‘A revolution of incalculable effect’: modernism and the teaching of art in schools

This chapter explores a range of encounters between modernism and school-children. Focused most sharply on the work of Marion Richardson, teacher of art at Dudley High School for Girls, it ranges across arts education policy in Britain in the early twentieth century and some other initiatives designed to get abstract art into the classroom. Richardson, in particular, has hardly been attended to by modernist scholars, but her work at Dudley, and later at the London County Council, was crucial in transforming the teaching of visual art across Britain.

Postimpressionism™

This chapter explores the context and after-effects of the exhibition ‘Manet and the Postimpressionists’ (1910). While seen, rightfully, as a central moment in modernism’s introduction to the British public, by way of the encounter with the work of Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and others, few studies have engaged with the explanatory and educational context of the exhibition, nor on the ways in which Postimpressionism became so central to British modernist design and decoration. This chapter, in particular, looks at Roger Fry’s writings on Postimpressionism, and argues that the term was simultaneously one that denoted both an artistic style and a pedagogical strategy designed to educate public taste.

‘But is it possible to live in such a motley setting?’ The modernist interior in Britain

This chapter details the encounters between modernist art and design and the British home. Using a range of case studies – in particular the Omega Workshops, the Isokon building in Hampstead and the activities of the Design Industries Association and Council for Art in Industry – it explores the reception of modernist home design and decoration in Britain in the decades before the Second World War. In particular, it discusses the rise of modernist design and decoration institutions, and charts their development and organisation.

‘A transformed world’: Herbert Read, British Surrealism and the institutionalisation of modernism

This chapter focuses on the discourses that surrounded the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition in London and the development of a distinctly British Surrealist movement in the years leading up to the Second World War. Using the debates in the periodical press about the movement – and how it might represent a particularly English or British avant garde – this chapter articulates the connection between the movement’s leaders in Britain and the rise of institutional structures to encourage avant garde work in Britain. In particular, it sees Herbert Read as one of the key mediators of modernism in Britain, and ultimately the key driver for the institutionalisation of modernism in Britain in the years around the Second World War.

Revolutionising ‘Bird’s Custard Isle’

This chapter begins with an assertion that modernism might constitute not only the attempt to improve the quality of art, but also to improve the quality of art’s reception. It outlines the fundamental ideas that the subsequent chapters explore – that the introduction of modernist art in Britain was often accompanied by explanatory materials designed to elucidate and educate. It explores the concept of ‘taste’ in artistic reception and explores some of the philosophical and aesthetic legacy of that term, going on to suggest that the mediators of modernism – individuals, groups and organisations – helped to establish a taste for advanced aesthetics in Britain.

Conclusion: ‘Half-baked if you like’—modernist afterlives in Britain, 1945–1951

This chapter concludes Insane Acquaintances, reflecting on some of the legacies of the pre-War modernist activity in Britain. It argues that while, ultimately, the revolution in taste that so many of the mediators of modernism in Britain wished to enact did not take place, the legacies of their activities continued to be felt after the War. Indeed, the kinds of activity that Fry, Read and others agitated for before the War – an engagement with continental non-representational art amongst the public, the fostering of state activity to encourage experimental art, and the development of an institutional apparatus to support and scaffold such art – reached their apotheosis in the first years of the post-War consensus. This chapter explores some of these afterlives of the modernist moment in Britain.