1.1 The War Artists’ Advisory Committee

In November 1940, two years before work began on The Penguin Modern Painters, Allen Lane met with Kenneth Clark to discuss a proposed series of books that the WAAC was hoping to publish with Penguin to achieve wider appreciation for the artworks commissioned by the committee. Although exhibitions became the principal vehicle by which the WAAC promoted its collection during the war, plans for some form of official publication had been mooted as early as November 1939. It was Noel Carrington, the book designer and commissioning editor at Country Life, who first suggested to Clark that his committee should publish a monthly periodical devoted to war artists (WAAC, 1939a). During the First World War, a ten-part government-sanctioned series titled The Western Front featuring war drawings by Muirhead Bone had been published between December 1916 and October 1917. A further four books promoting the work of C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, Eric Kennington and John Lavery appeared towards the end of the War titled British Artists at the Front. These were published ‘from the offices of Country Life’ at the behest of the Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House.Footnote ¹⁶ Priced at five shillings, they were printed in large editions and aimed at an urban middle class.

With this precedent there was an expectation within the MoI that the work of the WAAC’s artists would be reproduced in popular newspapers and magazines, as well as in the form of postcards (WAAC, 1939b). Clark, however, envisaged a far more deluxe proposal. His vision was for a ‘fine periodical’ that would be ‘so attractively produced that it should readily be bought for its own sake’ (Clark quoted in WAAC, 1939a). Clark surmised that since the circulation of art magazines was likely to be limited during the war, a natural market for a ‘first-rate publication’ would be found among the intelligentsia. This speaks to Clark’s conception of his committee’s core audience during the early months of the war: a small and cultured elite upon whom war art would likely have its greatest impact as propaganda. A wider public, he surmised, could be reached via cheap, illustrated papers such as Picture Post but, for the select audience that he wished to target, a luxury publication ‘would be useful propaganda, especially since some of those who would buy it might be the very people who needed a stimulus’. Clark was concerned that this group was perhaps more predisposed to apathy or even defeatism than other sections of the population and reasoned that a sumptuous publication of war art could boost morale.

As Foss (Reference Foss1991, pp. 61–62) has shown, the perceived propaganda value of war art was essential to the survival of the WAAC, which justified its existence and funding from the MoI on this basis. Publicly, Clark was careful to distance his committee from such activities. In Britain, propaganda was perceived to be profoundly undemocratic and associated with Germany’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, which had been established soon after the Nazi Party took power in 1933. As one correspondent to New Statesman and Nation put it: ‘the Government should recognise that in this country propaganda “won’t wash.” Goebbels has stolen all the thunder’ (Checksfield, Reference Checksfield1940). Writing in The Listener during the second month of the war, Clark (Reference Clark1939b) warned that an artist engaged in the production of propaganda would likely ‘coarsen his style and degrade his vision’. But the WAAC was placed within the MoI, the government department responsible for sustaining civilian morale, and therefore necessarily implicated in the production of propaganda. Indeed, the MoI’s Director of General Production, Robert Alexander Bevan (Reference Bevan1940), informed Clark that the WAAC’s publication proposals ‘were not designed to emphasise the art side of the venture but to bring the art definitely into the service of propaganda’.

Unlike The Western Front, which had been published in editions of 30,000, Clark intended his publication to number just 5,000 copies (WAAC, 1940a). In targeting a narrow demographic he was echoing a policy developed during the First World War, that cultural propaganda aimed at educated, opinion-forming intellectuals could be effective in shaping public attitudes. In the words of one government official (Ministry of National Service, 1918): ‘It is better to influence those who can influence others than attempt a direct appeal to the mass of the population.’ In November 1939, it was the belief in a trickle-down approach to propaganda that drove Clark’s ambition for his ‘first-rate publication’ which, he hoped, would not only be sponsored but actually produced by the Government (WAAC, 1939a). However, when Clark met with Lane a year later, the proposal under discussion was for a very different kind of publication, one aimed not at a small elite but a general audience. The involvement of Penguin, which had made its name by introducing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market, indicates that Clark’s views regarding government-produced publications had shifted considerably. His change in thinking was a result of the MoI’s rejection of his plans for an influential periodical. As Head of Publications, William Surrey Dane (Reference Dane1939), had written: ‘I do not think a publication of this nature would have a very big sale and surely there would hardly be sufficient paintings and posters to justify a separate publication’.Footnote ¹⁷ Others concurred, and at a meeting about copyright and reproduction arrangements there was general agreement that it would be difficult to justify to the Treasury either the expense or the allocation of paper to such a proposal (WAAC, 1939b). Clark, however, did not completely give up on his deluxe publication and continued to advocate for it despite a lack of support from colleagues.

The MoI was now hoping to pursue a popular publication that would target a wide public. It was suggested that a series of illustrated shilling books should be published: thematic collections of war art dealing with specific topics (WAAC, 1939b). Reminiscent of British Artists at the Front, they were to be cheap, mass-produced publications aimed at a popular audience rather than a small, select group. This attitude reflected a fundamental shift in the MoI’s position. The notion that a publication of war art would have its greatest impact if aimed at influential individuals had given way to a belief in addressing a mass readership directly. As the war progressed, the MoI became increasingly favourable towards supporting illustrated books aimed at a popular readership and began working directly with commercial publishers, clandestinely sponsoring books that it did not want the public to perceive as propaganda. A notable example of the Ministry working in this way was the illustrated series Britain in Pictures, which originated from within the MoI but was published by William Collins. Instigated in 1940 by former BBC producer Hilda Matheson, the series was conceived as a propaganda scheme to promote ‘the British way of life in all its varied colour’ (Keir, Reference Keir1952, p. 267) and its eighty-plus titles included Life Among the English by Rose Macaulay (Reference Macaulay1942), British Romantic Artists by John Piper (Reference Piper1942) and English Cities and Small Towns by John Betjeman (Reference Betjeman1943). Macaulay’s book, which featured war art by Henry Moore and Anthony Gross, was described by The Bookseller (Squire, Reference Squire1942) as ‘a highly important contribution to the national war effort’.Footnote ¹⁸

1.2 The Books and Pamphlets Programme of the Ministry of Information

The shilling books on war art that Clark discussed with Lane were, like Britain in Pictures, to be supported by the MoI as part of its Books and Pamphlets Programme, which encouraged and sometimes instigated books highlighting positive episodes from British history, British cultural heritage, or anything with an underlying message to which the Ministry was sympathetic. As Holman (Reference Holman2008, p. 102) observes, such propaganda ‘was most effective when least visible, that is, when it appeared to be produced and distributed by a trade publisher with no connection to the Government’. The Ministry supported publishers in one of three ways: ‘joining subject to author and author to suitable publisher; supporting the book with publicity; supplying paper from the Ministry’s ration’ (Ministry of Information, 1940). The latter was especially enticing for publishers who were struggling with the impact of paper rationing that had come into force in February 1940 with the Government’s Control of Paper Order. As one government official (Parrish, Reference Parrish1940) put it:

The Britain in Pictures project set an important precedent for the MoI. Not only did it demonstrate the kind of effective partnership that could be forged between state and publisher but also the great potential of illustrated books. In fact, illustrated books were perceived to be so important for the Ministry that its head of publications, Robert Fraser (Reference Fraser1941), urged they become a central concern of the Books and Pamphlets Programme:

Fraser’s vivid description of propaganda books that carefully balanced word and image must surely have resonated with Clark and his committee, encouraging them to push forward with their publishing plans.

A table produced by the MoI’s Publications Division (Ministry of Information, 1941) shows that it was sponsoring forthcoming books and pamphlets for, among others, Hodder and Stoughton, Faber and Faber, OUP and Methuen. Although Penguin was not on this list, the firm had previously received six tons of paper for the Puffin Picture Books, a new educational series designed to inform children about everyday topics such as natural history, technology, agriculture and the built environment. The first four titles, which were all war-themed, were printed in runs of 10,000 and promptly sold out.Footnote ¹⁹ The Ministry clearly recognised the role that Penguin could play in influencing public opinion, and, just a few days after the outbreak of war, it made a secret agreement with Lane to produce a series of threepenny propaganda pamphlets that would include titles such as The Science of War and War Aims (Ministry of Information, 1939). However, this provisional arrangement inexplicably came to nothing and the titles were instead given to other publishers.Footnote ²⁰ For example, a book on naval power by Sir Herbert Richmond that Penguin had been asked to produce in October 1939 appeared the following year as The Naval Role in Modern Warfare published as part of the Oxford Pamphlets of World Affairs series. This did not discourage Lane, however, who continued to pursue his own war-themed books, with titles including The Real Cost of the War and Science in War (both published in 1940 as Penguin Specials).Footnote ²¹ Lane’s propensity to forge ahead with an idea, whether or not he found wider support for it, was characteristic of the way in which he ran Penguin during this period and would soon prove instrumental for the early development of The Penguin Modern Painters.

1.3 The Road to Penguin

Despite the Ministry’s early interest in Penguin and its support for the illustrated Puffin Picture Books, Lane’s firm was not its first choice to publish the WAAC’s shilling books. The MoI initially approached His Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO), which acted as official publishers to the Ministry. Its Director of Publications, C. F. S. Plumbley, was keen to secure the contract but Clark was indignant at the suggestion, declaring that he ‘could not submit modern artists to the indignity of seeing their work badly reproduced’ (Clark, Reference Clark1941a). He mistrusted the Stationery Office, doubting the quality of its work, and made it known to the MoI that he believed it was ‘for his committee to take the initiative in making recommendations as to how reproductions should be issued’ (Dickey, Reference Dickey1939).Footnote ²² The WAAC (1940b) decided instead to approach OUP, a trusted publisher to whom they had previously proposed a book on the subject of Bomber Command with reproductions of paintings by Paul Nash, Eric Kennington, and William Rothenstein.

For Clark, a key reason for working with OUP was the hope that, in addition to producing the shilling books, the publisher might also produce his longed-for deluxe periodical of war art, which, he likely hoped, would help foster patronage and support for the nation’s artists. His enthusiasm for this project led him to prepare an ambitious forty-eight-page dummy, showing that the proposed publication was to be richly illustrated in both colour and black-and-white, and would employ a range of printing processes (WAAC, 1940a). The prestigious OUP name would no doubt have appealed to his intended readership: an elite group of art collectors, connoisseurs, and educated laymen who, like Clark himself, took art seriously and were interested in supporting artists, especially during wartime. However, OUP communicated that it was ‘lukewarm’ to the suggestion and expressed ambivalence about taking on either project (Dickey, Reference Dickey1940a). Undeterred, the WAAC continued its search for a suitable publisher.

Another firm that the WAAC (1940c) had hoped to work with was the Curwen Press, a respected publisher renowned for its high-quality books and art prints.Footnote ²³ In the summer of 1940, plans were afoot to produce with Curwen a portfolio of lithographs by Eric Ravilious, but, in the face of paper shortages, the Treasury’s subsequent ban on ‘luxury’ printing had halted the project (WAAC, 1940d). In a bid to secure a cheaper form of reproduction, the committee sought the advice of Robert Wellington, an expert in the art of lithography who in 1937 had collaborated with John Piper to launch a series of large, affordable, poster-like prints under the name Contemporary Lithographs.Footnote ²⁴ It transpired that Wellington was collaborating with Penguin Books to produce two volumes in its new King Penguin series: one on English churches by John Piper and the other on zoo animals by the sculptor and equine painter John Skeaping.Footnote ²⁵ The King Penguins were small, illustrated reference books featuring sixteen full-colour reproductions with thirty pages of text that sold for just one shilling, which although twice as expensive as regular Penguins, still represented extraordinary value for money.Footnote ²⁶ Sensing an opportunity for the WAAC, the committee’s secretary, Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey (Reference Dickey1940b), suggested to Clark that the King Penguin format ‘might be the very thing for some of our war artists work’. The committee agreed and Lane was soon invited to put together a proposition.

