From Ruskin to Nietzsche: Michael Sadler and the Leeds Arts Club
Tom Steele, University of Glasgow
Whitechapel Gallery 14 Nov. 2013.
Prologue/synopsis
Barnsley born, but by 1911 very much a metropolitan intellectual, Michael Sadler (pp 2) arrived in
Leeds with a reputation as probably the leading educationalist in Britain. He brought with him one of
the largest and most progressive private collections of contemporary paintings of any British
collector. Many of these were hung around the walls of the university and for many students these
were their first contact with ‘Modern Art’. Following in the footsteps of Nathan Bodington, the first
Vice Chancellor of the University of Leeds, formed only seven years previously, his professional
project was to complete the task Bodington had begun of transforming the young university into a
leading educational and cultural centre. Much of his time was spent in cultivating local societies,
making close links with industrialists to endow professorial chairs and create scholarships and
encouraging whatever cultural talent he found in the wasteland of Leeds, then thought of as one of
the ugliest towns in Britain. He appointed many new lecturers and Professors, often from the
university extension movement pioneered by Oxford and Cambridge in which he had played a
leading role. He dramatically expanded the humanities departments in what was hitherto a largely
technical and medical teaching institution. His art collection and charisma attracted the challenging
art critic, Frank Rutter, (pp3) to the post of Director of Leeds Art Gallery and together they turned
the Leeds Arts Club into the foremost provincial centre for the promotion and practice of postimpressionist painting and theory. Were the educationalist and the arts patron at one with each
other? This paper attempts to demonstrate that the patron was also the educator and that the
educationalist was trying to revolutionise the local and national culture. He was a both the Ruskinian
who would leave ‘no Giotto among the sheepfolds’ and the Nietzschean Modern for whom the
‘intense and silent power of dynamos and turbines’ were a vital element of a futurist aesthetic.
Education
Michael Sadler arrived in Leeds in 1911, battered but unbowed. His ambitions to lead the Board of
Education in reforming British education had been politically rebuffed. Academic life was a kind of
compensation for lack of actual policy making power, although his detailed reports to local
authorities over secondary education in the wake of the 1902 Education Act had resulted in
widespread change. His frustrated political ambitions nevertheless threw him into deep and
prolonged depressions during which he profligately spent his wife Mary’s dowry on paintings.
Fortunately, as the daughter of the wealthy Quaker Barnsley linen maker, Charles Harvey, Mary was
for the most part content to indulge him and during his breaks from academic study and report
writing, he would sink himself in the art markets of Europe. From these he would emerge with the
occasional Gauguin, van Gogh and Cezanne and a host of other talents now less celebrated but well
thought of at the time. His taste was catholic, ranging from British water colourists like Cotman, to
Turner and Constable landscapes to Dutch and French post-impressionists and he seems to have
1
been well guided by his dealers and his son, Michael, who introduced him to the work of the Russian
post-impressionist, Wassily Kandinsky.
The coexistence of radical views on education and art in Sadler could be dated to his school days at
Rugby and as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. At Rugby he was immersed in Thomas
Arnold ‘s atmosphere of ‘Puritan radicalism’, which boiled to down to an intense concern with
critical thinking and social reform. Although he remained loyal to his father’s Gladstonian liberalism
throughout his life, Sadler grew close to and, for the most part, sympathetic with the socialist
reformers he later met in his adult education work. At Oxford, he came under the influence of the
philosophical idealism of T. H. Green and the ethic of public service promoted from Balliol by
Benjamin Jowett. But he was utterly intoxicated by the lectures of John Ruskin, (pp4) mixing to
explosive effect aesthetics, art history and political economy. Ruskin’s lectures were for him
‘inexpressibly splendid. Like seeing a jewel talking to coals in a coal hole’ (quoted in Oliver, 1963: 5).
Ruskin, Sadler told a WEA audience in Leeds in 1913, ‘(w)ould allow no bar of humble birth to shut
out a lad of genius from the training which would fit him for leadership and honoured rule. He
warned us to leave no Giotto among the sheepfolds’ (Sadler, 1913). But Ruskin’s refusal to separate
artistic production and enjoyment from public health and welfare gained him few friends amongst
his Oxford colleagues, many of whom regarded him as merely a publicist and showman. But he was
quickly absorbed by the growing ‘working class movement’. Few thoughtful workers who attended
university extension classes or committed themselves to cooperative and trade union activities
could be found without a well-thumbed copy of Ruskin’s Unto This Last on their shelves. In the West
Riding the liberal papers of Leeds and Bradford had devoted many column inches publishing and
debating his work (Hardman, 1986). To be a Ruskinian was to embrace the cause of radical progress.
