London Group

London Group. An exhibiting society of British artists formed in 1913 by an amalgamation of the Camden Town Group with several smaller groups and various individuals. The first president was Harold Gilman; apart from other ex-Camden Town Group artists, the strongest representation among the early members consisted of Futurists and those who would soon become known as Vorticists, among them Bomberg, Epstein (who suggested the name), Nevinson, and Wadsworth. The first exhibition of the Group was held at the Goupil Gallery, London, in March 1914, with the Vorticists seeming to the press and public to swamp the show. Bomberg's enormous and dazzling In the Hold (Tate Gallery, London, 1913–14) was the most spectacular work on view; Lucien Pissarro said that the ‘drunkards’ had triumphed over the ‘teetotallers'. Membership at this time numbered 32 and after this exhibition an increasing number of non-members were encouraged to submit works to the annual shows. Once the initial Vorticist domination was over, the Group became less aggressively avant-garde, although it still represented advanced taste. Several artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group joined during the next few years: Mark Gertler in 1915, Roger Fry in 1918, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1919. Fry summed up the progressive aims of the London Group when he wrote that it had ‘done for Post-Impressionism in England what the New English Art Club did in a previous generation for Impressionism'. These aims were deprecated by Tonks, who said: ‘The leaders of the London Group have nearly all come from me. What an unholy brood I have raised.’ The Group survived such conservative opposition, was revived after the Second World War, and came to be looked on as something of an institution. But with the dignity of an institution it lost its early sense of mission and by 1950 it would have been difficult to distinguish the artistic principles for which it stood. An exhibition marking the Group's silver jubilee was held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1964. By this time the membership stood at about 90, embracing painters and sculptors of every persuasion. The Group still exists.