A Century of British Art | 1911 - 2011: Online Viewing Room

PIANO NOBILE  presents a century of British art, bringing together a selection of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and works on paper made between 1911 and 2011. This period in British art reflected ascendant themes in the art worlds of Paris and then New York, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, even as artists working in Britain adopted those themes and developed them in original new directions. Eric Gill’s use of direct carving spawned a revolution in sculpture, while Henry Moore’s later surrealist art scouted new territory for organic sculptural morphologies. After the Second World War, Lynn Chadwick and Kenneth Armitage - both sculptors associated by Herbert Read with the 'Geometry of Fear' - used startling distortions to represent animal and human forms. Figurative artists such as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Euan Uglow persisted with a representational style in search of profound human truths. John Hoyland broke free of New York School painting and developed a personally distinctive idiom using richly flattened planes of acrylic. In the early twenty-first century, Edmund de Waal has brought studio pottery into the realms of conceptual art, drawing lessons from Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons as he laid the foundation for a novel concept – the ceramic installation. Together this selection demonstrates the quality and breadth of British art made between 1911 and 2011.