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£9.99
Published
1 June 2010
PB
9781906964320
Ebook
9781906964887
Press Release
Coming soon.
 

FIVE YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS AND THE GREAT WAR

Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington were five of the most exciting, influential and innovative British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds, they met in the years before the Great War as students at the Slade School of Art, where they formed part of what their teacher Henry Tonks described as the school’s last ‘crisis of brilliance’.

To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry they were ‘les jeunes’ — the ‘Young British Artists’ of their day. As their talents evolved, they became Futurists, Vorticists and ‘Bloomsberries’, and befriended the leading writers and intellectuals of the time, from Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke to D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. They led the way in fashion with their avant-garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with their models and with prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide.

And as Europe plunged into the madness of the ‘War to end Wars’, they responded to its horror with all the passion and genius they could muster.

Old Street Publishing A Crisis of Brilliance

FIVE YOUNG BRITISH ARTISTS AND THE GREAT WAR

Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington were five of the most exciting, influential and innovative British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds, they met in the years before the Great War as students at the Slade School of Art, where they formed part of what their teacher Henry Tonks described as the school’s last ‘crisis of brilliance’.

To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry they were ‘les jeunes’ — the ‘Young British Artists’ of their day. As their talents evolved, they became Futurists, Vorticists and ‘Bloomsberries’, and befriended the leading writers and intellectuals of the time, from Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke to D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. They led the way in fashion with their avant-garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with their models and with prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide.

And as Europe plunged into the madness of the ‘War to end Wars’, they responded to its horror with all the passion and genius they could muster.

 9.99
 
 

"Haycock's narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel, hard to put down . . . We should call for a joint exhibition of [their] work, to complement the moving portrayal of their lives in this engrossing and enjoyable book."
—Guardian

 
 
  • "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
  • "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
  • "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
  • "A sad tale, wonderfully told… [Haycock] fades the many different narratives in and out with ease"
    —Country Life
  • "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"
    —Michael Holroyd
  • "An extraordinary book. I read it avidly … The familiar cast is handled in a quite new and original way. They have been made fresh and vulnerable once more, and their work re-evaluated, made new to us"
    —Ronald Blythe
  • "There is something endlessly appealing about a group of artists behaving badly while simultaneously creating their best work…Depression, doubt, love triangles and the horrors of war all conspire against their ambitions, causing their fortunes to diverge wildly… [Haycock's] research provides rich context, with personal letters supplying detail to every squabble or concern"
    —Metro
 
 
David Boyd Haycock

David Boyd Haycock was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, in 1968 and grew up in West Africa, East Anglia and North Yorkshire. After reading Modern History at the University of Oxford he lived in Brighton, London and Los Angeles, but now lives with his family in Oxford. He is a freelance writer, curator and NADFAS lecturer, specialising in early twentieth-century British art and culture. He writes a blog, at http://davidboydhaycock.blogspot.co.uk