Reconceptualizing British modernism: The modernist encounter with Chinese art

The influence of Chinese poetry, as translated by Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley, upon the Anglo-American free-verse movement has long been established; in this study I establish the concurrent influence of Chinese art upon British Modernism. To demonstrate that Chinese high art impacted British modernist aesthetics, this dissertation recovers often-overlooked writings by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Wyndham Lewis, Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on Chinese art, as well as art historical writings from Burlington Magazine, and locates them in dynamic relation to several contexts: the historical imperial context between Britain and China, the diachronic aesthetic context of Chinoiserie, and the synchronic aesthetic context of Primitivism.;As a study of the process by which modernist intellectuals redefined Chinoiserie and cultural imperialism as a result of liberal cosmopolitanism and universalizing formalism, my work offers a new account of Modernism in dynamic relation to metropolitan conditions. It suggests, moreover, that a post-colonial critique of Orientalism and Primitivism can be applied to England's own reinvention of Chinese art and to the absorption of Chinese art into modernist aesthetics in the wake of empire. Traditional narratives of Modernism focus on themes of fragmented consciousness, formal innovations, and universalizing myths. By contrast, this study analyzes works and intellectual movements in light of Chinese art. In my view, early British modernist movements were informed---and re-formed---by the possibility that post-imperial England could become attracted to non-Western art. Between 1900 and 1940, the British discovery of archaic Chinese art was infused with an interest in the Historical Primitives as well as with interest in the tribal primitives. This infusion shows the Janus-like ambivalence of British Modernism, at once progressive and traditionalist, modernist and anti-Enlightenment.;In its conclusion, this study argues for revisions to several current assumptions about British Modernism. First, it argues that current historiographies of British Modernism in general are too narrow and too Eurocentric. Second, the pervasive interest in Chinese art shared by both the Bloomsbury and Vorticist groups demonstrated here calls for reconsideration of popularly presumed groupings of the Avant-Garde. This study reveals that there were, in fact, cross-groupings and influences between and among these groups. Third, this study modifies current notions of the cosmopolitanism of British Modernism, showing that the ways that Chinese art was discovered expose the imperial and colonial underpinnings of British Modernism. Finally, this study also shows how the British modern writers were caught in a cultural dilemma between their liberal openness to Chinese art and their unwitting appropriation of Chinese art for the cause of modern art.