Leeds Arts Club

The Leeds Arts Club was founded in 1903 by the Leeds school teacher Alfred Orage and Yorkshire textile manufacture Holbrook Jackson, and was probably one of the most advanced centres for modernist (modernism) thinking in Britain in the pre-First World War period. Its very existence challenges the idea that radical art and culture only happens in metropolitan centres.

The Art Club was an iconoclastic organisation that mixed radical socialist and anarchist politics with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Suffragette Feminism, the spiritualism of the Theosophical Society and modernist art and poetry into a heady mixture. It had close associations with the Independent Labour Party, the co-operative movement and the early Fabian Society. At its weekly meetings it would often discuss the connections between art, spiritualism, philosophy and politics.

In 1907 Orage and Jackson left Leeds and moved to London to edit the hugely influential cultural and political journal The New Age. Following their departure the Arts Club came under the sway of Frank Rutter, the founder of the Allied Artists Association and newly appointed Director of Leeds City Art Gallery, and Michael Sadler, the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. Under their leadership the Arts Club maintained its interest in the relationship between radical politics, spiritualism and art, but this was expanded to encompass early psychoanalysis and, most significantly, abstract art. Using his personal links with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Sadler built up a remarkable collection of expressionist and abstract expressionist art at a time when such art was either unknown or dismissed in London, even by well-known promoters of modernism such as Roger Fry. Most notable in his collection was Kandinsky's abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII, of 1912, which was in Leeds and on display at the Leeds Arts Club in 1912. He also owned Paul Gauguin's celebrated work "The Vision After the Sermon". According to Patrick Heron, Kandinsky even visited the Arts Club in Leeds before the First World War (see Heron interview in B. Read and D. Thistlewood, Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art, London 1993).

In many respects the Leeds Arts Club can be seen as the closest England came to a genuine expressionist art movement, and this was accentuated not only by its interests, which mirror those seen in German expressionist art groups of the time, but in the Club's direct links to Kandinsky in Germany. It also produced its own expressionist artists, including Jacob Kramer and the little known, but remarkable, painter Bruce Turner. It also was the seed ground from which the eminent art critic and theorist Herbert Read emerged, and Henry Moore has been linked to it. If one takes Orage and Jackson's New Age as England's equivalent to the German expressionist journal Der Sturm, then it seems reasonable to view the Leeds Arts Club as the epicentre of English Expressionism.

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