This book by David Boyd Haycock, focuses on the lives of Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington. All attended the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in London. Henry Tonks, their Professor of Drawing later described them as the the schools second and last 'crisis of brilliance'. The book is made up of 18 chapters and an epilogue, and is, I have to say one of the most engaging biographical texts I have read.
The first five chapters introduces the reader to the main 'chaaricters', the middle chapters deal with the relationships between the five artists with each other as well as the wider art world, and the later chapters deal with the impact of the 1st World War on their work and their involvement in it.
The stand out chapter for me is Chapter 6, Roger Fry and the Post-Impressionists.
Having just written notes on 'the cannon', reading a chapter that so concisely describes the tensions between the social unrest at the time, the influence of European art on the Slade students and the accepted 'order of things' helped to put neatly into focus what I was trying to say in that exercise.
Reading, in effect five biographies in one, presents the reader with the opportunity to understand some of the dynamics that influenced each artist and how complicated and damaging their relationships with each other were, all of which contributed to the art that they produced.
I thought that each artist was given equal weight through out the narrative, and was the the sort of book that was hard to put down, The Guardian, stated that 'Haycock's narrative of this entangled, war-defined group is so strong that it often has the force of a novel'
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| La Miltrailleuse Richard Nevinson 1916 Tate |
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| The Merry-Go-Round Mark Gertler 1916 Tate |
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