1930s
A01=Timothy Wilcox
Author_Timothy Wilcox
avant-garde
belle peinture
british painting
Category=AFC
Category=AGC
contemporary
cyclist
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
european
exhibition catalogue
expression
figure painter
freikorperkultur
german influence
harold williamson
historical context
human subject
imagery
laura knight
maxwell armfield
modern art
movement
press photograph
printed ephemera
realist
stanley spencer
sunbather
swimmer
travel poster
visual culture
william roberts
Product details
- ISBN 9780856676192
- Dimensions: 220 x 260mm
- Publication Date: 06 Apr 2006
- Publisher: Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This ground-breaking exhibition focuses on an overlooked strand in British painting of the 1930s. It reveals a small group of figure painters, situated stylistically between the avant-garde abstractionists and the entrenched Edwardian traditions of belle peinture, who were looking for ways of being both modern and in touch with a wide public. Their crisp, realist style was one which enjoyed a vogue across Europe, and has been explored in a number of recent exhibitions on the Continent, but the full extent of the movement has never been investigated in its British context. The artists include Stanley Spencer and William Roberts, painters whose contribution to British painting between the wars is only now being fully recognised. Alongside them are shown a host of lesser names, including Maxwell Armfield, Laura Knight and Harold Williamson. Their paintings of swimmers, cyclists and sunbathers promote an aspect of our own culture in the 1930s which has long been concealed beneath the shadow of similar activities in Germany, where Freikorperkultur was put to the service of a more sinister ideology. Yet, these British paintings may not be as innocent as they seem, either.
The exhibition also includes travel posters, press photographs and printed ephemera, all of which demonstrate the penetration and cross-fertilisation of this imagery across a wide range of visual culture.
Timothy Wilcox has worked as a curator at the Walker Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Hove Museum and Art Gallery and the British Museum. Now an independent curator, he teaches at the University of Surrey and is a regular lecturer at Cambridge International Summer School. He is the author of Frances Towne (1997) and of The Triumph of Watercolour, published by Philip Wilson Publishers in conjunction with the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