Not surprisingly, Sadler threw himself into the cause of University Extension, the movement begun
by James Stuart in Cambridge in 1873 and then taken up by Oxford as a kind of ‘peripatetic
university’ to extend the benefits of university learning to working people. Sadler became the
Secretary to Oxford’s Delegacy, the department set up by the university to carry out extension work,
in 1885, the same year as he married Mary Harvey. He also became the editor of its journal, the
University Extension Gazette, which he edited with a remarkable concern for the comparative
development of educational activities elsewhere in Europe and the USA, which was to become a
hallmark of his approach to educational reform. Sadler was pre-eminently a European and an
internationalist who believed that although education was a national issue, educationally backward
Britain had much to learn from developments elsewhere. The university extension movement was,
moreover, serviced by many passionate idealists, like R.H. Tawney and Alexander Lindsay who would
become the leading voices in educational reform over the next few decades (Lowe, 2007).
Pre-eminent among Sadler’s own courses of extension lectures was one on the ‘Future of the
Working Classes’, in which he approved of Marx’s analysis of the evils of the capitalist system but
criticised his lack of an alternative to it (Lindsay took much the same line in his Glasgow
University/WEA classes to the ILP in Clydebank twenty years later (Lindsay 1925). Sadler approvingly
witnessed the formation of the WEA in 1903 as the Association for the Promotion of Higher
Education for the Working Man (Fieldhouse, 1996: 46-47). In the same year Sadler became
convinced of the absolute urgency for reforming secondary education. His recommendation to the
Board of Education for, an essentially hierarchical, tripartite system of secondary education
2
consisting of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools, though not entirely original,
remained the basis for the structure of secondary education until Labour’s introduction of
Comprehensive education in 1965i.
In 1911 Leeds University was still a fairly raw new institution. (pp4) Although it had been the third
member, alongside Owen’s College Manchester and Liverpool College, of the Victoria University and
had a long standing Medical School and the Yorkshire Wool College, it had suffered by comparison
with the other members. When Manchester and Liverpool decided to break away and become
independent universities, Leeds stalled, knowing that there was insufficient local funding for its own
independence from hard-headed Yorkshire business men. Moreover, Leeds was heavily
technologically based and many argued that universities were not the appropriate institution for this
kind of education. Indeed in Leeds many classes seemed, as one observer put it , to amount to no
more than watching little bits of fabric boiling in little pots’ (quoted in Shimmin, 1954: 19). Many
had agreed also with Benjamin Jowett that the ‘older’ universities had a responsibility to humanise
the local college movement.
Sadler’s appointment in 1911 was something of a gamble. Although he was feted as a leading
educationalist, he was an outsider and socially an unknown quantity. A cause célèbre because of the
Morant debacle a few years (Morant was his junior at the Ministry of Education who was promoted
by the incoming Tory government over his head as Secretary for Education), with arty leanings and
most definitely not a technologist, he was regarded with suspicion by local industrialists and many
on the university senate. Moreover, Leeds City Council had withheld its grant two years earlier
because it was not convinced the interests of the city were being well-served but the university while it made plain that far too many sons of the wealthy actually were. Undaunted, Sadler swiftly
set about trying to make the university a centre of learning, expanding its size, widening access,
enhancing town and gown relations and securing its funding through increased government grantaiding. Out of his office, he systematically cultivated local authority leaders and business leaders,
encouraged cultural activities, founded or rejuvenated clubs like the Leeds Arts Club, involved
himself in the WEA, supported charities and generally made himself indispensable to Leeds civic life.
Within the university, he established more chairs in the humanities and science and established new
departments in languages . Convinced by the Oxbridge model of collegiate fellowship, he established
new halls of residence including the first for women, Oxley Hall, and instituted the first staff
student committee, (it lapsed under Sadler’s successor, James Baillie, and was unknown in 1968
when student occupiers demanded the same). Pedagogically, Sadler was sceptical of the value of
lectures and encouraged a tutorial system, with closer staff-student relationships and more private
study time. He wanted students to read, think and debate, to broaden their horizons from narrow
curricular matters and take an interest in the social and cultural world around them. He lectured the
students on the need for Truth, Beauty and Art, established the mid-day concerts (which still survive)
and hung much of his private collection around the walls and corridors of the university, challenging
to students to notice them and engage with them.
But he did not neglect the university’s base in science and technology. During his study of German
education carried out when Director of Special Inquiries for the Board of Education, Sadler had been
impressed by the way technical and moral education had been brought together and, with his
colleague Arthur Smithells, he energetically pursued the academic argument for the inclusion of
technological study and its harmonisation with the humanities in a university. In this he marked out
3
some of the defining territory of the northern civic universities and rehearsed an argument for a
modernised liberal studies that would test those who could only see an unbridgeable gap between
arts and sciences. Later, in a lecture at Columbia University in New York in 1930, Sadler pushed his
views a stage further. He developed what Higginson called an idea of a ‘liberating’ education:
We believe that that a liberal education is a discipline of body, mind and spirit; a discipline
which is not only individual but communal... (which) subtends the arc of life from nursery to
old age. We perceive that the presence of a liberal education is not signified exclusively by
any label, certificate or academic degree; above all that a liberal education does not consist
in the absorption of inert ideas in cramming for an examination (quoted in Higginson, 1994:
463)
This was a bold restatement of the classical argument for liberal studies for modern times which
significantly prepared the path for the humanisation of national education in the post Second World
War settlement. It is precisely this vision that Michael Gove and his fellow Gradgrinds are currently
so energetically unravelling (though New Labour functionalists should also shoulder some of the
blame).