Lane promptly sent the best examples of colour printing he had: The King Penguins and Puffin Picture Books. The quality of reproduction in these publications greatly impressed Clark, but others in the WAAC worried that colour printing would prove prohibitively expensive and so it was suggested that monochrome booklets be produced instead. Lane assured Clark that, for an editorial cost of £100 per volume, Penguin could produce a book along the lines of The King Penguins with up to thirty-two pages of black-and-white photogravures to be sold at sixpence, or slightly more than double that size if they were priced at one shilling. Alternatively, a shilling book modelled after the Puffins could be produced, which would include both colour and black-and-white plates. He also suggested that this proposal would look better if the books were oriented in landscape rather than portrait (a format that would eventually be adopted for the Modern Painters). Clark informed Lane in December 1940 that the King Penguin format was just what the WAAC wanted. The two men met a few days later and it was decided that each book should be devoted to a single subject, contain forty-eight black-and-white plates with sixteen pages of text, and be published as part of the King Penguin series (WAAC, 1940e). Lane was to pay the MoI £50 per volume for the right to reproduce works from the WAAC’s collection and Clark insisted that no expenses of any sort should fall on the Ministry, nor would there be any obligations for them to purchase or publicise the books.

Towards the end of 1940, Lane sent the WAAC a tentative and rather fanciful list of proposed authors for the series that had been devised during a Penguin editorial meeting. H.M. The Queen, or perhaps Lord Reith, it was suggested, could pen texts on the Blitz, while Lloyd George might write on the topic of wartime supply. War heroes such as Sir Wyndham Deedes and Sir Roger Keyes might be approached to write about civil defence and the war at sea, while the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, could tackle the subject of air-raid shelters.Footnote ²⁷ Such suggestions may reveal more about Lane’s perception of Clark than anything else; the majority of proposed authors on the curious list – notably devoid of art historians, critics, and artists – were, like Clark himself, elite, establishment figures. Nevertheless, it seemed that at last, with the help of Penguin Books, the WAAC would have its official publication. The committee’s objective now was ‘to aim at the widest possible circulation for really satisfactory books of reproductions at popular prices’ (WAAC, 1940f). But Clark, who was still harbouring a desire to pursue a luxury publication, decided that OUP should be given another opportunity to compete for the contract, reasoning to his committee that ‘each firm should have an equal chance to show what they can do’ (Dickey, Reference Dickey1940c).

When OUP learned of Penguin’s involvement, the firm experienced a sudden change of heart and promptly informed the WAAC that it was now ‘most anxious’ to undertake the work ‘on the most advantageous terms possible’ (Clark, Reference Clark1941b). Additionally, OUP made it known that, alongside the shilling books, it was willing also to produce a larger, deluxe publication with two hundred reproductions to be sold for seven shillings and sixpence. With two publishers now vying for the shilling books, Clark was, he claimed, compelled to put the two offers to the WAAC who, after ‘careful consideration’, chose OUP for the sole reason that the publisher had agreed to the more comprehensive deluxe volume. ‘I know that this decision will be a disappointment to you,’ Clark wrote to Lane (Clark, Reference Clark1941b), emphasising his gratefulness for the enthusiasm he had shown. Perhaps wishing to distance himself from the decision, he added that it was not for him to question his committee. This episode illustrates well Clark’s mercurial personality; though he had clearly warmed to Lane’s proposal and had much sympathy with Penguin’s broader democratising mission, the stature, reputation, and history of OUP were ostensibly far more alluring to this establishment figure and his WAAC colleagues.

1.4 War Pictures by British Artists

The WAAC’s shilling books were published by OUP in May 1942 under the title War Pictures by British Artists, but when compared with Penguin’s illustrated publications, the slim pocket books appear markedly inferior: the black-and-white images are small, have a limited tonal range and many are printed on their sides in order to fit the books’ narrow portrait orientation (19 × 12 cm). Priced at one shilling and threepence, the four titles – War at Sea, Blitz, R.A.F., and Army – were issued in editions of 25,000 and sold out in less than a year.Footnote ²⁸ Each slim, sixty-four-page paperback contains a concise introductory essay followed by around fifty black-and-white reproductions with summary annotations. Their success led to a second four-volume series – Women, Production, Soldiers, and Air Raid – which was published in November 1943 in editions of 20,000 and priced one shilling and sixpence. Yet while their success was welcomed by the WAAC, their mode of presentation must surely have disappointed Clark. The standard of the books could not have escaped the attention of Lane either, for it was just a few weeks after the first four volumes were published that he wrote to Clark introducing his concept for a new series of art books that would become The Penguin Modern Painters. Lane knew, and had proved to Clark, that Penguin was capable of producing a far superior product than the WAAC had achieved with OUP, though it was not until he actually set eyes on the War Pictures by British Artists books that he felt compelled to begin planning his own series, one that would not be propagandistic but focussed on individual artists.

Before his contact with the WAAC, Lane had shown no interest in pursuing art monographs, and the extent of his engagement with contemporary art lay primarily in commissioning artists to provide illustrations for his King Penguin and Puffin Picture Books. But, as an astute businessman, he clearly sensed an opportunity in 1942 and perhaps even wanted to corner the market before OUP could publish the larger, luxury volume of war artists’ work. However, producing a series of art monographs under wartime conditions and without government support still presented a challenge, especially considering that Penguin had no experience in art book publishing and Lane himself had little knowledge of the field. What, then, were the factors that convinced him of the marketability of The Penguin Modern Painters and what were the preconditions for determining its success? To answer these questions, the next section will examine three key areas: the immediate social and cultural context, the performance of Penguin Books during the war and the role of Lane’s personal ambition.

2.1 The Popularity of Wartime Exhibitions

At the beginning of the war, Clark had sent the priceless treasures of the National Gallery to Manod Quarry, near Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales, to protect them from aerial attacks. The Gallery’s empty walls provided the perfect venue to showcase the WAAC’s growing collection of war art, and a continually evolving exhibition was displayed there from July 1940 to May 1945. It proved so successful with the public that in 1941 a decision was made to open the galleries on Sunday afternoons to accommodate the crowds. As The Scotsman reported in 1943: ‘no matter what the hour, the galleries containing the pictures by war artists are always full of animated little groups of people, who do not hesitate to express their pleasure frankly’ (L.M.W., Reference W1943). This was in marked contrast to the pre-war years when attendance was so low that one’s ‘footsteps would echo through the quiet rooms’. The popularity of the exhibition was captured in Jill Craigie’s documentary film about Britain’s war artists, Out of Chaos (1944), the opening scenes of which show crowds of people streaming into the gallery on a Saturday afternoon.

The popularity of the war artists’ exhibition can, of course, be largely attributed to the topicality of the work on display. But the new public interest in art was certainly not limited to pictures dealing with war themes. According to the Daily Mail’s George Edinger (Reference Edinger1943, p. 2), the National Gallery exhibition ‘19th Century French Paintings’ (11 December 1942–17 January 1943) attracted 40,000 visitors during its five-week run, and on at least two occasions the gallery doors ‘had to be shut in the face of a long and disappointed queue’. The new surge of interest in the visual arts was not limited to London. At the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Museum of Wales, temporary wartime exhibitions attracted three or four times the number of visitors than the pre-war average (Richardson, Reference Richardson, Kirkham and Thoms1995, p. 93). Nine touring exhibitions of paintings from the WAAC’s collection were exhibited in more than one hundred British villages, towns, and cities, generating a remarkable amount of interest and, as Foss (Reference Foss2007, pp. 183–84) notes, setting visitor attendance records at many venues.

Four of the WAAC’s touring exhibitions were organised by the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE) as part of its Art for the People scheme, which had been established by W. E. Williams in 1935 to provide free exhibitions for people living in towns and cities without access to art galleries. During the war, the scheme was run in association with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the State-funded forerunner of the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1940, exhibitions were successfully toured by CEMA and the BIAE to eighty venues, attracting over 300,000 visitors (Williams, Reference Williams1941, p. 4). In 1941, ninety-three venues hosted popular touring exhibitions including several large thematic shows that included ‘British Landscape Tradition, 1740–1940’, ‘Contemporary British Painting’, and ‘British Watercolours and Drawings, 1900–1940’.Footnote ²⁹ There was much excitement surrounding these exhibitions. The Somerset County Herald (1941) described the exhibition ‘British Landscape Tradition’ as ‘the finest and most comprehensive exhibition of pictures ever seen in this part of the country […] it is doubtful whether even in London a better collection could be found at this time’. Such enthusiastic responses were repeated across the country, and the number of recorded attendances at these exhibitions that year totalled 367,000 (Williams, Reference Williams1971, p. 21). In light of this, the prospect of publishing art monographs must have seemed to Lane like a fortuitous business opportunity. But it was not just the consistently large attendances at free art exhibitions that convinced him of the marketability of The Penguin Modern Painters (for that alone was no guarantee of sales); rather, it was another aspect of the cultural renaissance: the unexpected demand for books about art.

2.2 The Wartime Demand for Art Books

Despite paper shortages and diminishing stock, overall book sales in Britain actually rose between 1939 and 1945. As Stanley Unwin (Reference Unwin1944, pp. 17–18) commented, ‘the curious thing is that though they are advertised less, the demand for books is greater than it has ever been before. The war has turned publishing completely topsy-turvy’. As Joseph McAleer (Reference McAleer1992, pp. 62–63) records, in 1941 eighty-six new bookshops opened their doors and borrowing from libraries increased by 15 per cent. The Central Statistical Office recorded that expenditure on books, newspapers and magazines increased from £64 million in 1938 to £67 million in 1943, and £77 million in 1945. This trend, which was no doubt an encouragement to Lane, reflected the fact that unemployment became virtually non-existent during this period and, consequently, personal income rose by almost 100 per cent between 1938 and 1945, creating a climate in which cultural products could thrive.Footnote ³⁰ A further boost to Lane came when booksellers began noting a marked increase in demand for books on art. As Anton Zwemmer reported to his son in August 1943:

Before the war, general booksellers had shown little interest in stocking art books, believing there to be no market for them. Phaidon’s British distributor had experienced great difficulty in convincing bookshops to stock the publisher’s art monographs in the late 1930s. During the war, however, market conditions changed to such an extent that, as early as 1941, Unwin could tell Phaidon’s co-founder Béla Horovitz that the book trade was realising that ‘Phaidons are safe stock’ (Unwin to Horovitz, 3 March 1941, quoted in Holman, Reference Holman1999a, p. 325). The public’s hunger for publications about art was also seen at the National Gallery where sales of the cheap, illustrated guide booklets accompanying the ‘British War Artists’ exhibition exceeded all expectations. In July 1940, 400 copies were sold on a single day (Dickey, Reference Dickey1940d). The interest in art books was, as with exhibitions, not limited to war-themed titles. Christina Foyle, director of Foyle’s bookshop in London, responded to the demand for art books by starting the Foyle’s Art Book Club.Footnote ³¹ When she contacted OUP in 1943 requesting recommendations for her new club, Humphrey Milford dutifully offered her two war-themed titles that had been published the previous year: Men of the R.A.F. by William Rothenstein and Drawing the R.A.F. by Eric Kennington (Milford, Reference Milford1943). However, Foyle considered these to be too specialised for her readers. Whilst the members of her club desired art books, there was evidently little hunger for topical, war-related publications, especially not ones filled with portraits of R.A.F. servicemen.

The wartime enthusiasm for the visual arts, the demand for art books, and the success of the War Pictures by British Artists series must have convinced Lane of a healthy market for art monographs. The scheme he had in mind, however, was far more ambitious than the morale-boosting, war-themed booklets published by OUP. The scope of the Modern Painters was to be much broader; each book was to be dedicated to an individual artist and would contain pre-war work as well as wartime commissions. Furthermore, unlike OUP’s low-quality monochrome reproductions, these were to include high-quality colour plates printed on premium art paper – features previously unheard of at the proposed price of two shillings and sixpence. Lane had good reason to be confident in the marketability of The Penguin Modern Painters, but to produce such an ambitious proposal under wartime conditions represented a significant challenge. The following section considers the advantageous position that Penguin found itself in during the war and why the company was so well placed to contemplate such a venture.

2.3 Penguin’s Wartime Success

For most publishers, a proposal like The Penguin Modern Painters would have been unthinkable during wartime. Shortages of paper and other raw materials combined with the loss of staff across the industry had made book production increasingly difficult. Despite a strong market and an overall increase in sales, many publishers struggled to meet demand. As Unwin (Reference Unwin1944, p. 18) noted, ‘there is something more than ironical in the fact that at the moment when, for the first time the public is clamouring not merely for books but for good books, most of the good books are unobtainable or in short supply’. Penguin, however, found itself in a unique position, one that afforded Lane the opportunity to take greater risks in the type and number of new books he was prepared to publish.

