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BRITISH ART
1915–2018
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In the twentieth century, British art underwent a series of transformations and renewals. It was a period of high creativity in which talented individuals developed their own personal techniques and styles to confront the history and art of their times. In dialogue with other cultural centres of the twentieth century such as Paris and New York, British artists wrote new chapters in the history of modernism. This select group of paintings, drawings and ceramics reflects key developments in that history.
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Landscape painting in twentieth-century Britain frequently laid a special emphasis on the spirit of place. Craigie Aitchison’s views of Holy Isle in the Firth of Clyde are animated by a genius loci, and they often abound with undefined spiritual transmissions between this world and the next. In Sickert’s painting of Bedford Square in Brighton or Duncan Grant’s painting of the Pont Neuf in Paris, the scene was studied closely from life. The animating motive was to translate visual facts into the artists’ chosen scheme of tones (Sickert) or pure colour (Grant).
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Simple vessels—a cup, a pan, a jug—have sometimes attracted painters and ceramic artists who wish to connect their work with aspects of pre-modernist history. The ceramic installations of Edmund de Waal, which respond to the studio pottery tradition of Bernard Leach, are frequently enhanced by literary glosses. The installation included here, jade steps grievance, has a title lifted from the Tang poet Li Po. In William Scott’s abstract paintings of the sixties, irregular circles and plastic, painterly mark-making suggest a modulated continuation of his earlier interest in solid kitchenware vessels such as bowls and frying pans.
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An artist’s preference in figure subjects often reveals their wider creative outlook. Some of Winifred Nicholson’s most characteristic paintings depict children. These paintings have a warm sympathy for the naïve, unstudied manners of her sitters. For his naturalistic portrait drawings, Stanley Spencer often sought out weathered and care-worn faces: the baker, the farmer’s wife, the navvy. The two drawings included here show the builder W. G. (‘Bill’) Head and an almsman, Albert Symes. For Henry Moore, fragments of classical sculpture and beaches of flint pebbles held an equal fixation. His sculpture frequently plots a personally distinctive path between these two worlds.
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British Art 1915–2018: Online Viewing Room
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