Peter Wollen

Art catalogues have drifted away from being simple accessories to exhibitions and become instead strange hybrid forms somewhere between cultural studies primers and coffee-table books. They provide both an intellectual commentary, written by academics, journalists and art-world figures, and a comprehensive set of colour reproductions of the works in a show, taken by specialised photographers. From a practical point of view they are freebies for the press, commodities to be sold in the museum store and in the wider world, promotion tools for the museum and the artists and, perhaps most important of all, they endow exhibitions with a durable after-life in libraries, both private and public. The catalogue for Sensation, the show of works by young British artists from the Saatchi collection, currently on view at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, runs over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd. It has five catalogue essays, several pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an apparatus of dates and dimensions. The cover design of the book is not drawn from the works on display in the show but was produced for the book by a design company. It is as vivid and arresting as the artworks documented inside, perhaps even more so.

Yeats had no doubt how and when the fatal blow was struck. In his memoirs, he noted that ‘the condemnation of Wilde had brought ruin upon a whole movement in art and letters.’ Yeats himself was fortunate that the Celtic Revival, which ran in close tandem with Decadence, had special resources of its own. Two of the great iconic victims of the social purity movement, the repressive engine of Late Victorianism, were themselves Irish – Parnell and Wilde – and Yeats was able to incorporate their tragedies into his heroic narrative of Irish nationalism. Moreover, as Yeats himself pointed out, his own circle – the poets of the Rhymers’ Club – were too marginal to be significantly affected by the Wilde verdict. They only aimed to sell three hundred copies and wrote ‘for the smaller public that has knowledge and is undisturbed by popular feeling’.’

My first thoughts, in connection with suits, are of Lucky Lucan, Joseph Beuys and the Thin White Duke, at the head of an imaginary horde of accountants, dandies, clubland heroes, zoot-suiters and funeral directors. It has taken me some time to realise that the question of suits is indeed a crucial question, not only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history. My slow awakening may well be typical. Whatever their knowledge of the great dress designers – from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Schiaparelli to Westwood and Miyake – I do not think that many people could name a great tailor or men’s clothes designer who flourished before the Fifties, before Brioni and Cardin and Armani succeeded in wresting the hegemony from Savile Row. Yet Savile Row dominated male fashion for more than a century, just as the rue de la Paix has dominated female fashion. Tailors have never been given the credit that has gone to couturiers. They have stayed in the shadows, sitting cross-legged or wielding their tape-measures in traditional obscurity.’

In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes. Williams also noted the importance of the Imperial bureaucracy in this tangle, especially the top echelons of the administration of India. Finally, he characterised Bloomsbury as an upper-class ‘fraction’, which turned against its own class without identifying itself with the subaltern classes and peoples, except insofar as it saw them as ‘victims’. This fraction played an important ‘liberalising’ and ‘modernising’ role, producing ‘adaptations’ rather than ‘basic changes’. It was against the ‘dominant ideas and values’ of the English upper class, while ‘still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it’.

In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes and design for an innovative production of Twelfth Night. Grant completed the commission, using fabrics from the Omega Workshop for the costumes, and went over to Paris the following February to attend rehearsals and install his work. While there he was taken to Picasso’s studio by Gertrude Stein, a visit which led to him bringing Picasso some rolls of old wallpaper which he had found abandoned in his hotel room, so that Picasso could use them for his collages. Thus Blooms-bury played its part.