Book Description
It was a sensation, indeed, when the young British artists took over the art scene in the 1990s. But what came before them? With works from more than 100 artists, Blast to Freeze traces the epoch-making art movements of an entire British century, from the outbreak of World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union, beginning and ending with a decided break from the traditional. In 1914 a group of young British artists, the Vorticists, in their avant-garde journal Blast!, propagated a style that blended influences from French cubism and Italian futurism into an independent British modernism. In turn, mavericks such as Henry Moore and Francis Bacon are unthinkable without the British primitivists and surrealists of the 20s and 30s. The specifically British brand of pop art began with the legendary exhibitions of the Independent Group in the 50s, and in the 80s, new British sculpture emerged, represented by important proponents such as Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley. The YBAs, presented to the world in the exhibition Freeze, jointly organized by Damien Hirst and friends in the London Docklands in 1988, brings the survey to a close. Under the Union Jack: Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, Tony Cragg, Ian Hamilton Finley, Lucian Freud, Gilbert & George, Antony Gromley, Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Gary Hume, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Richard Long, Henry Moore, Julian Opie, Bridget Riley, Kurt Schwitters, Richard Wentworth, Rachel Whiteread, and many more Essays by Andrew Causey, Richard Cork, David Curtis, Penelope Curtis, Margaret Garlake, Charles Harrison, Robert Hewison, James Hyman, Jeremy Lewison, Marco Livingstone, Norbert Lynton, Tim Marlow, Anne Massey, David Alan Mellor, Richard Shone and Christopher Stephens. Paperback, 9.75 x 11 in., 215 color, 178 b/w illustrations
Blast to Freeze: British Art in the 20th Century FROM THE PUBLISHER
With works by more than one hundred artists, Blast to Freeze follows pioneering trends in the art of Great Britain over the course of a whole century. The publication begins and ends with a decisive break with tradition. On the eve of the First World War, a group of young British artists and writers launched a movement, Vorticism, and a magazine, Blast!, which offered a heady combination of iconoclastic fervour and stylistic innovation deriving from Cubo-Futurist influences. In the 1930s Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth established a sculptural tradition which was to continue with Anthony Caro, Richard Long and Tony Cragg, down to the present day. The specific character of British Pop Art owes much to its origins in the legendary exhibitions of the Independent Group in the 1950s. But some of the towering figures in British art, such as Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon, have tended to work in isolation. This large historical span concludes with the Young British Artists who first came to prominence through the exhibition Freeze, organised by Damien Hirst and his friends in 1988.
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