Penguin’s wartime output was remarkable for a company that had only been in existence for four years when war was declared. Working with a staff that never exceeded forty people, Penguin published over six hundred titles and launched nineteen new series between 1939 and 1945 (Lewis, Reference Lewis2005, p. 149). Penguin’s sales grew significantly after the outbreak of war, rising from nine million books sold in 1939 to thirteen million in 1940. This rose to an extraordinary seventeen million in 1941, after which sales dropped back to between eight and nine million per year. This fall in sales corresponds not with a lack of demand but with a fall in production due to the precarious nature of producing books during this period.Footnote ³² Complications with printers were a common problem; many firms lost skilled workers to the forces and much machinery was damaged or destroyed during air-raids. The situation was further exacerbated by the Government who regularly commandeered printers at short notice.

Penguin’s wartime success can be attributed in large part to the generous paper quota it had secured. Paper rationing was officially introduced in February 1940 to conserve the limited stocks of imported paper that were increasingly needed for munitions, foreign propaganda, government publications and other official purposes. Publishers became increasingly frustrated as they witnessed vast stocks being consumed by Government ministries such as the War Office, which by itself used more paper than all of the commercial publishing houses put together (Chibnall, Reference Chibnall, Kirkham and Thoms1995, p. 136). As Holman (Reference Holman2005, p. 208) notes, the annual quota granted to publishers in 1940 was 60 per cent of the quantity they had consumed between August 1938 and August 1939. In September 1942, the already strict paper controls became even more stringent and by 1943 entitlements dropped to just 6.5 per cent of the amount firms had enjoyed in 1939 (Holman, Reference Holman2005). Whereas most publishers complained that 1938–39 had been a challenging year for sales, Lane had experienced huge success with the launch of the Penguin Specials, a series of topical books on world affairs that sold extremely well. To price his books at sixpence, he had printed in extremely large numbers in order to recoup his investment, a business model that required substantial stocks of paper. Penguin therefore qualified for an impressive paper ration, much to the chagrin of its rivals. This was compounded by the fact that Penguin’s small paperbacks required less paper per unit than the books of other firms, thus Lane was able to print far greater quantities than his competitors.Footnote ³³ Publishers who were unable to meet the unprecedented demand for their publications could only watch in dismay as Penguin grew to dominate the paperback market.

Another factor in Penguin’s success was that the firm and its warehouse operation were based outside of London, in Middlesex, away from the chaos of the Blitz.Footnote ³⁴ For instance, in December 1940, an air-raid gutted Paternoster Row, the traditional centre of the book trade. Millions of books stored in warehouses were destroyed and some firms lost everything (Feather, Reference Feather2006, p. 196). Worse still, the warehouse of leading wholesaler Simpkin Marshall was badly hit, wiping out around four million books and destroying a very important part of the trade’s wholesaling and distribution arrangements (Unwin, Reference Unwin1941, p. 33). The situation at Penguin was far less devastating and consequently its activities continued largely unhindered. Penguin was also far less reliant on the kind of governmental support craved by other publishers, such as the MoI’s Books and Pamphlets Programme. From this position of strength, Penguin enjoyed a freedom to expand unlike any other wartime publisher. As Steve Hare (Reference Hare1995, p. 90) has commented, for Penguin, ‘the rationed and restricted war years became not a period of retrenchment and consolidation but a period of intense and spectacular growth’.

While Lane found himself in a strong position that enabled him to experiment with the type of publications he produced during the war, illustrated art books represented a new territory for the pioneering publisher and the success of The Penguin Modern Painters was by no means guaranteed. Lane’s confidence in embarking on the series was characteristic of his entrepreneurial character and penchant for ploughing ahead in the face of uncertainty. As W. E. Williams (Reference Williams1973, p. 66) wrote in his memoir of Lane, ‘the more adventurous a project seemed the more likely he was to adopt it’. We now turn to consider the role that Lane’s personal ambition played in his decision to pursue the Modern Painters.

2.4 Allen Lane and the Road to Illustrated Books

The launch of Penguin Books in 1935 had been a gamble and many in the book trade predicted its failure. Lane’s introduction of exceptionally cheap paperback reprints of successful hardback books was initially conceived to reinvigorate his uncle’s failing publishing imprint, The Bodley Head, where he worked as managing director.Footnote ³⁵ He had become convinced that there was in Britain ‘a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price’ (Lane, Reference Lane1938, p. 969). This ‘new reading public’, as the author Sidney Dark (Reference Dark1922, p. 6) had termed it, was a new class of lower-income reader who, thanks to improved living conditions and increased literacy, had ‘discovered that the literature of their country is a priceless possession which is their very own’. Lane was aware that hardback reprint editions such as Chatto & Windus’s Phoenix Library and Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library were selling in their thousands and sometimes even in the tens of thousands, but he suspected that with the creation of even cheaper, paperback editions, he could tap a new market, achieving sales in the hundreds of thousands.

Packaged in austere typographical covers with genre colour-coding, the first Penguins appeared in July 1935 as an imprint of The Bodley Head and were priced at just sixpence, the cost of a packet of ten Woodbine cigarettes. The initial list was a selection of relatively safe titles, licensed from Jonathan Cape and The Bodley Head, which were the antithesis of the trashy, lowbrow romances and Westerns hitherto found at the sixpence price point.Footnote ³⁶ Lane was confident in his new venture despite scepticism from the trade. As Edward Young (Reference Young1952, p. 210), one of the firm’s original employees and designer of the Penguin logo, recalled:

Lane’s doubters were proved wrong. The first ten books were an immediate success, selling over 800,000 copies in just four months. By the end of 1936, over four million books had been sold. The Penguin list grew rapidly, and, by 1938, contained well over 100 titles selling in editions of 100,000 to 150,000 copies each (Kitchin, Reference Kitchin1938, p. 972). The firm’s success, which would significantly impact the future availability of books in Britain, came too late to save The Bodley Head from liquidation, but proved to the trade the benefits of engaging with the ‘new reading public’.

The decision to proceed with the Penguin concept in the face of opposition and uncertainty demonstrates the tenacity with which Lane, eminently confident in his own abilities, ran his firm during its early years. The Penguin Modern Painters was, of course, a radically different proposal to the cheap paperback reprints that had launched Penguin in 1935, but the series was not entirely without precedent. As Lane’s former employee and biographer J. E. Morpurgo (Reference Morpurgo1979, pp. 128, 143) noted, the publisher was ‘always most contented when pioneering’, and it was not long before he began to pursue other modes of publishing, remaining ‘devoted to the idea that somehow he must enlarge the Penguin range to include illustrated books’. It was an ambition that he had inherited from his uncle John at The Bodley Head, whose conviction was that books must not only satisfy the mind, but also the eye.

The first of Lane’s publications to include illustrations were the Pelican Books, a parallel non-fiction imprint launched in 1937 that was designed as an avowedly educational series. Pelicans were marketed to students, teachers, and readers enrolled in adult education classes such as those organised by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). The list was representative of the best in adult education, offering books on a range of subjects including history, science, politics, economics and the arts. The books, which were produced in the same format as Penguins, sold in significantly lower quantities, but individual titles could still sell in the tens of thousands. It was deemed essential that Pelicans dealing with the visual arts should include illustrations. Two notable examples appeared in 1938: Art in England, a selection of essays compiled by R. S. Lambert on the centenary of John Constable’s death, and Modern German Art by Peter Thoene, a Pelican Special responding to the Nazis’ ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition’ and scheduled to coincide with the ‘Twentieth Century German Art’ exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries that year.Footnote ³⁷ These publications, with their low-quality, black-and-white photogravures, were only one step towards the type of finely illustrated books that Lane had in mind. As W. E. Williams (Reference Williams1956, p. 15), Penguin’s Editor-in-Chief and prominent adult educator, later acknowledged: ‘Pelicans proved the basis of a vertebrate structure of creative publishing which was soon to include such other species as King Penguins, Puffins, Penguin Modern Painters, and […] many other series.’

An ambitious attempt to enter the field of illustrated books came with The Penguin Illustrated Classics, a series modelled after the type of expensive and exclusive illustrated hardbacks published by The Bodley Head. The intention was to produce a paperback series with original wood-engravings comparable in quality but priced for the Penguin market. Ten titles appeared in May 1938, including Pride and Prejudice, A Sentimental Journey, and Robinson Crusoe with illustrations from members of the Society of Wood-Engravers. They were, however, unsuccessful. As Morpurgo (Reference Morpurgo1979, p. 143) observed, ‘the choice of title was almost too obvious; their newly created British audience expected from Penguin something more original than Jane Austen, Sterne and Defoe’. Furthermore, to the modern eye, the wood engravings appeared antiquated, ‘as if they had been prepared by tired disciples of the old John Lane school of book illustrators’. Though exquisitely executed, the illustrations simply did not match either the youthful energy of Lane’s firm or the small Penguin format, which caused them to appear cramped on the page. Furthermore, the cheap, thin paper used for the books meant that they could not compare with the sophisticated products they were attempting to emulate. Labelled a disaster, the series was discontinued after the first ten volumes.

Lane remained committed to pursuing illustrated books for the mass market and soon began to explore the potential of colour reproduction, an aspect of The Penguin Modern Painters that was routinely praised. In the 1930s, colour printing was well established as a technical process and, from 1937, was exploited to great effect in Britain by the firm Adprint. Founded by the Austrian émigré publisher Wolfgang Foges, Adprint specialised in producing greetings cards, commercial advertising and, with the assistance of Walter Neurath, illustrated books.Footnote ³⁸ Foges, like Lane, wished to produce colour illustrated books that were both high-quality and affordable. Having witnessed the remarkable success of Penguin, Foges, and Neurath approached Lane proposing that they collaborate on a series of small reference books with colour illustrations. Lane was keen to work with Adprint in order to take advantage of Neurath’s experiences with colour printing. Their collaboration resulted in The King Penguins series, which was launched in November 1939.

The appearance of The King Penguins coincided with the start of the Second World War, which led Penguin to market the books accordingly, promoting them in light of the recent closures of traditional art venues, many of which had been evacuated in anticipation of aerial bombardment. As Penguin’s promotional publication Penguins Progress stated: ‘At this time when so many of our galleries and museums are closed we hope [The King Penguins] will fill a useful purpose in promoting an appreciation of art and as a reminder of the pursuits of peace’ (Penguin Books, 1940, p. 2). The early volumes were edited by Elizabeth Senior of the British Museum, but after she was killed in an air-raid in 1941 the series was taken over by Nikolaus Pevsner, an art historian and émigré from Germany. Pevsner had previously been commissioned to produce a King Penguin on the subject of illuminated manuscripts but had pulled out after seeing the poor quality of the colour reproductions. Despite Adprint’s involvement, the illustrations of the earliest titles left much to be desired, reflecting the difficulties faced by Foges and Neurath who struggled to convey their exacting standards to British printers. As Morpurgo (Reference Morpurgo1979, p. 144) noted, The King Penguins ‘made demands upon the printer that seemed superhuman’ as they were expected to ‘somehow use mass-production to provide for the public a fair reconstruction of some of the most expensive and esoteric colour printing of the past’. An unimpressed John Piper (quoted in Carney, Reference Carney1995, p. 49) remarked that the colours in the first books appeared to him like ‘a mess on the bathroom linoleum’.

Lane was not discouraged, however, and improvements in printing came in 1942 when he hired R. B. Fishenden, a recognised authority on colour printing who would eventually oversee production of The Penguin Modern Painters. Under his expert guidance, the quality of The King Penguins improved significantly with colour plates executed using a variety of techniques such as halftone letterpress, photolithography and autolithography (Lake, Reference Lake2014, p. 14). Though not selling in vast quantities, the enhanced books were very well received. Piper (Reference Piper1943, p. 104) noted that ‘the pictures are distinctly better than usual’, while Eric Newton (Reference Newton and Fishenden1949, p. 58) later praised the series for its ‘balance between text and illustration which suggests neither a copiously illustrated essay nor a picture book with an artificial ballast of text’.

