This lavishly illustrated book is both a detailed history of the development of modern art in England in the early 20th century and a study of the evolution of the concept of modernism among English artists, critics, and theorists. First published in 1981 to great acclaim, the book is now available in paperback with a new introduction and new colour plates.
"The modernity of English art reconceptualises the history of English painting from 1914 to the end of the 1920s. Whereas most accounts have tended to see the period as marked by a tension between the native tradition and Modernism, this ground-breaking book rethinks the 1920s by situating both Modernist and non-Modernist painters within a wider cultural history. Established figures such as Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Wyndham Lewis, as well as lesser-known artists like Charles Sims, John Armstrong and Ethelbert White, are discussed and illustrated in a series of innovative readings within this context. The modernity of English art offers a new account of painting in England after 1914 and argues for a strongly revisionist view of the significance of the modern during this important but neglected period in English art." --
Early Modernism is a uniquely integrated introduction to the great avant-garde movements in European literature, music, and painting at the beginning of this century, from the advent of Fauvism to the development of Dada. In contrast to the overly literary focus of previous studies of modernism, this book highlights the interaction between the arts in this period. It traces the fundamental and interlinked re-examination of the languages of the arts brought about by Matisse, Picasso, Schoenberg, Eliot, Apollinaire, Marinetti, Ben, and many others, which led to radically new techniques, such as atonality, cubism, and collage. These changes are set in the context both of the art that preceded them and of a new and profound shift in ideas. Theories of the unconscious, the association of ideas, primitivism, and reliance upon an expressionist intuition led to a reshaped conception of personal identity, and Butler examines the representation of the modernist self in the work of figures including Mann, Joyce, Conrad, and Stravinsky. Accessible and wide-ranging, the book is lavishly illustrated with over sixty illustrations, many in color. It provides an elegant and incisive guide to a momentous period in the history of European art.
This lavishly illustrated book is both a detailed history of the development of modern art in England in the early twentieth century and a study of the evolution of the concept of modernism among English artists, critics, and theorists. Charles Harrison explores the two main phases of modern art activity during the period: the years before and during the First World War, when the principal factions were Sickert's Camden Town Group, the English Post-Impressionists, and the Vorticists; and the 1930s, when a new avant garde assembled in response to recent developments in European art, only to divide into groupings of abstract artists, Surrealists, and Realists. Harrison discusses the artists of the period, the most important individual works, and the writings of the critics. His book is a major contribution to knowledge about the art and theory of modernism.
Art in Theory 1648-1815 provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Presents a "first history" of the artist and his work within the literary and sociocultural context of contemporary London, Paris, Milan, and New York. This work also emphasizes a re-evaluative positioning of Nevinson's work within a modernist framework in literature and art in the first half of the twentieth century in northwest Europe.
The bold graphic images made by artists affiliated with Vorticism, British Futurism, and the Grosvenor School of Modern Art capture the optimism and anxiety of early twentieth-century Britain. This richly illustrated volume features rare British prints from the Leslie and Johanna Garfield collection dating between 1913 and 1939—a period marked by two world wars, a global pandemic, the Great Depression, and the rise of Fascism and Communism, but also new technologies, women’s suffrage, and a growing focus on public access to art. Essays explore how artists turned to printmaking to alleviate trauma, memorialize their wartime experiences, and capture the aspirations and fears of the twenties and thirties. At the heart of the catalogue are the colorful linocuts made by artists associated with London’s celebrated Grosvenor School. The visually striking compositions by Sybil Andrews, Claude Flight, Cyril E. Power, and Lill Tschudi, among others, convey the vitality of quotidian life during the machine age.
In one of the first studies of its kind, Orphan texts seeks to insert the orphan, and the problems its existence poses, in the larger critical areas of the family and childhood in Victorian culture. In doing so, Laura Peters considers certain canonical texts alongside lesser known works from popular culture in order to establish the context in which discourses of orphanhood operated.The study argues that the prevalence of the orphan figure can be explained by considering the family. The family and all it came to represent - legitimacy, race and national belonging - was in crisis. In order to reaffirm itself the family needed a scapegoat: it found one in the orphan figure. As one who embodied the loss of the family, the orphan figure came to represent a dangerous threat to the family; and the family reaffirmed itself through the expulsion of this threatening difference. Orphan texts will be of interest to final year undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and those interested in the areas of Victorian literature, Victorian studies, postcolonial studies, history and popular culture.
The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.
