A story of a forgotten friendship explored through personal diaries and archive writings.

Looking in depth at the artist's life and work in both places, this work highlights the extent to which his pictures of Cornouaille were imbued with resonances and memories of Cornwall. Around 40 works are illustrated and discussed.

In 1930 pioneering female gallerist Lucy Wertheim opened The Wertheim Gallery in London. Wertheim challenged the established art scene conventions; she was a woman without formal art training, driven by intuition and a belief that young British artists should have the same opportunities as their European counterparts. Adventure in Art is Lucy's 1947 autobiography, telling the story of her career in the British Modernist era. Republished by Unicorn to coincide with the forthcoming Towner Eastbourne exhibition, A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim & Reuniting the Twenties Group (Summer 2022), this book brings to a contemporary audience the trials and tribulations of a key participant in the male-dominated art world in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucy Wertheim's discerning eye and business acumen helped to propel big names such as Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, Cedric Morris, Henry Moore and Frances Hodgkins into the mainstream.With three commissioned essays - the first by Frances Spalding (Lucy Wertheim - Her Gallery in Context); the second by Ariane Banks (Lucy Wertheim - A Pioneering Woman and Her Contemporaries); the third by Towner's Collections & Exhibitions Curator, Karen Taylor (Lucy Wertheim - Her 'Forty-One Year Experiment' [1930-71]) - this new edition not only brings Lucy Carrington Wertheim's words and deeds back into our conscience, but it also publishes over 70 artworks, many of which are featured in the Towner exhibition, as well as newly photographed ephemera from the Estate's extensive archive. Together, this exhibition and book will significantly reset the accepted narrative, and shine a light on a neglected corner of mid-twentieth century art history.

"When Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines opened The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, Essex, in 1937 they were both established artists with international reputations...Their idea was to set up an art school which would provide an alternative to the formal courses offered by the art schools in the metropolis. The aim, as expressed in the school's brochure, was to provide 'an environment where students can work together with more experienced artists in a common endeavour to produce sincere painting.' The emphasis was on encouraging freedom of invention, enthusiasm, and enjoyment, with the assumption that the student 'believes himself to have a clear idea of creative work and requires help only in its production'...The extracts which form the text of this book are based largely on conversations with our contributors which took place during the years 1998 and 1999. Articles, extracts from an autobiography and a diary are also included. They comprise the affectionate memories of a few of those who knew and loved Benton End and its two gifted and hospitable hosts." -- from the Introduction.

First published in 1986 to wide critical acclaim, The Sexual Perspective broke new ground by bringing together and discussing the painting, sculpture and photography of artists who were gay/lesbian/queer/bisexual. The lavishly illustrated new edition discusses the greater lesbian visibility within the visual arts and artist's responses to the AIDS epidemic. Emmanuel Cooper places the art in its artistic, social and legal contexts, making it a vital contribution to current debates about art, gender, identity and sexuality.

"The modernity of English art reconceptualises the history of English painting from 1914 to the end of the 1920s. Whereas most accounts have tended to see the period as marked by a tension between the native tradition and Modernism, this ground-breaking book rethinks the 1920s by situating both Modernist and non-Modernist painters within a wider cultural history. Established figures such as Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Wyndham Lewis, as well as lesser-known artists like Charles Sims, John Armstrong and Ethelbert White, are discussed and illustrated in a series of innovative readings within this context. The modernity of English art offers a new account of painting in England after 1914 and argues for a strongly revisionist view of the significance of the modern during this important but neglected period in English art." --

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

“It will have to wait until I’m dead or Laura will shoot me,” Lucie Aldridge wrote of her autobiography, referring to Robert Graves’s long-term mistress and muse Laura Riding. A painter and rug weaver, Lucie Aldridge settled in the Essex village of Great Bardfield in 1933 with her husband, the painter John Aldridge. Also living there at that time were Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah Garwood who were cohabiting with Charlotte and Edward Bawden. When Tirzah and John had an affair it tarnished the Aldridge’s marriage forever, something Garwood didn’t acknowledge in her biography Long Live Great Bardfield. This is Lucie’s newly discovered autobiography, with a detailed biographical postscript by Robjn Cantus. The memoirs were written at the suggestion of the editor of Time magazine, T. S. Matthews. They describe her unorthodox childhood in Cambridgeshire, the involvement of her family in Women’s Suffrage, her marriage during the First World War, and her experiences at Art School in London in the 1920s. A beautiful woman, she posed for several artists. She also observed the post-War era of the Bright Young Things and the painters she knew, including Robert Bevan, Cedric Morris and Stanley Spencer. Through John Aldridge she came to know Robert Graves when he was living in Deià with Riding, and provides a fascinating account of her visits there while Graves was in self-imposed exile after writing Goodbye to All That. During these visits she also met and wrote about poets and artists such as Norman Cameron and Len Lye. Lucie’s memoir is illustrated by Edward Bawden. After Lucie’s death in 1974 the memoir was lost, but it recently surfaced in an American university archive. This is its first publication with Lucie’s text illustrated with linocuts by Edward Bawden. The postscript covers the other artists of Great Bardfield and their friends. Printed in a limited edition of 50 hardback copies and 250 paperbacks.

The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britains leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange. Throughout these years, the pursuit of the real was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the romantic, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.