The Radical Legacy of Antiquity in TWENTIETH Century British Art
For the greatest Modern British artists, the allure of ancient western sculpture was less a retreat into the past, than a radical leap into the future. Modernism not only reached London via the studios of Brancusi, Picasso and the galleries of Paris, but through the quiet corridors of the British Museum. While non-western art clearly had a huge influence on twentieth century British artists, the ‘antique’ still cast a long shadow, affecting the fundamental tenets of their practice: their choice of materials, methods of creation, formal language, subject matter and iconography. Our exhibition explores this enduring dialogue, tracing the resonance of ancient art from the Early Bronze Age to the Roman period, within the work of major British artists including Kenneth Armitage, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, William Staite Murray, William Turnbull and Emily Young.
Ben Nicholson’s collection of antiquities offers a compelling point of departure. Among its highlights was the fragmentary Cycladic torso that is included in this exhibition. Nicholson regarded Cycladic art as uniquely sympathetic to his own work, writing to his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, that he knew of “no work which…goes better with mine unless it’s Cycladic or some other primitive works” (Beard, 2019: 69–70). Hepworth echoed this sentiment in an interview, stating that “to hold a Cycladic or Neolithic work in my hands is an ecstasy…even a fragment of an early period will move me deeply” (Bowness, 2015: 212). This allusion to the power of ancient fragments is revealing, for a major part of their appeal to modern artists derived from their provision of an aesthetic precedent for abstraction. Hepworth said that “abstract sculptural qualities are found in good sculpture of all times; in the works of the Aztecs, the Sumerians, the Neolithic, the Cycladic, the Etruscan periods” (Hodin, 1950: vol.ii, no.1) and so this was clearly a characteristic she valued and was inspired by.