Romantic moderns

£14.99

Alexandra Harris presents a confident case for the interest and importance of the English arts during the modern period. She examines the work of writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers, some well known and some almost forgotten.

Out of stock

Description

An award-winning study of England’s unique and peculiarly insular variant of modernism.

While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-award-winning book, Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that ‘the modern’ need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus émigré, László Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjeman’s nostalgic Oxford University Chest.

This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

Additional information

Weight 0.456 kg
Dimensions 19.8 × 19.9 × 3.7 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

416

Language

English

Edition

New edition

Dewey

820.9145 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K