Circles and Squares

The “Hampstead Modernists” were a group of artists and thinkers – among them, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Walter Gropius – who occupied a “knot of streets” in north London during the 1930s, said Lucy Davies in The Daily Telegraph. In her entertaining group biography Circles and

Squares, the art historian Caroline Maclean brings them “to glowing life”. Her title is partly a riff on Nicholson’s abstract style of painting, and partly a reference to Dorothy Parker’s quip about the Bloomsbury Group, that they “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”. As Maclean shows, the Hampstead Modernists had similarly unconventional domestic arrangements – this is a book “full of open marriages” – and also fretted endlessly about “how best to love and live”.

Hepworth (above) and Nicholson are the key figures in the story, said Frances Wilson in The Sunday Times. They began an affair in 1931, while both were married to other artists; they moved in together in a row of live-work cottages called the Mall Studios, and Hepworth had triplets in 1934. The art historian Herbert Read lived next door, and across the road was the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (one of many émigrés in the area). Nearby, in the gleaming Lawn Road Flats – the HQ of British modernism – were Gropius and the artist Paul Nash. As is often the case with portraits of “layered lives”, this book is a little cluttered with minor characters, said Laura Freeman in The Times. But Maclean succeeds in conjuring up the atmosphere of Bohemian Hampstead between the Wars. As one reads about the sculptor Alexander Calder putting on impromptu performances of his famous miniature circus, or Virginia Woolf perching on the “hard” Bauhaus chairs in Read’s house, “one very much wants to be there”.