Part Two: Art
A second aspect of Ruskin’s advocacy absorbed by Sadler was what he saw as ‘spirituality’. Sadler
was a devout Christian and believed his own vocation in education was, as Tawney noted, a kind of
missionary work. He believed that underlying all appearances and outward show of life and art there
lay a deeper reality or what he would have called ‘spiritual truth’. Thus while education had to
nurture the student’s soul and enable them to gain a deeper understanding, rather than simply
filling them with facts, so art had to inspire and enrich this vision. Hence as well as satisfying the
senses, art had a vital educational role. In this aspect some might say that Sadler was probably doing
no more than expressing the advanced late Victorian liberal sympathies of Ruskin and Morris. But
he went a stage further and added a Nietzschean spin derived from Orage at the Leeds Arts Club
(Steele, 1990). Ruskin’s nineteenth-century realist aesthetic, he said, could no longer be relied upon
to interpret the emerging post-Victorian world because he (Ruskin) couldn’t see the changes in
aesthetic perception that the modern industrial world was bringing. Sadler clarified his difference
with Ruskin in a highly-charged futurist moment: (pp6)
He failed to see that for us moderns strength and power show themselves in the great arms
of travelling cranes, in the gossamer beauty of scaffolding, in the gaunt severity of
Lancashire mill sheds and in the intense and silent power of dynamos and turbines. Where
there is force, there is beauty (Sadler, 1913).
Sadler’s new vision was developed in the context of a remarkable avant-garde organisation ,the
Leeds Arts Club (ppp7) It was founded by a number of artists teachers and journalists in 1903,
including the architect A J Penty, the journalist Holbrook Jackson (pp8) and especially a young
schoolteacher called Alfred Orage who by 1911 when Sadler arrived was achieving a legendary
reputation as the editor of the capital’s most iconoclastic cultural journal The New Age. (pp9)
4
In the 1890s, when Orage arrived in Leeds as an elementary school teacher he enthusiastically
joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) which had just been formed in Bradford with Leeds
socialists Tom Maguire and John Lincoln Mahon playing leading roles. The ILP was the baptismal
forerunner to the Labour Party. Ruth Livesey claims the ILP diverged from previous socialist groups
such as the SDF and Socialist League in its concern for beauty and love. This attracted many women
adherents to what was largely hitherto a men’s occupation of socialist politics. These included the
Ford sisters from a leading Leeds Quaker family (pp10). Isabella Ford’s novel On the Threshold had
attracted Orage’s sympathy for its critique of masculinity and her pamphlet ‘Women and Socialism’
was widely influential. Much of this first wave feminisms passed into the Club where Isabella Ford
played a leading role and strongly influenced another leading suffragette, Mary Gawthorpe (pp11).
Gawthorpe maintained that:
in its own sphere the Leeds Arts Club could not have been bettered. Those were living
cultural amenities for first-hand enjoyment as opposed to the second-hand approach of
scholarly inheritors and custodians. I have sometimes pondered the thought that the Club,
founded by Orage and Jackson, had the germ of a new future, not necessarily to be matured
in London, but capable of the completest enrichment of a community right on the spot’
(Gawthorpe Up Hill to Holloway, (1947) p197.
Despite his commitment to the ILP, however, Orage’s belief in a ’passion for a remote end’ (174)
increasingly distanced him from parliamentary representation and the trade union collectivism of
labourist politics.
The young Orage was also a disciple of the socialist mystic and campaigner for homosexual rights,
Edward Carpenter (pp12) whose long poem Towards Democracy he virtually knew by heart and
Carpenter lectured regularly for the Club. Orage was also a member of the Theosophical Society
then led by the charismatic Annie Besant (pp13) whose work Thought Forms will feature later in this
talk. Wilde’s Soul of Man under Socialism was a constant reference point. But his introduction by
Holbrook Jackson to Thomas Common’s recent translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
dramatically changed his life. In Nietzsche’s unashamed, egoistic, individualistic masculinism he
found ‘an antidote to current sentimentalism’. But although Orage’s view of women became
increasingly chauvinistic, it was not so in the conventional Victorian sense. Indeed that was exactly
what he thought he was correcting. Through his reading of Nietzsche he was convinced that the role
of women was to enable men find their destiny – an idea that was later taken up by DH Lawrence
(an avid reader of Orage’s New Age). For this they needed to throw off domestic shackles of duty
and pacificity and assert their ‘womanness’ in their sexuality and in the public sphere, as the
suffragettes were doing. But, increasingly, his initial support for women’s suffrage turned into
opposition to its limited aims, when what he desired was a total revolution of the spirit and
consciousness, as ‘New Women’ like Florence Farr were calling for (pp14).
