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Modern British

Modern British is a commonly used term to refer quite generally to all progressive, forward looking – modernist - strands in British art during the twentieth century and therefore encompasses a very diverse array of artists. It represents those artists who are widely considered to have been of lasting importance in furthering the modern movement in Britain - those who rejected academic conventions to achieve a more direct art that would seem relevant to modern life.

These artists shared an interest in European modernism, particularly the French modernism of Impressionism and Post Impressionism onwards. They bought these innovations to bear on English artistic ‘traditions’, which they interpreted through their own individual visions – usually the more ‘quirky’, the more they are admired.

The flourishing of British modernism occurred in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, but the term also covers these artists’ influential predecessors. These include the work of Sir Walter Richard Sickert and the Camden Town Group who were important in mediating Impressionism in the first decade of the century; the avant-garde Vorticist group (Percy Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg and William Roberts) whose dynamic and aggressive espousal of modernity erupted on the London scene in 1914; the painterly Fauve-inspired work of Sir Matthew Smith; and the Bloomsbury Group who were important in the 1920s and early 1930s.

In the 1930s there was a wealth of modernist artist groups and exhibiting societies. Many of these were interested in exploring the possibilities of abstract art: Unit One (Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson), and Circle and the Constructivists (particularly around the Hungarian émigré Laslo Moholy-Nagy) for example. There was also a flirtation with Surrealism its high moment coming in 1936 with the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. A third main strand of modernism can be seen in the realism of the Euston Road School, 1937-39 which in part followed on from the interests of the London Group and the Camden Town Group in looking back to the French Post Impressionists.

In the flourishing of visual arts after the Second World War, two main strands of Modern British painting stand out in particular: firstly that associated with the artist colony in St Ives, Cornwall which was broadly marked by a concern to modernise painters’ treatment of the landscape through abstraction and to incorporate a more personal, experience of landscape. This strand includes Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and William Scott. Though based in Sussex, the work of Ivon Hitchens can also be seen in this light. The Polish emigre Peter Potworowski was closely associated with the St Ives Group in these years (one of several important immigrant artists to influence Modern British art).

Secondly, there was a flourishing of expressive painterly figuration, with artists including Francis Bacon , Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin. Through certain similarities with the School of Paris, their concern with the experience of modern urbanism and their location and treatment of the capital, these are also often referred to as the School of London.

Inspired no doubt by the achievements of Henry Moore, whose work was rapidly gaining extraordinary international recognition in the post-war years, and of Barbara Hepworth, there was a flourishing of modernist sculpture in the period. This was particularly evident on the occasion of the Venice Biennale in 1952, where the bronze cast, abstracted figuration of young sculptors Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick , Reg Butler, Robert Adams, amongst others was famously showcased.

In the late 1950s there was a discernible shift in cultural orientation away from Europe and towards America. There was also a new and dominant concern in cutting-edge practices with the world of mass communications and popular culture. These interests marked the celebrated group of artists graduating from the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s – which included such luminaries as David Hockney, Peter Blake and Ronald Kitaj. Nevertheless, these changes generally suggest the opening of a new and distinctive period and the end of that covered by the term Modern British.