FABIANISM

The Fabian Society was a socialist organisation founded in 1884, which counted among its early members such writers as Edith Nesbit, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, as well as Jerome K. Jerome, Arnold Bennett, Rupert Brooke, Harley Granville-Barker and Leonard Woolf, and numerous other public figures. Although its origins lay in the bohemian Fellowship of the New Life, the Society quickly came to be associated with a reformist managerial state socialism. At the heart of the Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose gradualist anti-MARXIST and anti-ANARCHIST stance, research agenda and policy of permeation of existing political parties came to define Fabianism in the long-term, as did its association with the Independent Labour Party and subsequently the Labour Party.

Although the executive of the Fabian Society had little interest in modernist art, individual members played an instrumental role in the development of modernism. The Fabians Holbrook Jackson and A. R. Orage founded the Leeds Art Club in 1903 and re-launched The New Age journal in 1907 with financial assistance from Shaw as a modernism-oriented literary and political magazine (see LITTLE MAGAZINES). Fabian socialism was one of the prominent ingredientsthedrals and castles. in the heady brew of Nietzschean philosophy, SPIRITUALISM, PSYCHOANALYSIS and modernist aesthetics that characterised both the Club and the journal in its early years. After the departure of Jackson and Orage to London, the Leeds Art Club, under the leadership of the Fabians Michael Sadler and Frank Rutter, continued to champion POST-IMPRESSIONIST art and Abstract Expressionist painting, displaying the work of Wassily Kandinsky as early as 1913.

READING

Bevir, Mark (2011) The Making of British Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Britain, Ian (1982) Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c.1884–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, Wallace (1967) The New Age Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Steele, Tom (1990) Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. Aldershot: Scolar Press.

FAUVISM

The name Fauves (‘Wild Beasts’) was teasingly bestowed by critic Louis Vauxcelles on a loose and relatively short-lived affiliation of artists including Henri Matisse (the senior figure in the group), André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck and some of Matisse's associates from his artistic training under the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts.