Synopses & Reviews
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 . A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.
Review
"A brilliant piece of work that manages to be both comprehensive and coherent as it tells a compelling story about 20th century English art.... a significant contribution to the history of English culture." Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze
Review
"Can the masterworks of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf be discussed in the same pages as the perfectly delightful but infinitely less significant work of the photographer Cecil Beaton and the graphic artists Rex Whistler and Edward Bawden? I certainly did not believe this could be done well, until I read Alexandra Harris's new book. There is no question that Romantic Moderns is calculated to please Anglophiles. But Harris, a young English art historian, does not coddle her core audience. She knows how to wipe the cobwebs off subjects that are too often treated in a parochial or even a trite way, such as John Betjeman's poetry, Osbert Sitwell's autobiography, and Vita Sackville-West's gardens. The result is a new map of English culture in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The landscape may be familiar, but nearly all the landmarks, whether large ones or small ones, have been cast in an unexpected light."
Jed Perl, The New Republic (Read the entire )
Synopsis
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 emigre Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photos for Betjeman s nostalgicAn Oxford University Chest. A rich network of personal and cultural encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance. This great imaginative project was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, and composers. Piper abandoned purist abstracts to make collages on the blustery coast; Virginia Woolf wrote in her last novel about a village pageant on a showery summer day. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Sitwells are also part of the story, along with Bill Brandt and Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton. "
Synopsis
Winner of the 2010 First Book Award: a groundbreaking reassessment of English cultural life in the thirties and forties.
About the Author
Alexandra Harris is a cultural historian and writer. She is the recipient of the Guardian First Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award for Romantic Moderns. She is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Oxford and Liverpool.