The war did not dampen Lane’s desire to pursue illustrated books. If anything, it accelerated his resolve, providing him with the catalyst for the aforementioned Puffin Picture Books. The success of these and The King Penguins proved to Lane that not only was his firm capable of producing high-quality illustrated publications but that this could be achieved even during wartime. Lane’s enthusiasm for colour illustrations, his confidence in Penguin’s abilities, and the unprecedented public interest in art all gives the impression that The Penguin Modern Painters was something of an inevitability. However, there is little evidence to suggest that Lane had much personal interest in the work of contemporary British artists. Indeed, writing about the publisher after his death, W. E. Williams (Reference Williams1970) noted, rather disparagingly, that he had ‘no interest whatever in art, music, theatre, science or politics. His tastes were unsophisticated and he showed no particular bent’. Did the Modern Painters simply reflect Lane’s desire to capitalise on an emerging opportunity? Or was there more to the series than Penguin’s profit and loss account? We now turn to consider another, possibly decisive factor, in Lane’s decision to pursue The Penguin Modern Painters: the influence of W. E. Williams.

2.5 W. E. Williams: Editor-in-Chief

As Peter Mandler (Reference Mandler2019, p. 240) has written, during the economic slump of the 1930s, Lane’s ‘mild social conscience’ was pricked and he ‘was quickly swept up into a giddy whirl of earnest social reformers and adult-educators’. Paramount among these was W. E. Williams who, as The Times (1977) declared, could have claimed ‘to have been one of the greatest and most effective mass educators of his time’. Williams believed in the self-empowering potential of reading and was keen to increase access to published materials, especially among the working classes. As Rick Rylance (Reference Rylance2005, p. 60) observes, he ‘favoured a unitary, inclusive definition of culture and a conception of the “public sphere” of books that embraced some painstaking attention to questions of access and use’. Williams began working with Penguin as an editorial adviser in 1936 and so confident was Lane in his abilities that he was soon promoted to Editor-in-Chief. As his biographer, Sander Meredeen (Reference Meredeen2008, p. 87), writes:

Lane’s tendency to rely on advisers such as Williams stemmed from an awareness of the limitations of his own literary and scholarly abilities. He nearly always heeded Williams’s counsel, especially in areas where he himself lacked knowledge, such as the arts. For example, it was Williams who, after being appointed general editor of Pelican, quickly expanded the list to include books on the visual arts alongside those on history, science, and politics. Williams’s influence over the direction of Penguin Books, particularly in the area of the arts, is discussed at length in the next section, but it is worth briefly considering here the role that he played in the conception of The Penguin Modern Painters, especially with regard to the involvement of Kenneth Clark.

Indeed, Williams and Clark worked together closely during the war. Both were involved in CEMA and the Art for the People exhibitions, and Williams had briefly worked as Clark’s personal assistant at the MoI. They both shared an interest in increasing the popular understanding of the arts, though it was Williams who understood the vast potential reach of Penguin Books. As the Penguin Archive reveals, it was Lane’s Editor-in-Chief who steered the publisher towards Clark and possibly even planted the idea of publishing books on modern British artists – as opposed to books on war art exclusively – in his mind. This can be inferred from a missive from Lane to Clark in June 1942, in which the concept for the Modern Painters series was laid out: ‘while discussing this [proposal] recently with Mr. Williams he suggested that I might get in touch with you and, if possible, arrange a meeting when we could talk it over’ (Lane, Reference Lane1942a). Could it be that Williams capitalised on Lane’s previous dealings with Clark to ensure the involvement of his influential friend? Williams, as Lane’s trusted advisor, certainly knew that a suggestion to approach Britain’s most influential art world figure would be heeded. A further hint of Williams’s progenitorial role is found in a letter he received from Clark written soon after he met with Lane: ‘Allen Lane [has] been to see me about the Penguin “Modern Painters” and we have drawn up a promising looking list’ (Clark, Reference Clark1942b). Clark’s use of the series title before it had been decided upon is intriguing, especially because Lane (Reference Lane1942b) was at this time referring to the project as the ‘Penguin Modern Artist series’. Had Williams and Clark already discussed the concept for the series before it was suggested to Lane? Would Lane ever have considered publishing contemporary art books were it not for the gentle guidance and encouragement of Williams? As the next section will show, Williams, who was keen to see Penguin publish more educational books on the visual arts, had stronger ideological reasons than Lane or even Clark as to why The Penguin Modern Painters should be produced.

2.6 A General Editor for The Penguin Modern Painters

Although it was Williams who recommended that Lane should consult Clark regarding the Modern Painters project, Lane needed little encouragement to involve such an eminent figure. Not only was Clark the most powerful figure in the British art world, he was also popular with the general public. Driven by the belief that everyone should have access to culture, he appeared regularly on the BBC Home Service and his support for Dame Myra Hess’s hugely popular wartime concerts in the evacuated National Gallery had won him popular acclaim, as had his introduction of the ‘Picture of the Month’ scheme, which saw a succession of old master paintings retrieved from wartime storage and exhibited at the gallery. To have Clark’s name associated with Lane’s proposed series would have been a huge boon to Penguin. Yet, as Chris Stephens and John-Paul Stonard (Reference Stephens and Stonard2014, p. 9) note, he was also a contradictory character, appearing to some ‘aloof and condescending, a man from the higher echelons of British society who managed to occupy the uncomfortable area where the establishment meets the artistic community’.

After meeting with Lane in London on 11 June 1942, Clark recommended that the most appropriate editor for the series would be Eric Newton, art critic of the Manchester Guardian and Sunday Times (Clark, Reference Clark1942b). Newton was a prolific art writer, articulate lecturer, and radio broadcaster. His book European Painting and Sculpture had been published as a Pelican Special the previous year, and so he already enjoyed a working relationship with Penguin. Nevertheless, the opportunity to preside over a flagship series on modern British art for one of the country’s most successful publishers proved too tempting for Clark and he hastily wrote to Lane the next day informing him that, in fact, he would rather edit the series himself (Clark, Reference Clark1942c). Lane was naturally delighted and no doubt relieved, tactfully remarking that it was something he had not wanted to suggest himself as he knew how many calls there already were on Clark’s time (Lane, Reference Lane1942b).

As general editor of the Modern Painters, Clark was given free reign in selecting artists and authors for the series and while this represented a tremendous opportunity to advance the work of artists he personally supported, it also left him vulnerable to criticism. Fear of dissent perhaps lies behind his initial doubts about taking on the editorship: ‘I should love doing it’, he wrote to W. E. Williams, ‘but of course my name is a red flag to a number of people in the art world’ (Clark, Reference Clark1942b). The art historian Herbert Read was one of Clark’s most vociferous critics, judging him to be a dictatorial figure who promoted a narrow version of modernism and balked at abstract and non-objective art. Clark’s anxiety over such criticisms can be detected in his comments to Lane suggesting reasons not to hire him: ‘you may feel that my editorship would give the series too much of a parti pris’, he wrote, ‘or you may feel that I could not give enough time to it and you would rather have an editor whom you could hustle’ (Clark, Reference Clark1942c). Despite accepting the job as editor, his ambivalence became even more pronounced when a few weeks later he requested that his name not appear anywhere on the books: ‘no-one ever notices who edits a series – at least I never do – and consequently no-one will observe that the editor’s name has been omitted’, he wrote to Penguin (Clark, Reference Clark1942d). Clark’s dubious reasoning did not convince Lane who recognised that his name was far too valuable to be omitted.

As soon as Lane had secured his editor, the new series, tentatively named Penguin Modern Artists, began to progress rapidly. Clark quickly compiled a list of artists whom he wanted to include, pairing each one with an appropriate author. Lane had decided that each author should receive £50, while the artists would be paid £100, but they were also expected to provide him with an artwork, free of charge, for his own collection. Initially, Clark left the choice of reproductions largely in the hands of the authors and artists whose judgement he trusted. However, in the case of authors who were ‘primarily men of letters and not art critics’, he ensured that the choice of images was left to himself (Clark, Reference Clark1942f). This decision would prove problematic as several artists took issue with his selections, complaining that they should have been consulted first. Furthermore, in some instances, the precise location of artworks was unknown and, since Clark had little interest in detective work, the job of tracking them down fell to Penguin. In fact, Clark had very little involvement in the production of the Modern Painters, which was co-ordinated by Penguin’s first in-house editor, Eunice Frost, whose role in the development of the series would prove significant. The Penguin Modern Painters – as Clark insisted the series be renamed, no doubt for its Ruskinian allusions – benefitted hugely from Frost’s involvement. She undertook the majority of the editorial work and was also responsible for overseeing the physical production of the books under the most challenging of conditions. Her appreciation for art, sharp eye for detail and exacting standards all contributed to the early development of the series.Footnote ³⁹ Clark’s initial enthusiasm for the series began to wane after the war as various production problems were encountered, but it was here that Frost found herself in her element. She invested so much time and effort in the series that Clark regretted her role was not publicly acknowledged. As he wrote to Lane: ‘the credit for [the books’] good qualities must go entirely to Miss Frost, who has put an immense amount of energy into them and has been wonderfully patient with the artists. I only wish that her name could appear as editor instead of mine’ (Clark, Reference Clark1944).

2.7 Overcoming Production Challenges

Frost’s patience was tested time and time again while working on The Penguin Modern Painters and the Penguin Archive contains numerous examples of delays and setbacks. For example, when she wrote to the MoI’s Publications Division, asking for permission to reproduce works from the WAAC’s collection, she was told that her request would need to be put to OUP (Mont-Clar, Reference Mont-Clar1943). This concerned Frost who was emphatic that ‘in all cases the work has already been put in hand’ (Frost, Reference Frost1943a). The MoI, as has already been shown, were at times favourable towards Penguin, but in the case of the Modern Painters the planned series appears to have been considered something of a threat to its existing publishing activities. A determined Frost attempted to reason with OUP directly. ‘It was not known to us that there was any ban in force against this and we very much hope that you will, in principle, agree to our reproducing certain of the pictures,’ she wrote to Geoffrey Cumberlege (Frost, Reference Frost1943b). Frost, having not received any word from OUP, was eventually contacted by Cecil Day-Lewis of the MoI who advised her that there would, in fact, be no difficulty in reproducing paintings by Nash, Sutherland, and Moore, but in the case of later titles, such as those on Bawden and Ardizzone that were to feature a larger proportion of war artists’ pictures, ‘Sir Kenneth Clark has agreed that it would be advisable to postpone their publication until the new O.U.P. Series has had its market’ (Day-Lewis, Reference Day-Lewis1943).Footnote ⁴⁰ The Ministry clearly felt that Penguin’s books would affect sales of the OUP series, and the revelation that Clark was behind the delay must surely have irked Frost. However, in the event, the MoI need not have worried because, due to various other production challenges, the first Modern Painters books would not be ready for another year.

A significant delay was caused by Penguin’s decision to have new photographs taken of each painting from which the reproductions would be produced. This meant that all of the works to be included in the Modern Painters needed to be located and photographed individually, either in situ or at the National Gallery’s photographic department. Frost was responsible for tracking down the majority of the works, many of which were touring the provinces as part of WAAC exhibitions as well as those organised by the BIAE. Others, not belonging to the WAAC, institutions, or Clark and his associates, were harder to trace. Frost found herself writing individual letters to a host of private collectors in an attempt to ascertain the location of paintings, several of which had been sent abroad for safety and, in at least one case, the whereabouts of which was unknown. Finding the paintings, however, was only the first stage of the long and involved process of producing the reproductions for the books.

Creating accurate colour reproductions of paintings was, in the 1940s, a highly skilled and laborious affair. For the Modern Painters, Clark advised Lane to use the four-colour half-tone process, one of the more common reprographic methods of the day and the process employed by John Swain & Son and W. F. Sedgwick, Ltd., who produced the plates for the majority of The Penguin Modern Painters series.Footnote ⁴¹ But with this method, reproductions were at best approximations, the success of which depended largely on the interpretive skills of the photo-engraver and printer. The colour balance and contrast of paintings would frequently be rendered inaccurately in publications, resulting in images far removed from the originals. When, for example, Clark saw the illustrations accompanying an article about the war artists he had written for The Studio, he complained to the editor, saying: ‘I am a little disappointed that the colour plates have improved so little since I saw the proofs. As usual they are too red’ (Clark, Reference Clark1941c).

