"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." --

Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--Oxford University, 2000.

This book traces artists’ theories of constructive space in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on these concepts and recent theories on space, it develops a methodology termed ‘Spatial Art History’ that conceives of artworks as physical spatio-temporal things, which produce the social, to overcome the reductive understanding of art as a mere mirror or facilitator of society.

The first of three volumes charting the history of the Modernist Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of 'little magazines' which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and artistic modernism in the UK and Ireland. In thirty-seven chapters covering over eighty magazines expert contributors investigate the inner dynamics and economic and intellectual conditions that governed the life of these fugitive but vibrant publications. We learn of the role of editors and sponsors, the relation of the arts to contemporary philosophy and politics, the effects of war and economic depression and of the survival in hard times of radical ideas and a belief in innovation. The chapters are arranged according to historical themes with accompanying contextual introductions, and include studies of the New Age, Blast, the Egoist and the Criterion, New Writing, New Verse , and Scrutiny as well as of lesser known magazines such as the Evergreen, Coterie, the Bermondsey Book, the Mask, Welsh Review, the Modern Scot, and the Bell. To return to the pages of these magazines returns us a world where the material constraints of costs and anxieties over censorship and declining readerships ran alongside the excitement of a new poem or manifesto. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the field of modernist studies; it provides a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which both brings to light the debate and dialogue out of which modernism evolved and helps us recover the vitality and potential of that earlier discussion.

This companion is a collection of newly-commissioned essays written by leading scholars in the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to British art history. A generously-illustrated collection of newly-commissioned essays which provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of British art Combines original research with a survey of existing scholarship and the state of the field Touches on the whole of the history of British art, from 800-2000, with increasing attention paid to the periods after 1500 Provides the first comprehensive introduction to British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one of the most lively and innovative areas of art-historical study Presents in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship, including aesthetics, gender, British art’s relationship to Modernity, nationhood and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world

Abstract:

Rather than focusing on German philosophy or the French avant-gardes, as many books on the history of aesthetics do, Teukolsky takes up British responses to modern art controversies, thus providing a unique view on the development of artistic forms and art history. She considers the canonical writing of authors like John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde alongside texts belonging to the rich field of Victorian print culture--gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, advertisements, and early photography monographs among them. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument also adds substance to our understanding of the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention given to the historical particularities and real events that stamped their imprint on such interactions.

This anonymous manuscript play has long been the subject of scholarly dispute regarding its relationship with Shakespeare's Richard II. This edition, which thoroughly re-examines the text, situates the play within its historical and political context, relating it to the genre of chronicle drama to which it belongs. The manuscript is of particular interest in that it appears to have been used in the playhouse over a considerable period of time and contains what seems to be evidence of the theatre practice of the time. The play is also of special interest for its skilful and original handling of source material which may well have influenced Shakespeare's Richard II. The extensive appendices drawn from Holinshed, Grafton and Stow provide the reader with the opportunity to investigate the manner in which the dramatist has shaped the material. The editors argue for the play's stage-worthiness and dramatic complexity, suggesting that its range both of dramatic tone and social inclusiveness indicate the work of a dramatist of considerable skill and subtlety, equal or superior to the Shakespeare of the Henry VI plays.

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists’ biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.