Drawing Distinctions
Twentieth-Century Drawings and Watercolours of the British Artists
8 December, 2000 - 10 January, 2001

The exhibition features 82 works from the British Council Collection and covers the period of time from the early 1900s to nowadays.

One of the greatest modern architects, Mies van der Rohe, used to insist that "God is in the details".This exhibition proves his point: we find that the artists have pounced on the slight or the familiar and made of it something vibrant and unexpected. The work by Kathleen Raine Curtained Outlook better demonstrates the thesis that a recurrent characteristic of British art is the use of particulars to make the quotidian seem strangely alive, richly absorbing. Accompanying this delight in particulars is a recurrent joy in precision. (By Candlelight by Harold Gilman, Head of a Woman by Gwen John).

The exhibition also features works of the artists from Fitzroy Street Group that began in 1907 and by 1911 had become transformed into the Camden Town Group - Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner. Owing to Sickert's influence, several Camden Town Group artists began taking an interest in the poetry of everyday life, finding it in the popular culture of the music halls, in boarding house interiors and in London's streets.
The pre-1914 period was boldly experimental. Acquaintance with two post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 had brought certain avant-garde artists to experiments with non-figurative art ( Abstract Design by Wyndham Lewis).
The Vorticists rejected the traditional genres of portraiture and still-life and instead looked to the modern machine age for inspiration. According to the Vorticists, art should now imitate the principles and organisation that governed machinery and all inessentials should be rigorously eliminated (Howitzer in Action by William Roberts).

After the First World War the widespread destruction in Europe made the destruction of long-standing traditions in art seem callous and unhuman ( Folk Dance by William Roberts and Soldiers at Thanksgiving Service by Stanley Spencer).
Edward Burra (The Band) became one of the eleven artists who composed Unit One, an avant-garde group whose existence Paul Nash announced in a letter to The Times on 2 June 1933. Its aim, Nash said, was to address the ‘lack of structural purpose' in English art. ‘Nature we need not deny, but art, we are inclined to feel, should control'. But even nature itself Nash abstracts and remoulds to his own needs (Whiteleaf Cross). Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth had been part of Nash's Unit One in 1934-35 and by the end of this decade had aligned themselves with an international avant-garde, committed to the ‘constructive' ideal. It encouraged the belief that abstract art represented not a withdrawal from life, but a potent agent for change.

A neo-romantic style became widespread during the war and is well represented in this exhibition. In 1942 John Piper published a book called British Romantic Artists where he wrote "Romantic art deals with the particular. It is the result of a vision that can see in things something significant beyond ordinary significance: something that for the moment seems to convey the whole world". (Typhoon Orchard, France, The Beginning of an Advance by Albert Richards; Ravenna, A Quarter of the Town hit by Bombs by Edward Bawden; Limestone Quarry: Working at the Cliff Face by Graham Sutherland).
Once the war ended neo-romanticism gradually transformed into a tougher, more decorative style. (Hymn by Cecil Collins, Foreshore with Gulls by Bryan Wynter, Pastoral by Alan Reynolds).

In Cornwall during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, a loose gathering of artists called the St Ives School emerged. All of them pursued a dialogue between abstraction and landscape or the figurative painting (Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon).
By the late 1950s British artists began to look not to Paris but to New York for inspiration (Study for St Sebastian by Eduardo Paolozzi). Richard Hamilton was part of the Independent Group who once drew up a list of all that Pop Art shouls be: ‘Popular, Transient, Expendable, Low cost, Mass produced, Young, Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business (Colin Self's Fall-Out Shelter 4, Patrick Caulfield's Along the Twilighted Sky ). The exhibition features David Hockney's portraits of his friends. This artist emerged from the Royal Colledge of Art at the same time as several Pop artists and shared something of their rebellious mood.

While Pop Art began to lose impetus, large-scale absract painting and sculpture remained at the fore. John Hoyland and Richard Smith were part of a group of artists who mounted the two ‘Situation' exhibitions in 1960 and 1961. These drew attention to American-influenced, non-referential abstract art, huge in scale, often hard-edge in style cool and laconic.

The 1970s saw a gradual breakdown of traditional forms and the rise of Conceptualism (Roger Ackling). Nevertheless since the late 1970s there has been a revival of interest in the more traditional modes of sculpture and painting. ‘Story-telling', too, has become acceptable, at least in the works of Paula Rego. In Auerbach's drawing Head of Ken Garland and in Hockney's two portraits there is the same creative impetus. As David Jones wrote in his introduction to his long poem The Anathemata, the poet ‘must work within the limits of his love... There must be no mugging-up... for only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis. Which is why so many of these pictures will hang around in the mind long after the visitor has left the show.

Storm
Eric Ravilious
Larger view

Foreshore with gulls
Bryan Wynter
Larger view

Pastoral October 1952
Alan Reynolds
Larger view

Untitled
"Girl and Dog" series
Paula Rego
Larger view