Augustus John: & the First Crisis of Brilliance

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘the age of Augustus John was dawning.’ Augustus John & the First Crisis of Brilliance explored the early artistic networks around John and his Slade School alumni before the First World War. The exhibition was curated with the art historian Dr David Boyd Haycock, author of Brilliant Destiny: The Age of Augustus John.

Alongside Augustus John, the exhibition included work by gifted Slade pupils Gwen John, Wyndham Lewis, William Orpen, James Dickson Innes and Derwent Lees, as well as their friends Jacob Epstein, Henry Lamb and William Rothenstein. Together their work includes some of the outstanding artistic achievements in twentieth-century British art. The exhibition featured paintings, drawings and sculpture including a number of loans from museums and distinguished private collections. Many of the works in the exhibition had not been seen in public for half a century or more.

It was the Slade’s Master of Drawing Henry Tonks who coined the phrase ‘a crisis of brilliance’. Between 1908 and 1912, the School attracted a remarkable cohort of students including David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. Tonks described them as the School’s ‘second and last crisis of brilliance’. The first ‘crisis’ came a generation earlier in the eighteen-nineties when Augustus John had been at the centre of a network of equally brilliant talents.

These earlier artists’ work was distinguished by crystalline draughtsmanship and a restless search for new sources of artistic inspiration. They often looked to each other for encouragement and Piano Nobile’s exhibition included many examples of one artist drawing another. Portraits of lesser-known Slade students such as Mary Edwards, who married Ambrose McEvoy, and Ida Nettleship, who married Augustus John, were displayed alongside those of the famous muses Dorelia McNeill and Euphemia Lamb. John’s discovery of landscape was also addressed in panel paintings of Wales and the south of France by him and his contemporaries.

Augustus John & the First Crisis of Brilliance was accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication, including an introduction and catalogue entries by David Boyd Haycock.