“There are many instances of vanguard artists stepping out of civilisation into the primitive. Be it Gauguin and Laval in Martinique, Picasso in Gósol, Matisse in Tahiti, Pechstein in Palau or a dozen others artists, we can recall modern European men going to the well of barbarous backwardness in order to drink of its invigorating water, only to discover it tainted by colonial microbes – the religion, clothing, education, laws, consumer goods and other appurtenances of the West. An associated practice is going to a less developed part of one’s own country to immerse oneself in the simple life. Gauguin and Denis treated Pont Aven as their artless backwater, where the girls still danced in traditional bonnets and no one read the Paris papers.
“In 1907, English artist and typographer Eric Gill (1882-1940) set up a commune in a the Sussex village of Ditchling. Gill was a mildly vanguard artist who would become a Catholic convert. His faith became a constant source of inspiration for his art. Gill’s views were a mixture of Modernism, conservativism, and Distributism (Catholic communitarianism). Distributism holds that both laissez-faire capitalism and Socialist control economies damage natural social structures of community and family and have a tendency to degrade the goods produced, replacing the artisan with the employee worker. Gill’s Distributism has been misinterpreted as Socialism, mainly because the latter is better known and understood than Distributism.
“The Ditchling community was associated with a Dominican order of friars, who led worship; attendance at services was expected by Gill to be at least daily for all members of the community. Work, worship and living were mingled in a way that deepened the social implications of the earlier Arts & Crafts Movement…”
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