The Reconciliation of Modernism
Ceri Richards and the second generation, 1930–1945
Author(s) Dafydd W. Jones
Language: English
Genre(s): Art and Music
Series: Studies in Visual Culture
- September 2024 · 344 pages ·216x138mm
- · Hardback - 9781837721443
- · eBook - pdf - 9781837721450
- · eBook - epub - 9781837721467
About The Book
Modern art in Britain during the early twentieth century is a complex and compromised proposition. It has frequently appeared selective in its assimilation (or rejection) of European modernism, with the results proving uneven and sometimes flawed in coherence as well as quality – from an international outlook to a reductive vorticist blast, from an insular ‘English’ modernism to a purist abstraction, from a British neo-romanticism to an earnest accommodation of French surrealism. This book reads critically the context of modernist visual art in the interwar, conceding ultimately to the absence of one representative manifestation in order to account for circuits of ruptures and seizures from which emerge singular instances negotiating the radically new European modernism. The emergence of Ceri Richards as a modernist of remarkable originality in London between the wars poses one such singularity, setting the artist as focus for the present study in critical analysis of a globally trenchant avant-garde and aspects of art in Britain read as tributary to the greater European exchange.
Endorsements
‘The Reconciliation of Modernism presents a fascinating and timely reappraisal of the art of Ceri Richards in relation to European modernism between 1930 and 1945. Jones provides a revealing account of the complex interactions with the international avant-gardes that shaped Richards’s art during this critical period. Through perceptive close readings of key artworks and writings, he explores the deep engagement with abstraction and surrealism that allowed Richards to shape these influences into his own unique visual style. An essential resource for students, scholars and enthusiasts of modern art, this book offers a brilliant and nuanced study of one of the unsung heroes of modernism.’
Professor Eric Robertson, Royal Holloway, University of London
‘The Reconciliation of Modernism is a superb achievement, which shows in elegant detail why Ceri Richards matters to a nuanced history of visual modernism. Jones’s work deftly locates Richards in terms of a European tradition, and astutely theorises and traces how the artist developed over those intense interwar years – moving between his paintings, drawings and haunting relief constructions. The analysis demonstrates the complex history of techniques in Richards’s visionary avalanches of intensity, and yet counterpoints this with his laconic and finely graded detail. But the book also – vitally – reflects on how we encounter Richards now, and the compelling nature of his vision, one both rooted in material textures and simultaneously striving for emotional transcendence ... Magnificent.’
Dr Leo Mellor, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1 The Modern Artist
2 Europe and the Avant-Garde
3 Objective Abstraction
4 Subject and Object
5 Surrealism
6 Studies for Relief Constructions
7 Figures and Interiors
8 Flowers, Feathers and Bombs
9 Transformations and Flux
Conclusion
Select references
Index