of the review that, today, he would have gone to prison and labelled a sex offender. The loss of his excellent body of work would rightly be regarded as a small price to pay if his children were protected from rape – if indeed things were that simple.

The contemporary ‘silencio’ surrounding sexuality (we think also of the underground homosexual and bisexual culture amongst the Edwardian middle classes) is thus interesting as undercurrent to Gill's aesthetic.

It is clear that religious figures in the English Catholic Church tolerated Gill’s spiritual eroticism and took pleasure in his commissions. They accepted the eroticism at face value and they asked no questions.

This ‘silencio’ contrasted favourably with the vicious psychological terrorism of official Marxism.

If it looks less attractive now that we know the extent of sexual abuse by figures of authority within the Church – a scandal that continues to unfold – that does not make it less attractive than the sexual repression and bullying of the evangelical and scientific materialists of the Left.

As we look back on this era, we see two disturbing cultures competing for territory then as now. One sublimates the sexual into a faux-spirituality where it festers into crime. The other denies sexuality and creates a culture of mass neurosis.

Perhaps one of the few figures to see this for what it was in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s was also at his intellectual peak in the same period – Wilhelm Reich.

Reich saw the intensity of the sexual neuroses that were being sublimated and, as a Marxist and as a Freudian but unlike all other Marxists and Freudians, he refused to pretend that these neuroses would just go away with good governance or talking cures without a social aspect.

What happened to him is a tragic tale of increasing eccentricity and lack of focus that eventually left him to die of a heart attack in a US Federal Prison but his original insights have still to be incorporated into our social policies.

His adoption by the self-centred new Age culture of America who forgot his real insights, that sexual neurosis was both personal and socially conditioned, had the same diversionary effect on the New Left that Timothy Leary’s impatient espousal of altered states of consciousness was to have.

Gill, on the other hand, did not rebel and he prospered.

Claiming to a sacred sexuality (which is a reasonable enough proposition), he followed a pattern that would be called abusive today.

Claiming to be heir to the individualism of arts & crafts aesthetics, he ran a prosperous workshop with assistants.

Claiming to be a rebel, he took commissions from the greatest institutions in the land, with only sly cowardly subversions as his jokes for posterity.

It was as if he was the type of the narcissist.

And yet, and yet ... Gill is a truly great artist and aesthetician, proof that the good and the beautiful are not necessarily the same thing. His work is stunning and he is likely to rise in esteem (artistically) rather than fall despite his oh-so-human weaknesses. show less

Oh Eric Gill. I like the influence of twelfth-century art on his work, but sometimes it seems a bit on the fascist side. And then there's the incest. This book doesn't skate over that, and has a lot of his very rude things in. The book goes with a little exhibition currently on in the British Museum.