The artist Paul Nash was well aware of the problems associated with colour reproduction. As he wrote in the 1936 Penrose Annual:

The Penguin Modern Painters was no exception, and it took a long time before all the artists were satisfied with the proofs. As Nash’s correspondence with Frost attests, the artist was indeed very concerned with the ‘temperature’ of the reproductions in his monograph. Numerous colour proofs were produced in an attempt to satiate him but rarely was he satisfied with the quality of John Swain & Son’s work, which further delayed the progress of the first four books. Even after his monograph was published he still harboured reservations, writing to Lane: ‘It is an excellent general effect but I am rather sad to find that by comparison [to the originals] the colour paintings ultimately lose their brilliance. Have I had a freak copy or was this inevitable? (Nash, Reference Nash1944a). However, in later correspondence, he conceded that he had probably overreacted, writing: ‘I do not think I should have said I was disappointed with the final book, indeed I am very well pleased with it,’ admitting that the differences between the reproductions and his original canvases were ‘slighter than I thought’ (Nash, Reference Nash1944b). Despite this change of heart, Nash’s ambivalence delayed the launch of the series by several months.Footnote ⁴²

Other volumes in the series did not fare so well. For instance, W.F. Sedgwick Ltd, the photo-engravers tasked with producing the images for David Jones, was bombed during the war, and their blocks were destroyed. New blocks were not ready until 1947, but Jones, who was recovering from a nervous breakdown, was unable to provide feedback on them. When the book finally appeared in April 1949, Clark wrote promptly to Frost to complain about the poor quality of the colour plates:

The first four Modern Painters finally appeared in April 1944, a year after the second series of War Pictures by British Artists had been published (Clark’s longed-for deluxe volume failed to materialise at all).Footnote ⁴³ The arrival of the series was announced in The Bookseller (13 April 1944), where the books were commended for ‘fully maintain[ing] the Penguin reputation for value for money’ and subsequently selected as ‘Publications of the Week’ (20 April 1944). John Russell (Reference Russell1944, p. 526), writing in The Listener, hailed the books ‘a pleasure to possess’, remarking that ‘the plates have […] a remarkable veracity, and perusal of them, no less than of the essays, excites in every case the wish to see new works by these painters’. In The Times Literary Supplement, Charles Marriott (Reference Marriott1944) wrote positively about the books, enthusing that a great advantage of the series was ‘that it will enable at a moderate cost people who have not the time or the opportunity to keep up with contemporary art exhibitions to see for themselves what other people are making all the fuss about’.

Paul Nash (Reference Nash1944c) contacted Kenneth Clark to express his appreciation. ‘Apart from being a very interesting gallery of pictures at an incomprehensible price’, he wrote, ‘it is a far reaching blow for the artist and the people at one and the same time’. Recognising the innovative nature of the affordable paperbacks, Nash saw their potential in introducing his work, and that of his peers, to a mass audience. His use of the widely overused term ‘the people’ is noteworthy; it echoes the Art for the People exhibitions but, as with that scheme, the specific demographic in view here is rather nebulous. As Margaret Canovan (Reference Canovan2005, p. 2) has commented, ‘like other terms that have been much contested, “the people” carries an assortment of meanings, many of them incompatible with one another’. While the term resists easy definition, in a broad sense it simply refers to a section of a society that does not belong to an elite. In this, it is comparable to the term ‘general reader’ so beloved of Penguin in the post-war years.Footnote ⁴⁴ The notion that The Penguin Modern Painters was embraced by a broad cross section of the reading public has been suggested by Peaker (Reference Peaker2001, p. 10), who asserts that, ‘in Penguin’s hands the art book shed its class distinctions and reached out towards a new broader audience, which greeted it zealously’.

But is that actually the case? To what extent were class distinctions really eschewed by the series? Who comprised this new audience and how broad was it? It is, of course, extremely difficult to establish accurately the composition of any publisher’s readership. Lane attempted it in 1946, when he commissioned a study on Penguin’s readers from the social research organisation Mass-Observation, though, as we shall see, this offered no conclusive evidence regarding the Modern Painters. What is possible, however, is to identify the type of audience that Penguin anticipated reaching with the series. It is the nature of this imagined, or constructed readership that the next section seeks to establish, and the extent to which this was reflected by the books themselves.

3.1 W. E. Williams and The New Social Consciousness

As we have seen, multiple factors influenced the conception of the Modern Painters, but there was no greater champion of the series than Penguin’s Editor-in-Chief, W. E. Williams who, recognising its educational potential, was key to identifying its target market. Writing soon after the war in Penguin’s in-house magazine Penguins Progress, Williams (Reference Williams1946, pp. 46–47) claimed that The Penguin Modern Painters had been ‘designed to bring the work of painters to the wide public outside the art galleries: the public who have perhaps never ventured within because they doubted their ability to appreciate what they would see’. For writers, Williams reasoned, the printing press had brought their work to ‘a vast new world outside the lecture room’. Similarly, for composers, the wireless has introduced their music to ‘an ever-widening audience outside the concert hall’. But the painter, he opined, had only been able to reach the small minority of people with access to galleries and museums. ‘The work of our modern painters has lacked this general appreciation’, he concluded, ‘for the simple reason that its very nature prevents it from being both available and accessible to all but a limited public’. It was this perceived lack of accessibility to contemporary art amongst a supposedly uncultured section of British society that Williams thought the series should redress. By looking at the relationship between Williams’s role at Penguin and his multifarious activities in the field of adult education, one can begin to piece together a picture of the readership he envisaged.

Williams dedicated most of his life to promoting adult education and the democratisation of culture. His remarkable career began as English master at Leyton County High School in Essex. In 1928 he was appointed Staff Tutor in English Literature in the Extra-mural Department of the University of London, the first appointment of its kind. By the time he began working for Penguin as an editorial adviser in 1936, he was editor of The Highway (the journal of the Workers’ Educational Association) and Secretary of the BIAE, a post he held from 1934 until 1940. During the Second World War he established the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), where he served as Director (1941–45) and was appointed Honorary Director of Art at CEMA (1940–42), where he organised numerous wartime exhibitions in association with Kenneth Clark. In later life, he served as Secretary-General of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1951–63) and also Secretary of the National Arts Collection Fund (1963–70). As a writer he was a regular contributor to the BBC’s literary weekly The Listener and authored or co-authored more than twenty books. But it was as Editor-in-Chief at Penguin books from the late 1930s to 1965 that he had his greatest influence on the reading tastes of the public at large. As Meredeen (Reference Meredeen2008, p. 77), argues:

It was not only Lane who trusted in Williams’s counsel, Clark also sought his advice. For instance, after Clark had offered to edit The Penguin Modern Painters he confessed to Williams that he was ‘not sure this was wise’, worrying that his name ‘might prejudice the sale of the books in some quarters’ (Clark, Reference Clark1942g). He continued: ‘I am seeing Allen Lane about it on Thursday, but will not decide anything definite until I hear from you.’ Williams (Reference Williams1942), however, had no reservations regarding Clark’s editorship, remarking that his choice of artists and authors would make the Modern Painters ‘one of the best Penguin lines so far’. However, he questioned Clark’s initial decision to include the artist Richard Eurich and wondered if Edward Ardizzone was too ‘limited’ a subject. Of the authors, he noted that he was ‘a bit tired of Herbert Read’ and urged Clark to consider writing the introductions to Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore himself. Clark, however, did not intend on authoring any of the books, though he did heed Williams’s advice regarding Eurich who, like Ardizzone, was dropped from the series. But Clark was not willing to lose Read, whom he felt was the most suitable person to write about Paul Nash. That both Lane and Clark sought Williams’s advice illustrates the level of influence he enjoyed, and though he did not sway all of Clark’s decisions regarding the Modern Painters, his influence over the early development of the series was not inconsequential.

When The Penguin Modern Painters was conceived in 1942, Williams was leading the Art for the People scheme with CEMA, which gave form to his belief that everyone should have the opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the fine arts. This conviction derived from the communitarian values instilled by his Congregationalist upbringing as well as his formative years in Manchester, where he had discovered for himself the treasures of the city’s municipal art gallery. Following the nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold, many in the Adult Education movement of the 1930s believed that the democratisation of culture could improve social cohesion and create a united community that transcended class divisions.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Albert Mansbridge (Reference Mansbridge1934), chairman of the BIAE, wrote: ‘if an increasing number of people would […] live freely in the spirit of adult education, then new power and new happiness would be the reward of the entire community’. Indeed, the 1930s was an important decade in the push toward a common culture in Britain and, in the service of social reform, progressives and adult educationalists increasingly devoted themselves to improving the tastes of the general public.Footnote ⁴⁶ But, as Raymond Williams (Reference Williams and Williams1989, p. 164) has stressed, adult educators were not interested in propagandising, nor were they involved with the movement out of pity for the underprivileged; rather, they were driven by

W. E. Williams, who understood the role that the arts could play in this new ‘social consciousness’, had brought this democratising ideology to Penguin, recognising in the Modern Painters an opportunity to further his cultural vision in book form. As has been shown, during the war, Lane, Clark and Williams all believed in the existence of a ready audience for affordable art books, a potential readership who, though largely uneducated in such matters, ostensibly desired to learn more about modern art. It was an assumption based on several factors. Firstly, there was the great interest in visual art precipitated by the war, not only in London but across the country. With the Blitz had come the perception that culture was under threat, which sparked a general enthusiasm for art unseen before 1940. As John Rothenstein (Reference Rothenstein1966, p. 42) recalled, there was during the war ‘an unprecedented demand for opportunities of seeing works of art’, which for him was ‘a characteristic manifestation of the enhanced seriousness of the national temper’. This demand was not entirely surprising considering that the national art collections had been removed to safety and many venues remained closed for the duration of the war, but it contrasted sharply with the situation prior to the Blitz. Furthermore, Rothenstein notes that the ‘new public’ for art which emerged in that period was also hungry to learn, demanding ‘instruction as well as delight’.

Secondly, there was the increased demand for books, which, as discussed in Section 2, had seen Penguin’s sales rocket in 1941. Thirdly, there was the success of OUP’s War Pictures by British Artists, of which a second series was being prepared for 1943. The war had thus presented Penguin with the ideal conditions in which to launch a series of accessible and affordable contemporary art monographs. With the security of sufficient paper stock, Lane was sure that the project would be financially viable, but Williams saw another opportunity, one that would allow him to continue using Penguin as a tool to encourage new audiences for art, a mission that had begun during his time as editor of Pelican Books. To that end, Williams (Reference Williams1946, p. 47) was keen to ensure that The Penguin Modern Painters was accessible, educational, and targeted at people who believed that ‘modern painting is something unintelligible, and that modern Art Galleries are for the few, selected initiates’.

3.2 Pelican Books and the Arts

Williams’s editorship of Penguin’s non-fiction imprint, Pelican Books, set an important precedent for the development of the Modern Painters. As he later acknowledged, ‘Pelicans proved the basis of a vertebrate structure of creative publishing which was soon to include […] Penguin Modern Painters’ (Williams, Reference Williams1956, p. 15). Initially, Pelican Books was aimed at adult students enrolled on non-vocational courses, such as those run by the WEA and university extra-mural departments. But Williams, who believed that readers should be equipped with the tools by which they could form their own tastes and opinions, recognised that cheap paperbacks were an ideal way to reach those sections of society outside the influence of formal educational institutions. He thus sought to widen the appeal of Pelican Books, attaching the project to ‘an optimistic reformist social agenda’ aimed at a ‘large, intelligent reading public’ who were increasingly hungry for non-fiction books (Rylance, Reference Rylance2005, p. 56). Having superseded V. K. Krishna Menon as general editor of the list in 1938, Williams became central to the development of Pelican and the conception of its readership. Having recognised the educational advantages that Penguin’s growth could engender, Williams sought to further align the publisher’s activities with his own aspirations in the fields of literature and the arts. Thus Lane, with Williams’s guidance, was able to transform the image of Penguin from supplier of cheap fiction to that of the nation’s new Popular Educator.Footnote ⁴⁷

Williams believed that everyone was capable of enjoying the fine arts, provided they were given sufficient guidance, and for him Pelican represented a vehicle by which that guidance could be delivered. As Lane (Reference Lane1938, pp. 968–69) acknowledged, the Pelican list had initially been heavily weighted on the side of history, sociology, politics and economics. But in 1938, with Williams at the helm, he could promise readers that ‘a whole series of books in every field of Art’ was soon to be published. Williams was convinced that there was a much larger appetite for art among the general public than Lane had hitherto imagined, one that could only grow if suitably encouraged. If this audience was to be properly nourished, it was essential that the new Pelicans were suitably appetising. Lane therefore proclaimed that the books would feature no ‘highbrow art criticism’ and would treat the subject of art ‘as a human activity’. In this way, the two men anticipated Pelican books becoming ‘the true everyman’s library of the twentieth century, covering the whole range of the Arts and Sciences, and bringing the finest products of modern thought and art to the people’ (Williams, Reference Williams1937, p. 974). The editorial shift, indicated by talk of accessibility and an appeal to ‘the people’, reflected a re-evaluation of Pelican’s readership. Instead of being targeted primarily at adult education students, the books would now be aimed at the much wider, if less readily defined, category of the ‘intelligent layman’, a nebulous readership that ‘was deemed to be at the centre of Penguin’s democratic revolution’ (Blackburn, Reference Blackburn2020, p. 21).

