Romantic moderns: English writers, artists and the imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
✍ Scribed by Alexandra Harris
- Publisher
- Thames & Hudson
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 5 MB
- Category
- Fiction
- ISBN
- 0500770883
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Winner of the 2010 Guardian First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties.In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.
Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately, wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. 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 photos for Betjeman's nostalgic An Oxford University Chest.
A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was...