The breakthrough of Modernism
Post-Impressionism shocked London, the Vorticists responded with machine art, and two world wars turned artists into witnesses.
Around 1900 British art was still shaped by academies and Victorian ideals, even though Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow was already forging an entirely new style. The great awakening came in 1910, when the critic Roger Fry showed Cézanne, Gauguin and van Gogh in London. The public laughed and shouted, but a young generation felt liberated. The Bloomsbury circle, with the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, took up the new colours and forms.
Shortly before the First World War Wyndham Lewis created Vorticism, a hard, angular art of machines and cities, and the sculptor Jacob Epstein made his robot-like Rock Drill. The war shattered this optimism. Many young artists were killed, and those who survived, such as Paul Nash and C.R.W. Nevinson, depicted a ruined landscape of mud and barbed wire. After the war many artists turned back to the countryside, religion and the personal. What they shared was a longing for something solid in a world that had collapsed.
In the 1930s Hampstead in London became a centre of abstract art, with Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Refugees from Hitler’s Germany, such as Walter Gropius and Naum Gabo, lived there for a time. Surrealism arrived in London with a major exhibition in 1936. During the Second World War the state employed artists to record everyday life in wartime, and Moore’s drawings of people sleeping in the Underground became some of the most powerful images of the period.