The Times and Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 'Superb ... Spalding is a lucid and revealing
guide who wears her scholarship lightly' Sunday Times 'Spalding's prose is as clear as a
Ravilious greenhouse her thoughts as orderly as a Ben Nicholson white relief' The Times A
fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent
years authored by one of Britain's leading art historians and critics. The 21st century has
seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists such as Winifred
Knights Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar have come to the fore while familiar names - Paul
Nash Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer - have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions
have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and
the Romantic Frances Spalding one of Britain's leading art historians and critics takes a
fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World
War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding
explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest
in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso and
the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists writers and curators
contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in
modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain but the
mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and
internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history place memory and a sense of
belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the
past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the
British love of the strange. Throughout these years the pursuit of 'the real' was set against
and sometimes merged with an inclination towards the 'romantic' as English artists sought to
respond to their subjects and their times.
