The Camden Town Group in Context

The new society is, in a limited sense, a secession from the New English Art Club, certain members of which, dissatisfied with the composition and methods of the latter club, have formed “The Camden Town Group,” with the aim of maintaining independence and emancipation from hanging juries. The “New English” seemed to them no longer “new,” and they are determined to be new at all costs, and to keep their modernity entirely free of the faintest suspicion of conventionalism, having found the elixir of eternal youth – apparently – in Camden Town. One of the rules is the unusual one that the Society shall be dissolved and reformed every five years, in order to prevent the growth of undesirable “traditions.”

The new “group,” whose first exhibition will open to-morrow at the Carfax Gallery, contains some well-known artists, among them Mr. Spencer F. Gore, who is the president, Mr. Augustus John, Mr. Walter Sickert, Mr. Lucien Pissaro [sic] (son of the noted French landscapist, Camille Pissaro [sic]), Mr. Walter Bayes, Mr. P. Wyndham Lewis, a rather remarkable writer as well as a fine draughtsman, and Mr. J. B. Manson, the portraitist and landscapist, who is the honorary secretary.