The programme of the LAC, as Holbrook Jackson later noted, was to ‘reduce Leeds to Nietzscheism’
and it was probably the first attempt anywhere in Britain to bring Nietzsche’s newly translated work
to a wider audience. The core series of evening lectures and discussions over its early years tried to
fuse Nietzsche’s Beyondman (or Superman) with Pater’s aestheticism. They argued that man was on
the brink of a revolutionary change of consciousness and being which would not be brought about
by the parliamentary representation sought by the ILP and the labour movement but precisely by
5
Art. This was heady stuff and artists and writers regularly travelled from all over the North to listen
and debate.
Talk to the two images of Arts Club programmes on screen
1905: (pp15) Nietzsche’s Beyondman or Superman runs through the heart of the
programme. ‘Burnhard’ Shaw on Leeds – burn it down and start again. Isabella Ford on
Woman and the State.
1910: (pp16) This programme includes:
Important affirmation of the Club’s values
WB Yeats on the Modern Dramatic Movement. Yeats’s Abbey Theatre also performed six
plays at Leeds Institute.
Edward Carpenter on Beauty in Town Life.
Father J O’ Connor on Francis Thompson the dissident Catholic poet – O’Connor, an Ilkley
priest was the model for Chesterton’s Father Brown.
Walter Frere a leading Christian Socialist was Superior of the Community of the
Resurrection at Mirfield, later to foster the talents of Bishop Huddleston the leading antiapartheid campaigner.
Prof Macgregor was one of the founders of the Yorkshire WEA and leading socialist
economist.
The Cub also bred a form of socialist politics called Guild Socialism, which was an attempt to combat
the big statism of Webbite Fabianism. Thought up initially by the York architect Arthur Penty, in
many ways it encouraged a medieval retrospect a la Ruskin and Morris. But was modernised and
refined by Orage, and eventually taken in a syndicalist direction by S J Hobson and GDH Cole. Guild
Socialists believed that guilds of craftsmen could control the aesthetic production of goods in a
locally determined context of social justice. Encouraged by the general strike in Leeds of 1913 and
the upsurge of working class awakening as a militant rebuke to Labour gradualism, many readers of
the New Age saw this as the revolutionary turn they had been arguing for.
Some workers’ cooperatives on Guild Socialists lines were in fact formed in Leeds, for example Tom
Heron’s shirt manufacturing in Buslingthorpe Lane (pp16). Heron was a leading member of the Club
who later went on to form the highly regarded design producers Cresta Silks( pp 17 &18) employing
artist like the Nash brothers and Stanley Spencer to produce designs. He was father of British
abstract expressionist painter and critic, Patrick Heron, who always claimed to have been galvanised
by his early exposure to his father’s collection and the Club’s ethos.
Now established in Leeds, Michael Sadler was increasingly drawn to the experimental modes of
artistic practice which relied much more on the artist’s expression of reality than in its close
naturalistic depiction. But he was still using Ruskinian quasi-religious terminology to address it. His
6
attraction to the abstract work of both the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (pp19) and Sadler’s
Leeds protégé, Jacob Kramer, (pp20) was precisely to what he called, its ‘spirituality’, in which he
believed the artist was reaching into his own deepest self and expressing the more profound reality
he found there. Much of this artistic tendency came to be called Expressionism and, as Michael
Paraskos has argued, many of the painters associated with the Leeds Arts Club could be seen as
perhaps the leading British exemplars of that school (Paraskos, 1993). It was left to Sadler’s son
Michael Sadleir (following the publication of his risqué novel Fanny by Gaslight, he used an older
spelling of the family name to distinguish himself from his father,) to develop a rationale for this
aesthetic.
Indeed Sadleir had introduced his father to Kandinsky’s work by means of some woodcuts (pp20) he
had bought at Roger Fry’s Post-impressionism exhibition in London in 1910. Both became so
fascinated by this new form of expression that, following an urgent visit to Kandinsky at Murnau,
Sadleir began to translate into English his theoretical text, Über das Geistige in der Kunst. (pp21) His
Introduction to Kandinsky’s text is revealing in the way he traces at least two lines of artistic
development into contemporary post-impressionism (M T H Sadleir, 1914). The most well-known,
claimed Sadleir, was a kind of structuralism that was generated by Cezanne and Picasso and passed
into cubism. Sadleir rejects this line because he felt it was still fatally rooted in naturalistic
representation. His preferred line was a more pure form of abstractionism that could be glimpsed in
late 19th century symbolism but was matured by Gauguin and Kandinsky. It is this second line that
held the promise of ‘spirituality’ for the Sadlers and this was the line that was most encouraged in
his work with the Leeds Arts Club. Kandinsky continued to send new work to Sadler in Leeds,
including some of his early pure abstractions. Sadler hung some of these in the university and lent
them out for Arts Club exhibitions and lectures. (pp22&23)
The intriguing element of Kandinsky’s writing of course is that, as he himself acknowledged, it relied
heavily on the Theosophical writings of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter, published as Thought
Forms in 1901 and printed by Percy Lund Humphries and Co Ltd in Bradfordii . (pp24 &25)
Besant, the leader of the Theosophical movement, had lectured regularly in Leeds for many years.
