East Anglian friends

Three exhibitions in East Anglia serve to remind us that museums and galleries outside London continue to programme stimulating events. At Norwich Castle is an excellent survey of British art from the beginning of the first world war to the end of the second — a time of great richness and considerable innovation. There’s so much of interest and value here that it’s difficult to decide what to mention and what to leave out.

The display begins with C.R.W. Nevinson’s ‘Twentieth Century’, depicting a brooding giant — the Moloch of War — surrounded by bold poster designs by McKnight Kauffer and William Roberts’s Vorticist masterpiece ‘The Cinema’. There are even some passable things by Roger Fry, usually not as effective a painter as a writer, and then a couple of marvellous pictures by his arch-enemy, Wyndham Lewis. One is his oil portrait of Edith Sitwell, the other a striking drawing entitled ‘The Rum Ration’. Here, too, is David Bomberg’s Vorticist ‘In the Hold’.

Frank Dobson is best known as a sculptor but he was also an accomplished painter as can be seen in his large oil called ‘The Balloon Apron’ (1918), featuring a colourful sunset over a ploughed field. Then there are lesser names such as Louis Duffy, Leslie Cole and Evelyn Dunbar, all worth looking at, together with the more expected figures of Moore, Piper, Spencer and Sutherland.