The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars
Frances Spalding (Thames & Hudson, £35)
BARELY two decades separated the two World Wars, but English art exploded in all directions in that brief interlude of peace. New perspectives formed from the shrapnel blast created by Cézanne and Picasso; Wyndham Lewis seemed to construct pictures of the future from war-time debris.
The Nash brothers, after completing grim masterpieces as Official War Artists in the calm of a Buckinghamshire seed shed, went their divergent ways to sum up the twin paths of English art in the 1920s and 1930s. Paul was pitched into Modernist experimentation and towards Surrealism; John found solace in fresh evocations of the far-flung countryside.
England’s rural economy collapsed with the swift withdrawal of wartime farm subsidies, but there were endless opportunities for artists able to thrive on a relative pittance. Ben and Winifred Nicholson could flourish on her grand allowance of £500 a year—with early picture sales adding a fine old house in the inspirational landscapes of Cumberland—until Ben decamped to abstraction and Barbara Hepworth. They and Henry Moore became Modernists of global stature.
However, as the Great Depression gave way to an even more depressing prospect of another war, there was a renewed focus on the beauty of belonging. John Piper’s story is poignant: his marvellous abstracted constructions brought to a crashing halt in anticipation of the destruction to come in the Blitz, he set about recording the built glories of England. Menace is a greater motivator than contentment.
Given the gift of distance, what once seemed eccentric now suggests a brilliant profundity. The peculiar visionary Stanley Spencer towers above this vast survey, although the deranged former Cornish fisherman Alfred Wallis (the truest and loneliest spirit of St Ives) runs him close.
The author has compressed a deluge of material into 384 critically lucid and crucially well-illustrated pages. She is expert in discerning trends and connections between hundreds of human strands—practitioners, partners, patrons, dealers, critics, curators, collectors, bureaucrats. In the end, however, all this perceptive linkage seems only to emphasise the fundamental individuality of some of the most interesting English artists between the wars.
Hurrah for Carrington, Newton, Ravilious, Burra, Gwen John, Roberts, Whistler. Grouped in friendships perhaps, but artistic outsiders all.
Ian Collins
The peculiar visionary Stanley Spencer towers above this vast survey