Joint membership of the Arts Club and the Theosophical Society was common and club members
were well versed in the associations of colour and form with emotion and feeling. So, for some,
Kandinsky’s avant-garde theory was only telling them what they already knew. Following Kandinsky,
Sadler encouraged members to experiment with painting to music and express themselves without
recourse to naturalistic representation. As Paraskos concludes:
This suggests that the discourse promoted by the earlier Arts Club survived and even
developed under Sadler and Rutter, thus affecting (Herbert) Read. Certainly the type of art
promoted by these two at the Club would support such a theory, with German
expressionism very much to the fore. Such art, after all, already had strong affinities with the
existing Arts Club aesthetic, with its reverence for Nietzsche, revolutionary social theory and
highly mystical content (Paraskos, 1993: 28).
The art critic, Frank Rutter, had followed Sadler to Leeds to become Director of the City Art Gallery,
convinced that important developments were in the offing. With Orage’s departure to London to
edit the New Age, the Club was, if not languishing, then indeed ‘waiting for a dancing star’ to reenergise it and in many respects Sadler fitted the bill. Confident, articulate, learned, deeply
7
interested in art and above all, perhaps, the Prodigal Son returned to the West Riding, Sadler, with
Rutter, focused the Club member’s attention on post-impressionist art and the new art theory being
promoted in Orage’s New Age. At this time Orage was publishing work by Walter Sickert, Wyndham
Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Gaudier Brzeska and ‘the complete works’ (five poems) of T. E. Hulme, pugilist,
poet, philosopher and art critic (pp26).
Orage published Hulme’s seminal pieces on Modern Art, which were like ‘so many hard jabs in an
ageing culture’s kidneys’ and were closely debated in the Arts Club.
Please forgive this digression into my fumbling attempts at art theory for a moment but I think it
demonstrates the conceptual battlefield that informed Sadler’s context for his collecting at this time.
Hulme’s modern art theory offered a counter blast to Kandinsky’s writing (and to Theosophical
thought forms), which Hulme regarded merely as a late form of Romanticism, or ‘spilt religion’, to
which he was utterly opposed, proposing instead a hard-edged Classicism centring in geometrical
imagery. Hulme’s writing was much more congenial to Wyndham Lewis, and stimulated the Vorticist
movement which, for a while, sucked in the Leeds painter, Jacob Kramer, who exhibited with the
group. On his visit to open an important exhibition of ‘Cubist and Futurist Art’ at the Club in May
1914, shortly before he launched the Vorticist movement, Wyndham Lewis roundly trashed a Club
member’s attempt at ‘thought forms’ painting saying that ‘they were not thought forms but flowers
and he could see the stalk’ (Steele 1990: 224).
Hulme appeared to have resolved the problem of the language of ‘spirituality’ by replacing it with a
more secular metaphor derived from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose works he was
then translating. Following Bergson, Hulme claimed that human creativity consisted in grasping
fleeting fragments of imagery first glimpsed intuitionally. The artist leaves behind the level of
naturalistic representation where things are crystallised into a definite shape and having dived down
‘into the inner flux, comes back with a new shape which he endeavours to fix’ (quoted in Steele,
1990: 186). Hence abstract forms are wrestled from the vast mass of intuitional material available to
the artist and shaped into simpler mental constructions which were artistically valid. This technical
language, as well as the resulting imagery seemed more appropriate to the modern mechanical age
as well as embracing the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis, currently translated in the pages of the
New Age by M. C. Eder.
However, for the Arts Club members, who now included the young Herbert Read, (pp27) the division
between Romanticism and Classicism was not so clear cut. Read especially was content to see
Romanticism and Classicism as held in a ‘dialectical tension’ rather than being mutually exclusive. In
the Romantic mode they still embraced Nietzsche’s Dionysian element, pursued by Orage at the Club
a few years earlier, while they also acknowledged the need for classical discipline and simplicity.
Thistlewood concluded that while Hulme’s articles in the New Age were a major influence on Read
and the Arts Club members, Nietzsche was ‘the occasional provider of decisive insights’
(Thistlewood, 1984: 29). Read’s correspondence with Jacob Kramer shows how even in the context
of war this debate continued to energise discussions (Manson, 2006; Roberts, 1983).
Sadler did much to aid this experimentation by making his paintings available for exhibitions and
lectures. By now his collection included four Gauguins, and works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Klee and
Kandinsky, including his 1913 abstract painting Fragment 2 for Composition VII (see above). But the
presence of Sadler and Rutter also attracted other leading painters from London, including members
8
of the Camden Town Group, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner, who regularly debated and sketched
in Leeds. (pp28) Ginner wrote, ‘Each age has its landscape, its atmosphere, its cities, its people’ and
art should be concerned with exploring the topical themes and features of its day. Consequently,
places where human intervention had shaped and altered the landscape were viewed as sites
through which to access authentic reality. (pp29) This could well have been Tom Heron’s clothing
factory in Leeds. (pp30) Note the precise draughtsmanship in these works. The market scene was
painted from a detailed drawing made on the spot during a visit to Leeds. The vibrant, working-class
life of the market provided subject matter for several Camden Town painters. The use of strong
colours and small, regular brush marks give the painting a tight structure which is complemented by
the pattern of iron struts of the market’s roof.
