A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists & the Great War (2009)
Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Stanley Spencr were five of the most exciting, influential and innovative British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds, they met in the years before the Great War at the Slade School of Art in London, where they formed part of what their teacher, Henry Tonks, described at the school’s last ‘crisis of brilliance.’
To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry, they and their other Slade friends - Dorothy Brett, John Currie, David Bomberg, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth - were ‘les jeunes,’ the Young British Artists of their day. As their talents evolved they became Futurists, Vorticists and ‘Bloomsberries,’ and befriended some of the leading writers and intellectuals of their day, from Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke to D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Inspired by the example of Augustus John, Henry Lamb and Jacob Epstein they led the way in fashion with their avant garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with models and prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide. And as Europe plunged into the madness of the ‘War to end Wars’ they responded to its horroe with all the passion and genius they could muster.
Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Stanley Spencr were five of the most exciting, influential and innovative British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds, they met in the years before the Great War at the Slade School of Art in London, where they formed part of what their teacher, Henry Tonks, described at the school’s last ‘crisis of brilliance.’
To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry, they and their other Slade friends - Dorothy Brett, John Currie, David Bomberg, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth - were ‘les jeunes,’ the Young British Artists of their day. As their talents evolved they became Futurists, Vorticists and ‘Bloomsberries,’ and befriended some of the leading writers and intellectuals of their day, from Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke to D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Inspired by the example of Augustus John, Henry Lamb and Jacob Epstein they led the way in fashion with their avant garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with models and prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide. And as Europe plunged into the madness of the ‘War to end Wars’ they responded to its horroe with all the passion and genius they could muster.
Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Stanley Spencr were five of the most exciting, influential and innovative British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds, they met in the years before the Great War at the Slade School of Art in London, where they formed part of what their teacher, Henry Tonks, described at the school’s last ‘crisis of brilliance.’
To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry, they and their other Slade friends - Dorothy Brett, John Currie, David Bomberg, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth - were ‘les jeunes,’ the Young British Artists of their day. As their talents evolved they became Futurists, Vorticists and ‘Bloomsberries,’ and befriended some of the leading writers and intellectuals of their day, from Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke to D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Inspired by the example of Augustus John, Henry Lamb and Jacob Epstein they led the way in fashion with their avant garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with models and prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide. And as Europe plunged into the madness of the ‘War to end Wars’ they responded to its horroe with all the passion and genius they could muster.
Shortlisted for Best Work of Non-Fiction, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, 2010