British Paintings & Works on Paper 1890–1990
British Paintings & Works on Paper 1890–1990 LISS FINE ART TWENTIETH-CENTURY MYTHS Twentieth-century British art is too often presented as a stylistic progression. top right In fact, throughout the century, a richness and diversity of styles co-existed. Albert de Belleroche, Head of This catalogue is presented in chronological order and highlights both some a woman – three quarter profile, late 1890s (cat. 62) extraordinary individual pictures and the interdependent nature of the artistic ground from which they flowered. bottom right Michael Canney, Sidefold V, Abstraction may well have been the great twentieth century art invention, yet 1985 (cat. 57) most of its leading artists were fed by both the figurative and abstract traditions and the discourse between them. Sir Thomas Monnington,the first President of the Royal Academy to make abstract paintings, acknowledged the importance of this debate, when he declared,‘You cannot be a revolutionary and kick against the rules unless you learn first what you are kicking against. Some modern art is good, some bad, some indifferent. It might be common, refined or intelligent.You can apply the same judgements to it as you can to traditional works’.1 Many of the artists featured in this catalogue – Monnington, Jas Wood, Banting, Colquhoun, Stephenson, Medley, Rowntree,Vaughan, Canney and Nockolds – moved freely between figurative and abstract art. It was part of their journey. In their ambitious exploration to find a pure art that went beyond reality, they often stopped, or hesitated, and in many cases returned to figurative painting. Artists such as Bush, Knights, Kelly and Cundall remained throughout their lives purely figurative.Their best work, however, is underpinned by an economy of design, which not only verges on the abstract, but was fed by the compositional purity developed by the pursuit of abstraction.
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