Ginner and Gilman, too, were engaging in the debate over modern art theory in the pages of the
New Age. At the same time as Hulme’s pieces were appearing they were developing their own
theory of Neo-Realism, which rejected comprehensive non-representation in painting and probably
owed much to the debates at the Arts Club over Rutter’s idea of ‘significant form’ (Thistlewood,
1985: 26). There is no evidence that Sadler himself contributed anything new to these debates other
than judiciously chairing them in his customary fashion and carefully summarising the points made.
Complementing his role in developing avant garde painting and theorising in the Arts Club as patron
and initiator of debate, Sadler lectured frequently on art and contributed articles to the university
magazine The Griffon. (pp31) He took an educator’s delight in sharing his art works and instructing
students in their appreciation. Others, from the Leeds School of Art for example, were invited to his
house in Headingley and, for Henry Moore, these were: ‘the first impressionist and postimpressionist works I had seen’ (quoted in Oliver, 1989: 17). Bill Oliver suggests that even Sadler’s
buying of ‘old masters’ was conditioned by their anticipating future developments, suggesting to his
students how in certain works they could see emergent trends. Sadler’s pamphlet, Art and
Revolution (1932), notes that the alarm and repugnance shown by the elderly to modern art was not
generally shared by the young and signalled an epochal cultural change.
Sadler’s encouragement of artistic experimentation in the LAC nurtured the talents of two especially
talented young painters: Jacob Kramer and Bruce Turner. Jacob Kramer (1892-1962) was a Jewish
immigrant the Ukraine, driven out with his family by the Czarist pogroms of the turn of the 20th
century and, forced into exile , settled in the growing Jewish community in Leeds in 1900. Kramer
was the Club’s most energetic and talented painter . This isabust of him by Jacob Epstein in 1920.
(pp32) Epstein asked Kramer to model for him, and offered to sit for Kramer in return. He later
wrote: ‘The Leeds painter, Kramer, was a model who seemed to be on fire. He was extraordinarily
nervous. Energy seemed to leap into his hair as he sat, and sometimes he would be shaken by queer
trembling like ague. I would try to calm him so as to get on with the work’. Sadler was very moved
by his painting, in which he detected an intense spirituality, and became his patron , introducing to
Kandinsky’s work and theory and enabling him to study at the Slade, frequently buying his paintings
or taking them in payment for loans made. Kramer was never a member of any group although he
exhibited briefly with Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist group – here is an example of what he called a
vorticist sketch. (pp 33). But his friend and fellow member of the Club, Herbert Read, described him
as perhaps Britain’s foremost Expressionist painter. This is Ruhalla painted int 1917.(pp34) He
developed a close relationship with Herbert Read with whom he corresponded during the war and
met in the Arts Club rooms when Read was on leave. ‘The Day of Atonement’ (1919) is regarded as
Kramer’s masterpiece (pp35).
9
A second significant painter was Bruce Turner (pp36) . Almost entirely forgotten now Bruce Turner
was another of the Club’s leading artists experimenting with abstractionism and was highly regarded
by Tom Heron who collected and promoted his work. Turner even made some designs for Cresta
Silks. Patrick Heron thought his work as ‘utterly avant garde’, it was he said: ‘the brilliantly gifted
expression of a talent quite remarkably attuned to the most creative explorations of the time’
(p223). Sadly, Turner was forced to serve a term of brutal imprisonment in Dartmoor for
conscientious objection from which he did not wholly recover and much of his work has been lost.
Here are some of his paintings from the Arts Club time: Pavlova (1913?) (pp37), landscape (pp38),
Patrick heron wrote in his notes to the 1964 exhibition of Turner's work arranged by himself Herbert
Read and Robert Rowe in the Leeds Civic Gallery: ‘ Turner in those early works showed a boldness,
an intelligence, and a thoroughgoing professionalism, which it seems to me in retrospect, must have
been unparalleled in the England of 1914: by comparison Wyndham Lewis seems unpainterly, and
Ginner or Gilman too conservative.’ Richard Cork, however, dismissed him as a ‘minor talent’.
The most formidable intellectual developing in the Club during these years was Herbert Read -here
painted by Kramer in1914 (pp39). He joined the Club while still an undergraduate at Leeds University
and became immersed in its atmosphere of experimental art and bold iconoclastic thinking. He later
claimed that the Club’s immersion in Nietzschean and other continental philosophy provided him
with his intellectual bedrock. After the War became close to Orage in London, who fostered his
career as a critic, and at one pointed hoped he would take over the editorship of the New Age.
