Medieval Modernism and The New Age Magazine: Creating Modernity While Turning to the Past Dominika Buchowska Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland ABSTRACT: Modernism is generally understood as a highly innovative cultural movement which openly promoted a breach from the past, rejecting tradition, undermining accepted norms and conventions. Yet within the broad spectrum of modernist groups there was a formation which did not adhere to these “standards” and could still be considered modernist. Medieval modernists looked back to the Middle Ages for inspiration in the communal and spiritual values of life, artisanal methods of work, as well as harmonious co-operation, all of which were absent in the contemporary world, and which they wanted to reinstate. The New Age magazine edited by A[lfred] R[ichard] Orage between 1907 and 1922 boldly embraced the ideas of medieval modernism while remaining a thoroughly innovative and modern publication. The editor and several other contributors came from the provincial north, infusing cosmopolitan London with their own values associated with positivism, didacticism, and functionalism of art, literature and culture—which were now lost in the capital, where formalism was propagated. In an idealist vein Orage’s aim was to appeal to the working classes to educate and elevate them, and to restore the connection between art and life. Yet it was Huntley Carter’s art criticism that openly promoted medieval modernist views, calling artists, designers and architects to abandon the enthusiastic trust in modernist machinery, and to turn away from imitation, rationality, and convention, returning to the more romantic, personal, and authentic methods of art-making, prevalent in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, elsewhere in the magazine, Carter also wrote articles supporting the highly avant-gardist art and culture, publishing himself the first Cubist image by Picasso to ever appear in Britain in the autumn of 1911. Such apparent inconsistencies were, nevertheless, in line with modernism itself, which endorsed oppositional and conflicting viewpoints in order to provoke discussion and vivid exchange of opinion in the public sphere, and were thus eagerly taken up by a magazine such as The New Age. KEYWORDS: Modernism, avant-garde, medievalism, little magazines, art criticism
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