Leeds Arts Club

The Leeds Arts Club was founded in 1903 by the Leeds school teacher Alfred Orage and Yorkshire textile manufacture Holbrook Jackson, and was probably one of the most advanced centres for modernist thinking in Britain in the pre-First World War period.

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

In 1907 Orage and Jackson left Leeds and moved to London to edit the hugely influential cultural and political journal The New Age. Following their departure the Arts Club came under the sway of Frank Rutter, the founder of the Allied Artists Association and newly appointed Director of Leeds City Art Gallery, and Michael Sadler, the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. Under their leadership the Arts Club maintained its interest in the relationship between radical politics, spiritualism and art, but this was expanded to encompass early psychoanalysis and, most significantly, abstract art.

...
Wikipedia