Thistlewood goes so far to maintain that the Expressivist /Formalist axis which fuelled the Arts Club
debates became a principle motivating force for Herbert Read’s own aesthetic theorising, which had
a substantial impact during the inter war period (ibid.). Though they have gone largely unrecognised,
Read’s attempts to heal these contrasting modern idioms- expressivism and formalism - proved a
crucial shaping influence for twentieth century art in England. It could be argued that Read
prepared a wider audience for the reception of modern British sculpture as public art, most
significantly that of fellow Yorkshire artists, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, while his principles
of art education energised the leading British art schools, like Leeds School of Art, under Eric Taylor
following World War 2 (Hyatt, 1994). His theories of education through art became widely influential
following WW2 and he was instrumental in developing the collections of leading art patrons such as
Peggy Guggenheim in New York and fostering both surrealism and abstract impressionism. Read’s
co-founding of the Institute for Contemporary Art in 1947 in London was an attempt to recreate the
energy of the Leeds club (Aldred, 2007).
As a born educator, Sadler encouraged such talents while remaining an apparently entirely benign
paternal figure. Although his buying of paintings was not always entirely innocent of an interest in
their later appreciation of value, he generously left much of his collection to the public. As Oliver
notes, in 1931 the National Art Collections Fund offered works from Sadler’s collection to ten
galleries which included paintings by Turner, Constable, Cozens, Cotman, Wilson Steer, Maddox
Brown, Sickert, John and Corot; to Leeds City Gallery he gave a collection of early English water
colours and to the Cooper Gallery in Barnsley drawings over two centuries; to Leeds University he
gave, amongst other paintings: Meninsky’s Mother and Child, Currie’s Semptstress, Nicholson’s
Striped Jug and an industrial landscape by Wadsworth (Oliver, 1989: 19).
10
His attempts to alter civic taste were not always successful if not to say actually verging on the
disastrous. The first of these was his project to create mural panels for the interior of the Leeds
Town Hall to commemorate the end of the war. At his own expense, he commissioned work from
the Nash brothers, Paul and John, Spencer, Wadsworth, Jowett, Kramer (pp 40) and Albert
Ruthersden (the brother of William Rothenstein, then at the RCA). Once the sketches were collected
however, it was clear that not only did they fail to harmonise but that he was never in a million years
going to convince the civic authorities of their value and he abandoned the scheme.
The second foray into public art was his commissioning of a war memorial from the sculptor Eric Gill
for the exterior wall of the university buildings on University Road. Gill came up with a bas relief
which on the surface seemed to have little to do with war, ‘Christ Driving the Money Lenders out of
the Temple’. Although very much an apt theme for today, his depiction of Christ raising his whip at
cowering silk-hatted business men, one carrying a pawn broker’s sign, created uproar in the local
press. Both commissioner and artist were roundly vilified. In response, Gill claimed that many
business men in Leeds had indeed done obscenely well out of the war and what he depicted was war
as a kind of cleansing of corruption (thus, rather weirdly, a celebration of war). Some were not
entirely convinced that there was not a disturbing element of anti-Semitism in it, however. Though
privately enraged by Gill, Sadler nevertheless stood by the sculpture, which is indeed a fine piece of
carving and can today be seen in the building that bears his name. Such feelings did not energise
Sadler’s successor, James Baillie, however, who encouraged the gardener to obscure it with
vegetation and when new buildings were added and the road blocked off following World War Two,
it was taken inside the New Arts Block (now Michael Sadler building). It was a great pity. Like
thousands of other undergraduates at Leeds, I spent a good deal of time contemplating this icon,
while waiting for lectures or examinations and I have to say it always raised the spirits.
Conclusion
I think it’s possible to see Michael Sadler as an engagingly liminal figure both in education and art.
He bridged the boundaries between Victorian realism and romanticism on the one hand and
twentieth century modernism and futurism on the other. Always an educator, his debts to Arnoldian
schooling and Ruskinian high purpose, made public service the only career option for him. But as a
Gladstonian Liberal, he was not able to break free from his liberal background to commit himself
wholeheartedly to the political cause of Labour. He delighted in telling a WEA audience that Ruskin
was no democrat and gave him a kind of Nietzschean gloss: ‘Loyalty to a brave leader seemed to him
(Ruskin) to be one of the greatest things in human life. To organise society in such a way to bring
great leaders to the front and to impel men to follow them through suffering and self-sacrifice’ was
the message of his later years. And Sadler enjoyed Ruskin’s belief in a kind of medieval hierarchical
order that ‘within the bounds of status...great familiarity of intercourse between men of different
stations in life’ would be preserved (Sadler, 1913). This benevolent despotism in which each knew
their place but in which no lad of talent would be ignored may have appealed to the Victorian
temperament but may not have been appreciated by his WEA audience, who had not forgiven him
for allowing students to blackleg during the 1913 municipal workers’ strike.
