Alive with innovation: British art between the world wars

When I mentioned the subject of this book to someone reasonably well-informed about 20th-century British art, the response was: ‘Isn’t that all portrait and still-life paintings?’ Well, perhaps if you’re looking exclusively at the contents of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions – and even there landscape was another popular choice. But actually the period was alive with innovation – with abstraction and surrealism infiltrating and balancing out a new kind of realism. Art was a melting pot of competing attitudes, drawing equally on native traditions and stimulating foreign influences, principally Cézanne and Picasso.

In her enjoyable new book Frances Spalding identifies ‘a recurrent tension… between a precarious stasis on the one hand, and on the other a yearning for rapid change’. In the immediate post-war period, art was predictably reactionary. Radical art was closely allied to destruction in the public mind, and no one wanted to court such associations. Even Wyndham Lewis was no longer so willing to glorify the machine and, like many others, he answered a recall to order, investigating an idiosyncratic form of classicism.