Grace Brockington – författare

The early twentieth century is usually remembered as an era of rising nationalism and military hostility, culminating in the disaster of the First World War. Yet it was marked also by a vigorous campaign against war, a movement that called into question the authority of the nation-state. This book explores the role of artists and writers in the formation of a modern, secular peace movement in Britain, and the impact of ideas about "positive peace" on their artistic practice. From Grace Brockington's meticulous study emerges a rich and interconnected world of Hellenistic dance, symbolist stage design, marionettes, and book illustration, produced in conscious opposition to the values of an increasingly regimented and militaristic society, and radically different from existing narratives of British wartime culture.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

«Samuel Shaw’s engaging new book on William Rothenstein takes a figure who has frequently made a fleeting appearance in texts on twentieth-century British art and puts him centre stage. Informed by rigorous research in archives and private collections in Europe and the United States, Shaw’s discussion of Rothenstein’s work as an artist, campaigner, educator and organiser will be of interest to anyone seeking out more complex cultural histories of this period. Shaw’s narrative is an impressive balance of detailed discussion about an individual’s career and a larger argument about the tensions between the nationalism and cosmopolitanism that shaped the early twentieth-century art world.»(Sarah Victoria Turner, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) «In this superbly well-researched book, Samuel Shaw argues convincingly that a commitment to British identity, including the experience of British Jews, is in no way at odds with a cosmopolitan openness to artistic activity across the whole of Europe, Asia and beyond. This will be the standard work on Rothenstein in his time for years to come and required reading for anyone interested in the international artworld of the period.»(Elizabeth Prettejohn, Professor of History of Art, University of York) The artist, writer and teacher William Rothenstein (1872–1945) was a significant figure in the British art world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was a conspicuously cosmopolitan character: born to a German-Jewish family in the north of England, he attended art school in Paris, wrote the first English monograph on the Spanish artist Goya, and became a prominent collector and supporter of Indian art. However, Rothenstein’s cosmopolitanism was a complex affair. His relationship with his English, European and Jewish identities was ever-changing, responding to wider shifts on the political and cultural stage. This book traces those changes through the artist’s writings and through his art, analysing a range of paintings, drawings and prints created from the 1890s into the 1930s. This book – the first in-depth study of Rothenstein’s art – draws on extensive archival material to situate his practice within broader debates regarding transnational exchange and the development of modern art in Britain.

"The work of an artist is, in its largest sense, inseparable from history thought of in its largest sense." That is how eminent British art historian Christopher Green described his methodological approach. Art, he argued, needs to be understood as happening in history, not in a vacuum.  Of Modernism presents original research by ten contemporary scholars of modern art who studied with Green and follow his historical method. The essays on European art rethink some of the crucial artworks, problems, and practitioners of European high modernism, ranging from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Guernica, avant-gardism to internationalism, and Joan Miró to Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Questions about modernism drive the ten essays, explicitly or otherwise, and they come in as many different shapes. The canon presented in Of Modernism is open, situating Picasso—a recurrent focus of the collection—alongside artists far more obscure, and in the context of a visual culture that is strikingly eclectic and often ephemeral.

The period from the 1870s to the 1920s was marked by an interplay between nationalisms and internationalisms, culminating in the First World War, on the one hand, and the creation of the League of Nations, on the other. The arts were central to this debate, contributing both to the creation of national traditions and to the emergence of ideas, objects and networks that forged connections between nations or that enabled internationalists to imagine a different world order altogether. The essays presented here explore the ways in which the arts operated internationally during this crucial period of nation-making, and how they helped to challenge national conceptions of citizenship, society, homeland and native tongue. The collection arises from the AHRC-funded research network Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870–1920 (ICE; 2009–2014) and its enquiry into the histories of cultural internationalism and their historiographical implications.This collection has been edited by members of the ICE network convened by Grace Brockington and Sarah Victoria Turner.