Sadler enabled experimental approaches to art to flourish but still appeared to be tied to the
religious notion of ‘spiritual’ values. The more psychological language of ‘intuition’ was perhaps still
a step to far, as was hard-edged geometrical modernism for his taste but his ability to move beyond
11
the naturalistic depiction of people and places put him firmly among the moderns. His metropolitan
friends were very impressed, Roger Fry writing that:
Every time I came to Leeds I got more and more impressed with the work Sir Michael was
doing. He had civilized a whole population...the entire spirit has changed from a rather
sullen suspicion of ideas to a genuine enthusiastic and spiritual life. He has shown what can
be done – but rarely is – by education (quoted in Sadleir, 1949: 333).
Fry conveniently forgot the work of the Arts Club, or perhaps he never knew - Bloomsbury was no
great fan of Orage’s New Age circle - and of the progressive stamp of his university colleagues. But
there is no doubt Sadler was a champion of many of forces for modernity and progress in Leeds and
for that he will be deservedly remembered, indeed perhaps, as the ‘Beyond man’ Orage had
prophesised.
Notes
i
Curiously, this politically defining change was introduced by a later Trinity College graduate, Tony
Crosland, who swore to get rid of every effing grammar school in the country (Crosland???). Was he
thinking about Sadler? [*NB See Asa Briggs, Serious Pursuits p448] – importance of technical
education in univs and German HE]
ii
Compare this illustration in Thought Forms ‘Thought-form of the music of Charles Gounod’, with Kandinsky’s
1913 Fragment sent to Sadler:
(Below) Kandinsky Fragment 2 for Composition VII
References
Alred, Nanette (2007) ‘A sufficient flow of vital ideas: Herbert Read and the flow of ideas from the
Leeds arts Club to the ICA’, in Paraskos, ReReading Read, pp 76-87.
Beresford, Maurice (1989), Notes for a lecture on Sir Michael Sadler, delivered in the University of
Leeds on 28 April 1989 by Emeritus Professor M.W. Beresford, Brotherton Library Special
Collections, University of Leeds.
Diaper, Hilary ed. (1989) Michael Sadler. Leeds: University Gallery Leeds.
Fieldhouse, Roger and associates (1996) A History of Modern British Adult Education. Leicester:
NIACE.
Gosden, Peter (1989) ‘Sir Michael Sadler, Educationalist and Vice-Chancellor’ in Michael Sadler. ed.
Hilary Diaper, Leeds: University Gallery Leeds, pp 9-16.
Hardman, Malcolm (1986) Ruskin and Bradford. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Heron, Patrick and Read Benedict (1993) ‘A conversation between Patrick Heron and Benedict Read’
in Read and Thistlewood (eds.) Herbert Read a British Vision of World art.
Higginson, J. H. (1994) ‘Michael Ernest Sadler’, in Prospects, vol. 24, no. 3 / 4, 1994, pp 455-469.
Hyatt, Derek (1994) Eric Taylor a retrospective, The University Art Gallery, Leeds
12
Jepson, N. A. (1973) The Beginnings of English University Adult Education - Policy and Problems,
London: Michael Joseph.
Lindsay, A. D. (1925), Preface to Karl Marx’s Capital: An Introductory Essay. London: Oxford
University Press.
Lowe, Roy (2007) ‘Sadler, Sir Michael (1861-1943)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, online edition [accessed 18 Jan 2012].
Manson, David (2006) Jacob Kramer Creativity and Loss. Bristol: Sansom and Company Ltd.
Oliver, Bill (W.T.)(1963) Introduction to catalogue of the Commemorative Exhibition of Sir Michael
Sadler’s Collection. Leeds: Leeds City Art Galleries.
Oliver, W. T. (1989) ‘Sadler as Art Collector’ in Michael Sadler. ed. Hilary Diaper, Leeds: University
Gallery Leeds, pp 17-22.
Paraskos, Michael (1993) Herbert Read and Leeds in Herbert Read A British Vision of World Art.
Leeds; Leeds City Art Galleries, pp 25-35.
Paraskos, Michael. ed. (2007) ReReading Read New Views on Herbert Read. London Freedom Press.
Read, Benedict and Thistlewood, David (1993) Read. ed. Herbert Read a British Vision of World Art.
Leeds: Leeds City art Galleries.
Roberts, John (1983) The Kramer Documents. Valencia: John Roberts.
Sadleir, Michael (1949) Michael Ernest Sadler a Memoir by his Son. London, Constable.
Sadler, M.T.H. (1914) translator’s introduction in Kandinsky, Wassily (1914) The Art of Spiritual
Harmony, translated by M T H Sadler (Michael Sadleir) London: Constable.
Sadler, Michael (1913) typescript notes for a talk ‘Reminiscences of Arnold Toynbee and Ruskin’ read
to a WEA audience at Leeds University 18 October 1913, in Sir Michael Sadler Paper, Accession no.
252, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
Steele, Tom (1990) Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893-1923. Basingstoke: Scolar Press.
Thistlewood, David (1984) Herbert Read Formlessness and Form. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul.
13