THE REAL AND THE ROMANTIC

By Frances Spalding

There was a push-me-pull-you tension about the British art scene between the two world wars, posits art historian Frances Spalding, in her fine new book The Real and the Romantic. 

‘Staunch conservatism jostles with energetic revivalism’, she writes, in her introduction. ‘Allusions to the classical past or the early Italian Renaissance become aligned with the pulse of the new; the pursuit of the modern and international is suddenly trumped by the return to native traditions, the local and vernacular’.

Modern British art emerged from these unpredictable waters, and Spalding guides us through its development, from the immediate aftermath of WW1, and the ‘return to order’ (as Cocteau memorably put it) through to the birth of that very British brand of abstract art pioneered by the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. This is by no means a linear progression, she explains. The ‘real’ and the ‘romantic’ are inter-related currents which can, on occasion, converge within the same stroke of a brush, or chip of a chisel. 

There are few commentators better placed to tell this complex story, bookended by the horrors of modern warfare. Spalding is the author of biographies of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper (as well as the poet Stevie Smith). She’s a fine storyteller, mixing pithy anecdote with astute critical insight, and never obfuscating her ideas with impenetrable academese. The book, divided into twelve largely chronologically ordered sections, is sumptuously illustrated with well-printed colour plates, well placed within the narrative so you don’t have to jump around (or resort to Google images) too much to find pictorial evidence to further clarify those ideas.

A great page-turner, then, but also a fine reference book, which will, undoubtedly, be frequently pulled off the shelf for information and inspiration about that variegated array of artists – real and romantic – whose imagination lit up what is nowadays routinely considered to be the richest period in British art history.

Thames & Hudson, £35, published May 2022