Defining British Art : 1910 - 2000
This exhibition reviewed the major creative outbursts in twentieth-century Britain, with paintings, sculptures, ceramics and textiles made by four generations of pioneering artists – from Sickert at the fin de siècle to Grayson Perry at the twentieth century’s post-modern conclusion. Sculpture, painting and textiles from the 1910s by Eric Gill, Duncan Grant and Wyndham Lewis provide an insight into Britain's first flush of avant-garde activity. In contrast to works of high modernism by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, crafted with austere, open-grained materials, the figurative work of post-war London painters like Auerbach, Freud, Kossoff and Uglow show renewed interest in the denotative, representational qualities of oil paint. Works exemplary of their type were exhibited, many of which had not been publicly exhibited for decades, including a distinguished portrait from Cedric Morris’s period of European travel in the 1920s and an abstract painting by Graham Sutherland from the height of his fame after the Second World War.
