The Reconciliation of Modernism

Modern art in Britain during the early twentieth century is a complex and compromised proposition. It has frequently appeared selective in its assimilation (or rejection) of European modernism, with the results proving uneven and sometimes flawed in coherence as well as quality – from an international outlook to a reductive vorticist blast, from an insular ‘English’ modernism to a purist abstraction, from a British neo-romanticism to an earnest accommodation of French surrealism. This book reads critically the context of modernist visual art in the interwar, conceding ultimately to the absence of one representative manifestation in order to account for circuits of ruptures and seizures from which emerge singular instances negotiating the radically new European modernism. The emergence of Ceri Richards as a modernist of remarkable originality in London between the wars poses one such singularity, setting the artist as focus for the present study in critical analysis of a globally trenchant avant-garde and aspects of art in Britain read as tributary to the greater European exchange.