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By Rupert Maas

This is the third part of an article from the FBA archives written by Rupert Maas in 2009.

The Artist Explorer was generously funded by Foyle Foundation. 

Post-Impressionism 

In 1910 and 1912 the critic, Roger Fry, organised exhibitions of Post-Impressionism (a term which he coined) in London. They were received with shock and horror. Fry was intimately involved with the Bloomsbury Group. They firmly rejected the traditional English aesthetics of narrative and the ‘picturesque’. This did not prevent some of them, particularly Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington, painting beautiful pictures. 

At the same time, also influenced by the Post-Impressionists, particularly van Gogh and Gauguin, the Camden Town Group formed around Walter Sickert, who had known Degas. Their evocative paintings of London in the Great War were in a drab, dun palette that now seems exactly appropriate. 

The Vorticists 

Wyndham Lewis split from Fry and the Bloomsbury Group, and formed the Vorticist movement with Epstein, Bomberg, Gaudier-Breska, Nevinson, Wadsworth and Roberts. Excited by the dynamism and action of machines and men, the Vorticists positively embraced modernity, striving to capture movement in an image. Although Vorticism lasted a mere three years, it is now considered to be the only entirely home-grown and truly modernist British art movement of the 20th Century. 

War-Time 

The upheaval of the Great War fragmented all groupings, but the inhumanity of it provided powerful stimuli to modernist painters. The vulnerability of man amidst the remorseless engines and obliterating explosives of war demanded a new grammar. Horror inspired the Official War Artists to paint intensely powerful pictures. Amongst these ‘painters in khaki’ were Bomberg, Nevinson, Orpen, and Paul Nash. 

Nash wrote from the front in 1917: "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls." 

Post-War British art 

British painting after the Great War is notable again for what did not touch it. Britain was exhausted. Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field, Minimalism and forms of Post-Modernism never took much of a hold here, although of course individual painters, notably Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, achieved greatness on the world stage. 

Some artists, like Stanley Spencer in Cookham, evolved slowly like pot-bound geraniums in isolated greenhouses, free of any formal influence. 

The most radical developments in Britain at this time were with form and surface, and the protagonists, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, were both sculptors. 

Hepworth’s husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, experimented with overlaid geometric panels, textured with marble dust and thinly painted, sometimes in pure white. Hepworth and Nicholson went to live in St Ives in Cornwall, attracting a group of artists that became known as the St Ives School, including Lanyon and Frost, Hilton and Heron. Rich sensuous colour and bold, flat interlocking shapes are typical of all the St Ives painters. 

In 1961 in the wake of Pop Art, a brash group of Royal College of Art students including Hockney, Caulfield and Kitaj made a big splash with an exhibition of very large and boldly coloured canvases. 

The Euston Road School 

Between the 1930s and the present day, Modernism in Britain evolved into a strange, wild, art market animal. However, alongside this story, and in stark contrast with it, another group of idealistic artists, many of them socialists, established itself just before the Second World War. They called themselves the Euston Road School. 

These artists retreated from the tsunami of modern–isms emanating from America and retrenched to nature and reality. Bewildered and alienated by the intellectualisation of art, they wanted painting to be understood by the common man once again. Their quiet and moderate response was perhaps peculiarly British. 

The Euston Road School provided us with a generation of great teachers, amongst them Coldstream, Gowing, and Pasmore, although Pasmore moved towards abstraction in about 1950. 

The YBAs 

It is out of this rich tradition that the Young British Artists – the YBAs - sprung from art schools to take the loud lead in contemporary art, worldwide.

© Rupert Mass 2009

Image by Max White, 'Rise, Version 2'