The Reconciliation of Modernism : Ceri Richards and the second generation, 1930–1945

A critical contextualizing of the early work of modernist painter Ceri Richards.

This study assesses Ceri Richards’s early art and career, documenting experimental drawings and constructions. The emerging analysis establishes a complex relation between this artist and his European contemporaries—prominently Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncu?i, and Hans Arp—contributing to an art historical study of the emergencies of modernism in Britain during the early twentieth century. The book includes a full account of Richards as a European modernist and of the dislocation of British artists’ engagement with, and Richards’s processing of, Paris surrealism; accompanying illustrations include previously unseen drawings and reconstructed early states, discussed here for the first time.

Modern art in Britain during the early twentieth century is a complex and compromised proposition. It has frequently appeared selective in its assimilation (or rejection) of European modernism, with the results proving uneven and sometimes flawed in coherence as well as quality – from an international outlook to a reductive vorticist blast, from an insular ‘English’ modernism to a purist abstraction, from a British neo-romanticism to an earnest accommodation of French surrealism. This book reads critically the context of modernist visual art in the interwar, conceding ultimately to the absence of one representative manifestation in order to account for circuits of ruptures and seizures from which emerge singular instances negotiating the radically new European modernism. The emergence of Ceri Richards as a modernist of remarkable originality in London between the wars poses one such singularity, setting the artist as focus for the present study in critical analysis of a globally trenchant avant-garde and aspects of art in Britain read as tributary to the greater European exchange.