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86th out of 102 books
—
10 voters
Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.
Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily, urgently, English artists were exploring what it mean
Hardcover, 320 pages
Published
November 1st 2010
by Thames & Hudson
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Can the masterworks of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf be discussed in the same pages as the perfectly delightful but infinitely less significant work of the photographer Cecil Beaton and the graphic artists Rex Whistler and Edward Bawden? I certainly did not believe this could be done well, until I read Alexandra Harris’s new book. There is no question that Romantic Moderns is calculated to please Anglophiles. But Harris, a young English art historian, does not coddle her core audience. my link...more
I can't join in the applause this book has been receiving. I think the argument of the book isn't very well made, and I suppose I have a slight aversion to the Little Englandism the artists, musicians, architects and writers covered in the book embody. This is supposed to be a revisionist cultural history of the 30's and 40's arguing that England was not in fact the backward, Modernism hating country people say it was, and that our thinkers and creatives produced a native, somewhat conservative...more
I really enjoyed this, although it begins to feel a little padded and directionless towards the end. Alexandra Harris excels at substantiating her broad general statements about visual and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s with the pithy use of contemporary diaries, letters and fiction. She has me utterly convinced of her arguments about neo-romanticism vs modernism and the rise of place as an index of English identity. I felt, at times, that she was making this argument with half an eye t...more
4 1/2 Very interesting study of English writers, artists and musicians drawing inspiration from the English landscape. Also beautifully done- color plates, etc.
This is the sort of book that makes me feel inadequate. Just 30 years old and Alexandra Harris has managed to pull off a book that is immensely readable and enjoyable, yet serious and academic at the same time. She looks at arts and attitudes in the 1930s and 1940s and sets against Modernism (abstract, minimalist, functional) the more prevailing attitudes in England of wanting to have roots, to belong to the land and almost of nostalgia. She looks at poetry, novels, non-fiction writing, architec...more
Engagingly written survey of how modernism evolved through English literature, art, and even gardens and homes during the 1930s and 1940s.
hmm this book looks way more interesting than it is.
Harris has an ability to write and has interesting things to say but and i appreciate that this is possibly just me it isnt interesting to me.
The sense of learning and enthusiasm could be infectious is you are of the mood but if you are not its almost a path to whocaresville.
It is the type of book you can dip into but i doubt you would ever swim in it, it can feel turgid but again i wonder if that is just me.
Nov 06, 2010
Lazarus P Badpenny Esq
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Shelves:
2010,
art,
beauty,
england,
extended-project,
hopeless-romantics,
nature,
twentieth-century
Charmingly illustrated tour around the parochial backwaters of early twentieth-century British art.
May 12, 2013
Stephen Gosling
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May 11, 2013
~Divine Miss B ~
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Looks fascinating!
Jan 26, 2013 01:20pm