British Art and the First World War

The story of British art in the early twentieth century has long been presented as a narrative of rapid and widespread decline as a result of the First World War. London-based sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and uncountable other promising, young artists perished on the battlefields. Avant-garde movements like vorticism, which had once celebrated the dynamism of war, fizzled as the grim realities of modern combat sank in. And, ultimately, the aesthetic innovations of modernism were abandoned in favour of a ‘return to order’, a reversion to traditional styles that sought to recapture the qualities of a supposedly simpler past. Yet James Fox’s excellent new book presents an alternative narrative for British art. Claiming that the First World War was as artistically productive as it was destructive, Fox sets out an elegantly argued and cleanly structured new account that shows how novel artistic modes and practices arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of war

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · First world war · Literature · Modernism (music · Narrative · Spanish Civil War · Visual arts · World War II · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact · History