Post-Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception

First Published in 1988, Post-impressionists in England documents the response of English taste to modern French art from the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910 to the outbreak of the First World War. The notion of ‘Post-Impressionism’, unlike its earlier counterpart, Impressionism, was an exclusively English contribution to art history. Originally used to denote the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and the Fauve painters, it rapidly assimilated Futurism, Cubism and recent English work like Vorticism. By focusing on one aspect of an important and complex period in British cultural history, J.B. Bullen illuminates not only aesthetic questions but also the way in which those aesthetic issues were determined and conditioned by social and political concerns.

Changes in English attitudes to art in this period were so rapid and were modified with such speed that the author has taken a strictly chronological approach to the subject. He sets out clearly the month-by-month developments in English attitudes and traces in detail the debates about modernism in England. To make matters clearer the book is divided into three major parts, each complementary to the others. The introduction surveys the period as a whole and places attitudes to art in the general context of the culture of the time. In the second part the extracts provide selected, concrete and particular examples of the huge range of material upon which the findings of the introduction are based; the writers represented include Roger Fry, Bernard Berenson, Desmond McCarthy, John singer Sargent, Walter Sickert, Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. In the third part a chronology sets out in tabular form month-by-month events- exhibitions and major publications- as they occurred in Britain and in France. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of British cultural history and art history.