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£12.99
Published
5 May 2026
Hardback
9781913083915
Ebook
9781917532242
Press Release
Coming soon.
By David Boyd Haycock:

 

Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and van Gogh – all were introduced to the British public in a single exhibition in 1910. Reactions ranged from outrage to mockery to a sense of ecstatic liberation, as visitors to the Grafton Galleries found themselves face to face with works that seemed to turn 500 years of culture on their head. British painters were still working in the shadow of the Old Masters, but here were Continental artists reaching for the new light of Modernism.

Vividly evoking the personalities of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group members who staged the exhibition, as well as the artists themselves, David Boyd Haycock captures not just a pivotal moment in British art but a whole society on the brink of upheaval. As Virginia Woolf remarked: ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed.’

Old Street Publishing Art-Quake, 1910

Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and van Gogh – all were introduced to the British public in a single exhibition in 1910. Reactions ranged from outrage to mockery to a sense of ecstatic liberation, as visitors to the Grafton Galleries found themselves face to face with works that seemed to turn 500 years of culture on their head. British painters were still working in the shadow of the Old Masters, but here were Continental artists reaching for the new light of Modernism.

Vividly evoking the personalities of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group members who staged the exhibition, as well as the artists themselves, David Boyd Haycock captures not just a pivotal moment in British art but a whole society on the brink of upheaval. As Virginia Woolf remarked: ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed.’

 12.99
 
 

‘Haycock’s narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel’
—Guardian on A Crisis of Brilliance

 
 
  • 'Haycock manages the drama in this tale with such skill that his story unfolds like a well-plotted novel. Never before have the private vicissitudes in these artists' lives been made so real or their exuberance so vivid'
    —Daily Mail on A Crisis of Brilliance
  • 'A lucid study of the lives behind the art . . . What gives Haycock's book its freshness is that, through skilful use of letters and memoirs left by his five subjects, he injects it with the anxiety, ambition, self-doubt and jealousy that possessors of youth and talent are fated to feel'
    —Sunday Times on A Crisis of Brilliance
  • 'What a fascinatingly tangled mess of human lives! Haycock tells the whole story engagingly and unpretentiously: the human conflicts, the clashes of ideas, and the terrible disruptions of war beneath it all'
    —Independent on A Crisis of Brilliance
  • 'A sad tale, wonderfully told… [Haycock] fades the many different narratives in and out with ease'
    —Country Life on A Crisis of Brilliance
  • 'A vintage decade of early twentieth century British art, told in vivid and entertaining detail through the adventures of five highly gifted young painters … I greatly enjoyed it'
    —Sir Michael Holroyd on A Crisis of Brilliance
 
 
David Boyd Haycock

David Boyd Haycock is a specialist in modern British art. He has published numerous books and has curated exhibitions at, among others, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Salisbury Museum and Poole Museum. A freelance author, curator and lecturer, he is a visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.