3.3 Williams and the Adult Education Movement

Lane and Williams recognised that to successfully market educational books on the arts to a mass audience, elitism was to be avoided at all costs. The changes in editorial policy that Williams (Reference Williams1934a, p. 7) made at Penguin reflected his belief that the ‘pedantry of academic exposition’ had made certain subjects ‘alien and unintelligible’ to students enrolled in formal adult educational schemes such as the WEA’s Tutorial Classes. These university-based courses, established by Albert Mansbridge in 1907, involved the provision of educational opportunities to working people who had left formal education at an early age. They were founded on the assumption that ‘there were great numbers of working people perfectly capable of profiting by more advanced education, even of the university standard’ (Williams, Reference Williams and Williams1938b, p. 8).Footnote ⁴⁸ Prior to the 1930s, adult education classes and courses were largely oriented towards the social sciences with little reference to the arts, but during the 1930s classes on aesthetic appreciation began appearing, fostering a growing interest in art and an increased demand for art education.

While the Second World War may have precipitated the emergence of a new public for art, a growing interest in the arts among adult students had been observed some years earlier. As Mansbridge (Reference Mansbridge1935, p. 1), now Chairman of the BIAE, noted:

Williams himself experimented with such classes in 1934 when he decided to introduce his English Literature students to modern art. Armed with printed reproductions of works by Van Gogh, Paul Nash and others, he began a class on aesthetic appreciation, which proved very successful.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nevertheless, he worried that such classes risked alienating the ‘unsophisticated’ if they became overly academic (Williams, Reference Williams1934a, p. 19). Many students wrote to him at The Highway bemoaning the lack of elementary level classes. He therefore encouraged the cultivation of new forms of adult education that would appeal to those intimidated by the formality of the WEA Tutorial Class.

Writing in The Highway, Williams (Reference Williams1934b) challenged his peers regarding the formality and overly intellectual nature of the adult education movement: ‘we persistently talk over [the adult student’s] head; we expect more intellectual agility from him than he can possibly have after many years of absence from formal intellectual exercise; we won’t begin from his level’. For Williams it was imperative that facilities were provided ‘not for a coterie but for a community’, adding that ‘we have to organise not for tens of thousands but for hundreds of thousands’. Adult education thus needed to ‘learn the needs and the idiom of that elusive but ubiquitous creature, the man-in-the-street’ (Williams Reference Williams and Williams1938b, p. 18). Using the metaphor of a swimming pool, Williams (Reference Williams1934a, p. 7) encouraged his adult education colleagues to cater for this expanded community of adult learners, reminding them that there was a ‘shallow end’ as well as a ‘deep end’:

Williams increasingly advocated an informal approach to adult learning, one that was less ‘intellectually arduous’ and that allowed more people to become participants rather than spectators. Bringing this perspective to Penguin, he had convinced Lane that it was the novice – the reader who needed to be tempted into the ‘shallow-end’ – that they should be targeting with Pelicans. It was an attractive proposition to Lane, for an expanded market would certainly result in increased sales.

3.4 Pelicans and the ‘Man in the Street’

In October 1938, there appeared on the Pelican list a book on art aimed firmly at the ‘man in the street’. Prompted by the centenary of John Constable’s death, Art in England comprised a selection of essays compiled by R. S. Lambert (Reference Lambert1938, p. 5), editor of The Listener, that was intended to provide an ‘accessible and up-to-date book on art in [England] for the general reader’. Lambert hoped that the collection would ‘meet the needs of that large and increasing section of the public which is becoming more and more interested in the visual arts and perhaps, at the same time, more and more puzzled about their present development’. Lambert was a former WEA tutor and had edited The Highway before Williams. As vice-chairman of the BIAE, he was one of Williams’s closest allies and collaborators in the Adult Education movement. He was similarly interested in popularising the arts and was convinced of the necessity of ‘bridging the gulf between the highbrow and the man in the street in matters of entertainment and culture’.Footnote ⁵⁰

A growing public interest in art during the 1930s had been noted by several commentators, including W. G. Constable (Reference Constable1935), Director of the Courtauld Institute, who remarked:

The essays in Art in England, all of which were reproduced from The Listener, were written by various contributors, including Eric Newton, Herbert Read, Henry Moore, William Coldstream, Kenneth Clark, and W. E. Williams. Williams’s belief that there was an ‘appetite for art’ among Britain’s book-buying public was vindicated by the popularity of Art in England, which by October 1938 had rapidly become one of the best-selling Pelicans. By January 1939, over half of its initial impression had been sold which, as a member of Penguin’s Publicity Department remarked was ‘very good for a Pelican title’ (Schurr, Reference Schurr1939).

Several of the essays in Art in England were first delivered as BBC radio broadcasts. The national broadcaster had been airing programmes on art appreciation throughout the 1930s, presented by figures such as Stanley Casson, J. E. Barton, and Eric Newton. As Rylance (Reference Rylance2005, p. 57) has observed, to Williams ‘Penguin was in many respects comparable to the BBC’ and he was evidently in sympathy with its radio art talks, which, as Sam Rose (Reference Rose2013, p. 608) notes, were firmly aimed at the ‘plain man’ and sought to ‘encourage a moderate and charitable attitude towards modern art’. They also encouraged listeners to visit the nation’s art galleries, several of which organised exhibitions illustrating specific talks. As noted by S. F. Markham (Reference Markham1938, p. 137) in his report on the state of Britain’s provincial museums and art galleries, at least two galleries installed loudspeakers in 1932 to enable visitors to listen to the talks in tandem with viewing the related exhibits. But whilst the BBC was reaching enormous numbers, access to art galleries was still limited. According to Markham there were only eighty public art galleries outside of London in 1938, and although many museums owned fine collections of art, these were confined to larger towns and cities. Like Williams, he believed that access to art had a role to play in societal improvement but warned that inadequate art education risked a cultural divide: ‘on the one hand we have the narrow world of scientific attainment, refined scholarship, and trained aesthetic taste; on the other vast crowds whose art is dictated by the chain store, the cinema hoarding, and the seaside souvenir shop’ (Markham, Reference Markham1938, p. 143).

The notion that public taste needed to be improved was a common theme in the 1930s. For instance, Clark (Reference Clark1939a) noted that ‘the English people have a fine taste in literature, but I do not think their best friends could claim that they have much natural taste in the arts of painting and sculpture’. His reasoning for the poor taste in visual arts among the English was attributed to the fact that, despite being subjected to ‘good literature’ from childhood, their walls are filled with ‘very bad pictures, coloured supplements from winter annuals or steel engravings of highland cattle’. Similar views were expressed by Thomas Bodkin (Reference Bodkin1940), who at the start of the war noted that ‘the Fine Arts are distrusted by the average Englishman because their value as helps to a full life are not appreciated […] they are disregarded as being futile distractions from his two main preoccupations, business and sport’. Williams (Reference Williams1935, p. 141) reasoned that ‘if popular taste is poor and ill-educated it is because it so seldom gets a chance to contemplate the examples of art which might illuminate its darkness’. As Secretary of the BIAE, he believed he could supply a remedy, and, in 1934, he began to devise Art for the People, a scheme that provides the clearest indication of the kind of audience that he was interested in stimulating.

3.5 Art for the People

Beginning in April 1935, Art for the People comprised a series of free touring exhibitions intended to compensate for the lack of municipal art galleries in the provinces. Williams (Reference Williams1937, p. 974) had calculated that there were more than four hundred towns with populations of over five thousand people in which there were no public art collections, and, according to the BIAE, many of these places were ‘too small or too poor ever to possess a gallery of their own’, thus it was not a case of ‘bringing the people to art’ but of bringing ‘art to the people’ (British Institute of Adult Education, 1935, pp. 7, 9). Williams’s proposal soon found favour with his BIAE colleagues who agreed to administer the scheme with support from the WEA, the Carnegie UK Trust and a number of private donors. The first exhibitions were planned by Williams (Reference Williams1935, p. 141) with the BIAE’s Art Committee, and while Art for the People became a highly successful venture that continued into the war years, it was initially conceived as a simple experiment to discover how much local interest could be stimulated by ‘exposing’ people ‘to the novel experience of looking at good pictures’.Footnote ⁵¹

The first three exhibitions were held in towns with significant working-class populations: Swindon, Barnsley, and Silver End in Essex. It was, of course, the working classes at whom much adult education was aimed but, in choosing these locations, it is clear that Williams and the BIAE intentionally targeted this section of society. The choice of venues reflected the organisation’s desire to ‘strike a balance between industrial and rural populations’ (British Institute of Adult Education, 1935, p. 11). These were also places where adult education initiatives were already present. Swindon and Silver End, for example, both had active local branches of the WEA, which were able to assist in publicity and encourage participation. All three exhibitions were an emphatic success with the total number of adult visitors across the venues exceeding ten thousand.Footnote ⁵²

Crucial to the scheme’s success was the securing of artworks. Legal restrictions at the time meant that loans from public collections were only available to accredited galleries and so, unable to secure pictures from national or regional art collections, the BIAE managed to persuade several private collectors to lend works to the exhibitions. With the exception of a couple of loans from the Contemporary Art Society and Courtauld Institute, the included artworks, all of which were paintings and drawings, were sourced from private collections. For example, the historian and educationalist Michael Sadler, himself a former resident of Barnsley, lent his entire collection of English and French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings to the South Yorkshire town’s exhibition. Among the many British artists included in these first three shows, it is noteworthy that a large percentage were also selected for inclusion in The Penguin Modern Painters. Artists such as Duncan Grant, Ivon Hitchens, William Nicholson, Matthew Smith, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, David Jones, and Ben Nicholson were exhibited alongside Boudin, Cézanne, Gauguin, Daumier, Matisse, Pissarro, and Van Gogh.

The choice of artworks at these exhibitions was designed to introduce modern art to new audiences and thereby improve public appreciation for such work. Williams (Reference Williams1935, p. 142) was keen to note that the exhibitions were not designed to ‘foist an artificial sense of “good taste” upon people, but to give them some opportunity to gain the experience on which they may ultimately come to base their conceptions of art’. As Meredeen (Reference Meredeen2008, p. 67) has observed, Williams’s intention was ‘to stimulate the habit of looking at painting and sculpture and so develop more critical faculties amongst viewers’. Williams’s use of the term ‘the people’ evokes the type of generalisations about the working classes that were made by Victorian social reformers. Indeed, parallels between Art for the People and the philanthropic exhibitions in the deprived East End of London organised by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in the late nineteenth century were openly embraced by the BIAE. The Institute’s report on the scheme noted that the Barnett’s motivations were ‘at most points similar’ to their own, but whereas their Whitechapel exhibitions had been designed to inspire the establishment of art galleries, Art for the People was primarily intended to ‘serve the centres where galleries are unlikely ever to exist’ (British Institute of Adult Education, 1935, p. 9). Having seemingly taken on the Barnetts’ mantle, Williams hoped that his scheme would engender a greater understanding and appreciation of art for the sake of class relations.

