Art of The United Kingdom - 20th Century

20th Century

In many respects, the Victorian era continued until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the Royal Academy became increasingly ossified; the unmistakably late Victorian figure of Frank Dicksee was appointed President in 1924. In photography Pictorialism aimed to achieve artistic indeed painterly effects; The Linked Ring contained the leading practitioners. The American John Singer Sargent was the most successful London portraitist at the start of the 20th century, with John Lavery, Augustus John and William Orpen rising figures. John's sister Gwen John lived in France, and her intimate portraits were relatively little appreciated until decades after her death. British attitudes to modern art were "polarized" at the end of the 19th century. Modernist movements were both cherished and vilified by artists and critics; Impressionism was initially regarded by "many conservative critics" as a "subversive foreign influence", but became "fully assimilated" into British art during the early-20th century. The London-born Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), was based in Dublin, at once a romantic painter, a symbolist and an expressionist.

Vorticism was a brief coming together of a number of Modernist artists in the years immediately before 1914; members included Wyndham Lewis, the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, Malcolm Arbuthnot, Lawrence Atkinson, the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frederick Etchells, the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Cuthbert Hamilton, Christopher Nevinson, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth, Jessica Dismorr, Helen Saunders, and Dorothy Shakespear. The early 20th century also includes The Sitwells artistic circle and more notably the Bloomsbury Group a group of mostly English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including painter Dora Carrington, painter and art critic Roger Fry, art critic Clive Bell, painter Vanessa Bell, painter Duncan Grant among others; very fashionable at the time, their work in the visual arts looks less impressive today. British modernism was to remain somewhat tentative until after World War II, though figures such as Ben Nicholson kept in touch with European developments.

Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group developed an English style of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism with a strong strand of social documentary, including Harold Gilman, Spencer Frederick Gore, Charles Ginner, Robert Bevan, Malcolm Drummond and Lucien Pissarro (the son of French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro). Where their colouring is often notoriously drab, the Scottish Colourists indeed mostly used bright light and colour; some, like Samuel Peploe and John Duncan Fergusson, were living in France to find suitable subjects. They were initially inspired by Sir William McTaggart (1835–1910), a Scottish landscape painter associated with Impressionism.

The reaction to the horrors of the First World War prompted a return to pastoral subjects as represented by Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious, mainly a printmaker. Stanley Spencer painted mystical works, as well as landscapes, and the sculptor, printmaker and typographer Eric Gill produced elegant simple forms in a style related to Art Deco. The Euston Road School was a group of "progressive" realists of the late 1930s, including the influential teacher William Coldstream. Surrealism, with artists including John Tunnard and the Birmingham Surrealists, was briefly popular in the 1930s, influencing Roland Penrose and Henry Moore. Stanley William Hayter was a British painter and printmaker associated in the 1930s with Surrealism and from 1940 onward with Abstract Expressionism. in 1927 Hayter founded the legendary Atelier 17 studio in Paris. Since his death in 1988, it has been known as Atelier Contrepoint. Hayter became one of the most influential printmakers of the 20th century. Fashionable portraitists included Meredith Frampton in a hard-faced Art Deco classicism, Augustus John, and Sir Alfred Munnings if horses were involved. Munnings was President of the Royal Academy 1944–1949 and led a jeering hostility to Modernism. The photographers of the period include Bill Brandt, Angus McBean and the diarist Cecil Beaton.

Henry Moore emerged after World War II as Britain's leading sculptor, promoted alongside Victor Pasmore and Barbara Hepworth by the Festival of Britain. The "London School" of figurative painters including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Michael Andrews have received widespread international recognition, while other painters such as John Minton and John Craxton are characterized as Neo-Romantics. Graham Sutherland, the Romantic landscapist John Piper (a prolific and popular lithographer), the sculptor Elisabeth Frink, and the industrial townscapes of L.S. Lowry also contributed to the strong figurative presence in post-war British art. According to William Grimes of the New York Times "Lucien Freud and his contemporaries transformed figure painting in the 20th century, In paintings like Girl With a White Dog (1951-52), Freud put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection." In 1952 at the 26th Venice Biennale a group of young British sculptors including Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, William Turnbull and Eduardo Paolozzi, exhibited works that demonstrated anti-monumental, expressionism. Scottish painter Alan Davie created a large body of abstract paintings during the 1950s that synthesize and reflect his interest in mythology and zen. Abstract art became prominent during the 1950s with Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron, who were part of the St Ives school in Cornwall.

In the 1950s, the London based Independent Group formed; from which pop art emerged in 1956 with the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts This Is Tomorrow, as a British reaction to abstract expressionism. The International Group was the topic of a two-day, international conference at the Tate Britain in March 2007. The Independent Group is regarded as the precursor to the Pop Art movement in Britain and the United States. The This is Tomorrow show featured Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, and artist John McHale amongst others, and the group included the influential art critic Lawrence Alloway as well.

In the 1960s, Sir Anthony Caro became a leading figure of British sculpture along with a younger generation of abstract artists including Isaac Witkin, Phillip King and William G. Tucker. John Hoyland, Howard Hodgkin, John Walker, Ian Stephenson, Robyn Denny and John Plumb were British painters who emerged at that time and who reflected the new international style of Color Field painting. During the 1960s another group of British artists offered a radical alternative to more conventional artmaking and they included Bruce McLean, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long and Gilbert and George. British pop art painters David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips, Peter Blake (best known for the cover-art for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), Gerald Laing, the sculptor Allen Jones were part of the sixties art scene as was the British based American painter R. B. Kitaj. Photorealism in the hands of Malcolm Morley (who was awarded the first Turner Prize in 1984) emerged in the 1960s as well as the op-art of Bridget Riley. Michael Craig Martin was an influential teacher of some of the Young British Artists and is known for the conceptual work, An Oak Tree (1973).

• Augustus John, W.B. Yeats 1907

• John Duncan Fergusson, People and Sails at Royan, 1910

• Sir Jacob Epstein The Tomb of Oscar Wilde, 1911, in Père Lachaise Cemetery

• Roger Fry, River with Poplars, c. 1912

• Spencer Gore of the Camden Town Group, Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery, 1911

• James Bolivar Manson, Lucien Pissarro Reading c. 1913

• David Bomberg, The Mud Bath, 1914

• Samuel Peploe, Still Life: Apples and Jar, c. 1912-1916

• Paul Nash, The Ypres Salient at Night, 1917 - 1918, he painted some of the most powerful images of World War I by an English artist.

• Dora Carrington, Portrait of E. M. Forster, 1924-1925

• Henry Moore, Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 5, Bronze, 1963–1964

• Sir Anthony Caro, Black Cover Flat (1974)