Crisis of Brilliance

Talk about the artists, Stanley Spencer, Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington.

Crisis of Brilliance
Speaker David Haycock (author of Crisis of Brilliance

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'.

Using letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies, Haycock recreates in intimate detail the formative years of these supremely gifted and committed painters. More than just a history of art, A Crisis of Brilliance is a story of individual artists and their times. It is an exploration of artistic ambition, struggle and success; and of lives linked by close friendships, fierce rivalries and love.

To the Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry they were 'les jeunes': the Young British Artists of their day. As their talents evolved in different directions, 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 and their Bohemian colleagues 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.

The Wheatsheaf
Rathbone Place
W1
7.30 pm
17th May
Admission £3

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