One of the most significant parallels between the Barnetts’ exhibitions and Art for the People was the inclusion of ‘guide lecturers’ whose job was to answer visitors’ questions and to initiate informal discussions about the artworks. The Barnetts’ exhibition guides were described by The Times (26 March, 1883) as ‘kindly educated folk […] who explain the pictures to willing groups of listeners’. The BIAE’s guide lecturers, or ‘observers’ as they were also known, were in turn described as a kind of ‘super-steward’ who functioned as ‘animated catalogues’ (British Institute of Adult Education, 1935, p. 10). Their main purpose was to ‘keep an eye on people who were puzzled or who seemed at a loss about how to look at the pictures’. As one exhibition catalogue stated, the guide lecturers ‘are ready to discuss how to look at pictures and to help visitors get pleasure from what they see on the walls’.Footnote ⁵³

For Williams (Reference Williams and Lambert1938a, pp. 115–16), it was the ‘tactful and friendly’ observers at Art for the People exhibitions who ‘have proved far and away the most useful way of helping people to get the best out of the pictures’. His description of their role provides an insight into his conception of the target audience for Art for the People:

Here, then, is Williams’s conception of the archetypal ‘man in the street’: a sceptical ‘blunt Yorkshireman’ with little knowledge of art, the very type of working-class person that would likely have been found in Barnsley at the first of the Art for the People exhibitions.

In addition to the observers, the BIAE arranged informal talks on aesthetic appreciation that were delivered two or three times a week at each venue. These were loosely based on the BBC’s art talks and were given by leading authorities such as Eric Newton, John Rothenstein, J. E. Barton, David Talbot-Rice, and Edward Halliday, several of whom had appeared on the BBC. Art historical content was kept to a minimum in favour of an emphasis on developing the critical faculties of those unfamiliar with looking at art. Despite the BIAE’s claim that Art for the People was simply intended to provide opportunities for people in small towns to access good art, the presence of observers and lecturers underscored the pedagogical impulse that drove the scheme.

Williams’s belief in the existence of a large potential audience for art and art education outside of the formal structures of the adult education movement was vindicated by the BIAE’s report on the first Art for the People exhibitions:

In just under a month, the number of visitors attending these three provincial exhibitions exceeded by more than a quarter the total number of students attending WEA classes across the UK in a six-month period. Concluding that Art for the People was a viable project, the BIAE began work on expanding the scheme and many similar exhibitions were mounted in the following years.

3.6 Expanding Art for the People

The war years saw a major expansion of Art for the People. By 1939, the scheme had secured a powerful new patron in Williams’s friend Dr Thomas Jones, secretary of independent educational charity the Pilgrim Trust and an ardent supporter of adult education.Footnote ⁵⁴ Jones had agreed to put up £25,000 and, a few weeks later, the Treasury had been persuaded to make available £50,000 for the creation in 1940 of the Committee (later Council) for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts in Wartime (CEMA). Not only did this mark the beginning of state funding of the arts in Britain but it paved the way for the creation of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1945.Footnote ⁵⁵ The role of CEMA, as their slogan ‘the best for the most’ indicated, was to deliver high-quality cultural activities to the general public. But, as Weight (Reference Weight, Weight and Beach1998, p. 157) has observed, it also signalled ‘a specific determination by Britain’s political elites to foster national culture using the organs of state’. CEMA became a useful tool for the government who not only believed that it would help bolster morale but, by nurturing popular taste, would also grow an awareness of the culture and heritage for which the nation was fighting. To this end CEMA was responsible for organising nationwide theatre tours, orchestral concerts, and exhibitions. Williams was appointed Honorary Director of Art for CEMA and Art for the People became its official provider of exhibitions.

Now that substantial funds were available, Williams was able to rapidly expand Art for the People. In 1940, under the joint direction of Williams and Clark, the exhibitions were toured by CEMA to eighty villages and towns attracting an estimated 300,000 people (Leventhal, Reference Leventhal1990, p. 298). Work was now drawn from the WAAC’s growing collection as well as the permanent holdings of the Tate Gallery and National Gallery. Exhibitions were presented in various venues including town halls, barrack rooms, canteens and factories. Commenting on the scheme, Clark (quoted in Mellor, 1990, p. 20) remarked that the wartime exhibitions provided ‘the only practical means of bringing pictures to the people, especially workers, who would never have the leisure to see them’.

The following year, ninety-three venues hosted exhibitions, which included several large thematic shows. The total number of recorded attendances at the major exhibitions was 367,000 (Williams, Reference Williams1971, p. 21). In 1942, 205 major exhibitions were organised, with 249 the following year. In 1944, the year that The Penguin Modern Painters was launched, there were 126 major exhibitions. The exhibitions were by now reaching a broad audience, yet Williams still believed that the target demographic should be the working and lower middle classes. This was confirmed by an Art for the People exhibition pamphlet published in 1943 (quoted in Meredeen, Reference Meredeen2008, p. 70) in which he wrote:

However, by the time these words were published, Williams had already surrendered the art directorship of CEMA to Philip James in order to concentrate on his role as Director of ABCA, a decision that would see him enjoy less influence over the direction of CEMA’s visual arts policy as well as the development of The Penguin Modern Painters (Leventhal, Reference Leventhal1990, p. 308).

3.7 Contradicting Williams

For Williams, The Penguin Modern Painters represented an opportunity to expand the wartime work of CEMA. Indeed, the similarities between the books and the Art for the People scheme have not gone unnoticed. Joicey (Reference Joicey1995, p. 152), for instance, has observed that the series owed much to Williams’s scheme, carrying forward the aesthetic evangelism of the 1930s into the post-war years. Carol Peaker (Reference Peaker2001, p. 26) has similarly noted that Williams’s proposal for the Modern Painters ‘resembled Art for the People in book form’. Certainly it was claimed that both projects aimed to disseminate the work of artists to a broad public who were largely unfamiliar with modern art, and both were similarly driven by a pedagogical impulse. For instance, a parallel can be drawn between the books’ introductory texts and the kinds of insights into an artist’s work that one may have gained by attending the BIAE’s art lectures, or even from having engaged with an official observer. Yet there are also significant differences. Most obvious is that viewing artworks in reproduction is very different to experiencing them as physical objects. As W. G. Constable (Reference Constable1934, p. 17) remarked at a BIAE conference, ‘nothing, however, can replace direct contact with works of art themselves. It is one of a teacher’s first duties to get his students to visit and revisit every kind of fine building, gallery, museum and exhibition’. Furthermore, the dialogical experience of interacting with an exhibition observer, or having the opportunity to question a visiting lecturer, was impossible to replicate in book form. This would prove to be a challenge for the authors of the Modern Painters who ostensibly had little notion of the audience they were writing for.

If The Penguin Modern Painters was to challenge and enlighten the views of those who believed modern painting to be ‘unintelligible’ and that art galleries were for ‘selected initiates’, it was essential that, as with Pelicans, the introductory texts should address the intended audience in a way that was both accessible and educational while avoiding condescension. However, as Holman (Reference Holman and Gee1993, pp. 76–77) has observed, in this regard the series was not consistent in its approach:

This suggests that not only were the authors not briefed about the intended readership, but that many lacked the experience of writing for such an audience. Holman’s citation is taken from Henry Moore by Geoffrey Grigson, which was one of the first books in the series to be published in 1944. It appears amid a discussion of Moore’s use of colour in his two-dimensional works: ‘think of taffeta in Reynolds’, Grigson (Reference Grigson1944, p. 15) writes, ‘or in Gainsborough. Think of colour in such poets as Mickle or Chatterton’. He continues by making reference to the water-colours of Cotman and Turner, and to ‘the open and shut weather of Constable’. While Grigson’s allusions would not seem out of place in an art history book, or in an art periodical such as The Studio, they appear incongruous in a series purporting to cater for uninitiated readers.

Grigson was not the only writer whose text did not befit Williams’s target audience. To a greater or lesser extent, all of the early volumes of the Modern Painters assume a level of knowledge and understanding contrary to that proposed by Williams. For example, Herbert Read (Reference Read1944, p. 9), in his text for Paul Nash, observed formalist traits in the artist’s work that tended ‘towards certain simplifications and emphases of a geometrical nature which could only have their origins in the cubism of Picasso and Gris: perhaps also in the futurism of Boccioni and Severini’. One must concede that the likelihood of Williams’s ‘blunt Yorkshireman’ being familiar with avant-garde art movements such as Cubism and Futurism is remote. Especially impenetrable to the general reader are portions of Edward Sackville-West’s introduction to Graham Sutherland. Not only does he presuppose a familiarity with artists such as Palmer, Blake, and Turner, but also with poets and classical composers:

Elsewhere are found obscure statements such as: ‘Sutherland’s harmonic progressions will seem in general as rugose as Beethoven’s, to those accustomed to the blandness of most contemporary English gammes’ (p. 9). Sackville-West’s text, which at times borders on the esoteric, displays little evidence that the author intended to avoid what Williams (Reference Williams1946, p. 46) described as ‘the over-coloured phrases that so often disturb the uninitiated catalogue-buyer’.

Even Eric Newton (Reference Newton1947, p. 5) makes assumptions regarding his readers’ knowledge of art history when he writes in his introduction to Stanley Spencer that the artist’s work ‘is not to be approached in quite the normal way – the way in which one would approach, for example Bonnard and Sickert or Toulouse-Lautrec’. Elsewhere, he writes that Spencer can be compared to ‘an imaginary painter of the Early Renaissance, a man endowed with a little of Masaccio’s simple grandeur and some of Ghirlandaio’s prosaic charm, mingled with his own native enthusiasm’, and reference is also made to Giorgione, Botticelli and El Greco, artists unlikely to be overly familiar to readers unacquainted with art galleries (pp. 15, 8). To be fair to Newton, the majority of his text is written in a relatively accessible style with little technical vocabulary. A clear attempt to nurture an aesthetic appreciation of Spencer’s work is apparent from lines such as: ‘each picture is a statement of a particular message, an illustration of a specific idea in pictorial form. Miss the particular message – or, worse, misunderstand it – and you have lost at least half your means of enjoying his art’ (p. 6). Nevertheless, as with the majority of writers who penned texts for the early Modern Painters, Newton’s assumptions about his readers are at odds with the audience so clearly outlined by Williams.

An author more in sympathy with Williams was the critic Raymond Mortimer (Reference Mortimer1944, p. 14), who adopts an explanatory tone in his introduction to Duncan Grant while attempting to demystify modern art for his readers: ‘It is now accepted that the principal function of a picture is not to give information about the visible world, but to express the imagination of the painter and to infect the spectator with his emotion’. Elsewhere, he writes casually, informing the reader that ‘[Roger Fry] and Clive Bell were, I fancy, the first English writers to cotton on to what is called “modern” painting […] Post-Impressionism has been a temptation and a trap to many apprentice painters: to try to distort before you can present is like trying to dance before you can walk’ (pp. 6–7). However, the majority of writers appear to have no awareness of an intended audience, which suggests that there was a distinct lack of editorial guidance from Williams and Clark. Similarly, Lane did not intervene and no attempt was made to discourage the ‘highbrow art criticism’ that he had previously sought to disown (Lane, Reference Lane1938, p. 968).

How, then, do we account for the discrepancy between the content of The Penguin Modern Painters and the claims that Williams made regarding his target readership? It is not known how much advice, if any, he gave to Clark and Frost during the commissioning of individual books, and there is no evidence to suggest that he was involved in editing the texts. We must conclude, then, that Williams had no involvement in the production of the books. In fact, little evidence of his editorial labours at Penguin exists at all. As Lewis (Reference Lewis2007, p. 88) observes, Williams

It is also worth noting the surprising fact that Williams, despite his senior role, was never actually employed by Penguin, working, as he described it, ‘in a strictly extra-mural capacity and virtually for out-of-pocket expenses’ (Williams quoted in Lewis, Reference Lewis2005, p. 118).

During the war, Williams’s attention was diverted away from Penguin as he became more involved in his adult education work. Much of his time was taken up with ABCA – for which he sought to bring the principles of adult education to Britain’s servicemen – and also CEMA where, in his capacity as Director of Art, he continued to organise the Art for the People exhibitions. But when John Maynard Keynes became chairman of CEMA in 1942, Williams began to grow frustrated. Keynes disliked Art for the People and made life progressively difficult for Williams by introducing an elitist, metropolitan bias to the Council’s activities. ‘C.E.M.A. is getting under my skin’, Williams complained to Clark (7 September 1942, cited in Leventhal, Reference Leventhal1990, n. 71). ‘Try as I will, I can do nothing right for [Mary] Glasgow and [Philip] James, both of whom seem animated by the increasingly obvious determination to put the B.I.A.E. right out of C.E.M.A.’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Williams’s troubles at CEMA – a time when he was perhaps at his most distracted – coincided with the commissioning of The Penguin Modern Painters.

