20th Century British Works on Paper

Early 20th-century modernism in Britain drew its inspiration form avant-garde art movements in France, Germany, and Italy (Cubism and Futurism, especially), though it took on its own idiosyncratic forms, the best known of which was Vorticism. But Britain's hold on modernism was more fragile than in continental Europe, and the tension between tradition and the avant-garde (signified particularly by a resistance to abstraction) was always more pronounced. Nevertheless, in the years before and during World War I (1914-1918) artists such as Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg, C.R.W. Nevinson, and Edward Wadsworth developed styles that embraced and reflected a new world defined by growing industrialization and a vastly quickened pace. The war's devastation, however effectively destroyed the idea of the machine as a positive force, and many British modernists responded by returning to more traditional visual languages. A renewed interest in the avant-garde would not fully reemerge until the 1930s and '40s under the influence of such movements as Surrealism and the pressures of another world war.