Counterpoint: Modern Realism 1910-1950

The story of modern art in Britain was often presented traditionally as a narrative journey towards abstraction or gestural expression, exemplified by the work of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, or the St Ives painters. But alongside this brilliant burning path ran many other contrapuntal threads, each of them distinct and defined in their own terms. Looking not at the French avant-garde but to more native sources, each was characterised by an individual and more personal form of modern expression. Such artists

did not resist or abandon the traditions and achievements of the past, remaining figurative rather than abstract, valuing the primacy of line and draughtsmanship, but expressing their art in a no less modern or original idiom that acknowledged both past and present. Counterpoint featured a selection of over 40 works, the drawing attention to the diverse range of artists working within a realistic or figurative genre from the period of 1910 – 1950