3.8 Clark’s Audience and the Market for Art

Even though Clark had championed the Art for the People exhibitions and shown an interest in promoting art to a broad public, Williams was perhaps naive to assume that his own notion of a popular audience was shared by the general editor of The Penguin Modern Painters. Clark’s interests lay primarily in supporting artists rather than the cultural edification of the working classes. His conception of a target audience for the Modern Painters was informed chiefly by his role as a patron. He certainly understood that the series was ‘intended to attract people with little or no previous knowledge of modern painting’ (Clark, Reference Clark1942h), but as he later remarked, he had found editing the series valuable ‘because it helped people to understand painters whose work they could buy, and it thereby helped the painters’ (Clark, Reference Clark1954). This comment highlights the diverging concerns of Williams and Clark: both men believed in educating the public about art, but whereas Williams longed for social change, Clark sought to support artists by cultivating patronage at a time when they needed it most.

Clark was well aware of the precarious position that artists found themselves in during the early months of the war. Unemployment rose sharply in the autumn of 1939, and a survey undertaken by the Artists’ International Association between late September and early October discovered that 73 per cent of its members had either lost commissions or were out of work altogether (Morris and Radford, Reference Morris and Radford1983, p. 56). The art market virtually collapsed during the first two months of the war. Brian Foss (Reference Foss2007, p. 10) notes that anxiety over air raids led several London dealers to suspend their activities, and, although other galleries lowered prices in order to stimulate sales, ‘a long list of well-known figures from Stanley Spencer to Harold and Laura Knight and Frank Beresford found themselves in the unaccustomed position of having neither commissions nor sales’. Against this background, Clive Bell (Reference Bell1939, p. 518) called for the government to step in and ‘save the artists’. Keeping ‘artists at work on any pretext’ had been Clark’s (Reference Clark1977, p. 22) rationale for establishing the WAAC, and, later, The Penguin Modern Painters represented a further opportunity for him to promote their work at a time when the market was beginning to recover.

From 1941, unemployment began to fall and personal income and savings rose substantially. According to Foss (Reference Foss2007, pp. 178–79), many first-time, middle-class buyers began to enter the market and exhibitions soon started selling out. As one columnist remarked, ‘if interest, activity, and demand are criterions, then this is the golden age of British painters as surely as the Elizabethan era was the golden age of playwrights. Never has there been such a demand for pictures. Never were painters so profitably busy’ (Edinger, Reference Edinger1943, p. 2). It was this group of enthusiastic new buyers whom Clark presumably wanted to target with The Penguin Modern Painters. Just as Allen Lane had perceived a market for art books, so Clark saw a large, untapped market for art. As Foss (Reference Foss2007, p. 173) has commented: ‘Clark associated the fostering and popularising of artistic excellence with the reinstitution of a vigorous, enlightened system of patronage.’ Indeed, the potential benefit of the Modern Painters to the art market was noted by art dealer Dudley Tooth, who wrote to Frost to express his support for the series, which he believed would boost the sales of works by contemporary British artists (Tooth, Reference Tooth1944). This may help explain why, in March 1946, after the war had ended and the market had recovered, Clark resigned from his role as general editor.Footnote ⁵⁷

Unlike Williams, Clark was not interested in countering the scepticism of those unfamiliar with modern art, and this was reflected by his choice of authors. Despite the fact that the books addressed a more sophisticated readership than envisaged by Penguin, Williams does not appear to have made any effort to make the texts more appealing to the ‘man in the street’, even though he maintained that the books were aimed specifically at this group. By the time Williams’s comments about the series appeared in Penguins Progress two years had passed since the first four volumes of Modern Painters were published. By that time, each title had sold out and been reprinted. Volumes on Matthew Smith, John Piper, Edward Burra, and Victor Pasmore had also appeared, and though they sold well, it is doubtful that Williams’s ‘blunt Yorkshireman’ had been responsible for their success. From Lane’s perspective, high sales meant that there was no need to change anything about the series as it was clearly meeting a demand. But if the books were not being bought by the proverbial ‘man in the street’, who was buying them? While it is impossible to arrive at a conclusive answer to this question, a 1947 study into Penguin’s readership provides evidence from which inferences can be drawn. It is that study and its findings to which we will now turn.

3.9 Mass-Observation and Penguin World

Although there is no evidence that Penguin issued any editorial guidance for The Penguin Modern Painters, the question of who constituted Penguin’s readership evidently became a subject of intense interest to Lane and his editors which, as Blackburn (Reference Blackburn2020, p. 16) notes, ‘led the publisher to question the idea that its audience was an anonymous mass whose qualities were indeterminate’. As Williams (Reference Williams1946, pp. 7–8) wrote in Penguins Progress: ‘in these unreticent pages we tell you about ourselves; but what are you like?’ he asked, continuing in his inimitable style:

The ‘Penguin Public’, as the firm’s readers came to be known, were described by Marghanita Laski (Reference Laski1956) in the Sunday Observer as ‘indefinable in terms of age or class or money or occupation or education’. The inability to define this group, it was claimed, was due to the fact that its members included readers from across virtually all sections of society. However, Laski’s anecdotal description of Penguin’s readership portrayed a distinctly middle-class audience, which stood opposed to Williams’s notion of ‘shallow enders’ who needed coaxing into deeper waters. In her estimation, the Penguin Public were sophisticated autodidacts who tended ‘to read The Observer, to listen to the Third Programme, use the public libraries, join the Film Society, go to concerts and art exhibitions, look critically at architecture and watch birds’.

Laski’s conjecture found empirical support in a major study of Penguin’s readership and general attitudes to its books undertaken by social research organisation Mass-Observation in 1946.Footnote ⁵⁸ The study, commissioned by Lane, involved a thousand formal interviews of readers, retailers, wholesalers, and librarians, and sought to establish the identity of the Penguin Public. The results were presented to Lane in November 1947 in a document titled ‘A Report on Penguin World’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The study recorded that those who bought Penguin books constituted just 9 per cent of the British public (p. 31). In regard to the social make-up of this group, it concluded that ‘middle class book readers are very much more likely to be Penguin readers than people from any other class group; slightly over five times as likely in fact, as the working class reader’ (p. 32). In fact, the Penguin Public was found to be ‘considerably more middle class than artisan or working class’ (p. 33). Of the middle-class respondents, 41 per cent had read a Penguin book, compared with 17 per cent of artisan book readers and just 8 per cent of the working class (p. 32). The study noted that those who read Penguin books tended to read more of everything, not just books but also newspapers and magazines, to a much greater degree than the ordinary public.

Of particular interest to Williams were the findings relating to Pelican. Whilst The Penguin Modern Painters was published as a part of the Penguin list, its content was more closely aligned with the aspirations of Pelican. It is worth noting here Morpurgo’s (Reference Morpurgo1979, p. 123) observation that ‘the frontier between the two lists was not easy to define’ and some subjects found their way into both ‘for no reason, it seemed, beyond the whim of the moment’. Nevertheless, no books about art had appeared on the Penguin list prior to 1944, whereas several had appeared as Pelicans. It is reasonable, therefore, to surmise that the Penguin reader buying a volume from the Modern Painters series would more than likely have also taken an interest in Pelican titles. Mass-Observation calculated that, of the Penguin Public, the proportion reading Pelicans was roughly four times smaller than those reading Penguin books. Whilst Pelican readers consistently read Penguins of some sort, the reverse was seldom the case (p. 33). In what may have been a disappointment to Williams, it was found that the middle classes were the greatest readers of Pelican: 17 per cent compared to just 4 per cent of artisan readers and only 1 per cent of working-class readers. Mass-Observation concluded that those who read Penguins and Pelicans were a small offshoot of the wider book reading public. Furthermore, this group comprised proportionately more middle-class readers who were more highly educated and generally younger than the average reader (p. 34).

The Penguin World report also found that the Penguin Public were more likely to be members of cultural and intellectual organisations (p. 42–3). In a section dealing with the way that readers spent their leisure time, the study observed that ‘the Penguin readers’ interest in films and theatre and radio, in sports and outdoor activities, in visiting people and in miscellaneous ways of spending their spare time is more marked than it is among people as a whole’ (p. 46). However, no mention is made of gallery-going, despite a table showing the results of favourite leisure time activities among respondents (p. 45). These include categories such as drinking, dancing, sports hobbies, reading, and going to films and shows. It is here that Mass-Observation explicitly distinguishes the Penguin Public from Williams’s conception of the plain man, whereby it is claimed that ‘a preference for drinking is the only sparetime interest which is almost equally popular with the Penguin reader and “the man in the street”’ (p. 46).

From Mass-Observation’s report, a picture of Penguin’s readership emerged that contradicted the myth of universal appeal expressed by authors such as Arthur Calder-Marshall (Reference Calder-Marshall1947, p. 26), who claimed that ‘everybody finally bought Penguins’. Indeed, the evidence it presented, writes Blackburn (Reference Blackburn2020, p. 59), suggested that ‘many of Penguin’s readers were located within an emergent class of technocratic professionals’ and that their ownership of Penguin books ‘came to be understood as a symbol of their membership of this emergent social formation, which could not be located within orthodox categories of class’. However, as Mandler (Reference Mandler2019, pp. 251–52) notes, the definition of the ‘Penguin Public’ presented by the study ‘set the bar too high’, for it only took into account respondents who spontaneously mentioned Penguin when questioned about their engagement with paperbacks. In actuality, he argues, the true ‘Penguin Public’ was likely closer to around a third of the book-reading public as opposed to 9 per cent. Furthermore, he writes, the report’s definition of working-class readers ‘set the bar too low’ for it excluded those referred to as ‘artisans’ of whom a quarter bought Penguins. Nevertheless, when combined, the figures for the artisan and working-class groups are still far lower than those of the middle-class readers, a fact that, as we shall soon see, prompted Williams to undertake some serious soul-searching.

3.10 Williams’s Disillusionment

The revelation that the demographic of Penguin’s readership was in fact far narrower than had hitherto been supposed led to a shift in Williams’s thinking. Instead of seeking to influence editorial policy, he ostensibly embraced the report’s findings. This is evidenced by a 1949 letter to Lane prompted by the suggestion of a junior editor that Penguin might consider introductions to academic subjects that were more accessible than Pelicans. Williams (Reference Williams1949) insisted that ‘the increase of the second-rate tends to diminish the market for the first-rate’ and reminded Lane that Penguin’s policy was ‘to make a large number of readers reach upward until they get into the Pelican class. If an easier option were offered them, they might not reach so avidly’. Williams had become convinced of what he now assumed to be the limitations of Penguin’s readership:

Clark’s disillusion with the book-buying public was also observed in the post-war years when interest in the Modern Painters had waned considerably. For instance, when Frost suggested that the series might be expanded to include books on Matisse and Picasso, he responded: ‘Whether there is really any point in introducing the people of South Shields, at this late hour, to Matisse and Picasso I am far from certain’ (Clark, Reference Clark1954). For Clark, these painters ‘were the product of a highly sophisticated society and can never be genuinely popular, although people may buy them out of snobbishness and curiosity’. How many people bought Modern Painters books out of curiosity, or even snobbishness, is impossible to say, though we may assume that this accounted for at least some sales.

By the 1950s, it was clear that Penguin had come to ‘epitomise the divide between the educated classes and the rest of society’ (Joicey, Reference Joicey1995, p. 11). Williams’s belief in Penguin as a vehicle for democratising culture was crumbling and he publicly conceded the limited appeal of its books in 1956: ‘The Penguin market, despite its ten million sales, is not a mass market, and the firm never intends to seek a truly mass market’ (Williams, Reference Williams1956, p. 58). Alluding to the findings of the Mass-Observation report, he continued by explaining that ‘[Penguin’s] books, especially outside crime and detection, are deliberately designed to appeal to a readership which probably does not exceed one-tenth of the population, and there must accordingly be a limit to the number of titles which can be economically offered to such a restricted audience’. Williams (Reference Williams1963, p. 11) maintained this position into the 1960s, writing in New Society that, although Penguin could lay claim to the title of popular educator, ‘that does not in the least imply that Penguins are made for the masses’. Citing sales figures of eleven million for the previous year, he noted that ‘even that big figure only means that one in five of our population buys a solitary Penguin a year. Penguins are made for a minority, but that minority (or most of it) is a reading élite’.