The Camden Town Group in Context

These are the minutes of the sixth London Group meeting. At the previous gathering on 6 December 1913 the first election had taken place with the rule being that ‘one adverse vote should cancel one favourable vote and that to secure election a member must finally receive the votes of at least half the total number of members of the Group’. However, the differing artistic allegiances of the voters meant that no candidates secured the number of votes required. The rules were then changed so that a candidate needed the votes of only one third of the members to be elected.

Henry Lamb sent in a proxy vote to James Bolivar Manson for Hilda Trevelyan, who was not elected (fig.1 TGA 806/10/6), while William Bernard Adeney returned his voting list, remarking to Manson that ‘It is somewhat absurd my voting as most of the names I cannot connect to work, or they are new to me altogether’ (fig.2 TGA 806/10/6). According to the minutes, Frederick Etchells was assigned the proxy for the ‘cubists’ of the group, Cuthbert Hamilton, Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth. This was the only meeting that Lucien Pissarro attended; he soon resigned from the group before the first exhibition took place owing to artistic differences. The only member to not attend or vote by proxy was Malcolm Drummond.

Of the twenty-six candidates put forward, only nine were elected: David Bomberg, Stanislawa de Karlowska, Jessica Etchells, Douglas Fox Pitt, Eric Gill, Sylvia Gosse, Thérèse Lessore, John Nash and Walter Taylor. The voting list shows how many votes each candidate gained (fig.3 TGA 806/10/6). The most successful were Bomberg, Etchells, Karlowska and Lessore while the least successful were J.S. Currie, Joseph Simpson and William Rothenstein.

At this meeting Walter Bayes proposed that the Fitzroy Street and London groups should not be amalgamated, as had been agreed at the first meeting on 25 October 1913 when Bayes had ‘proposed that Members of the New society, thus formed, become ipso facto, members of Fitzroy Street, share in its conveniences, and become proprietors of it, being entitled to keep a limited number of pictures there’. For the minutes of the five previous meetings, see TGA 806/10/6, TGA 806/10/6, TGA 806/10/6, TGA 806/10/6 and TGA 806/10/6.

Wendy Baron, Perfect Moderns: A History of the Camden Town Group, Aldershot and Vermont 2000, p.66.
Malcolm Easton, ‘The Camden Town Group into the London Group: Some Intimate Glimpses of the Transition 1911–14’, The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk.