‘A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War’

In 1910 Paul Nash, a former pupil at St Paul’s School, went to the Slade School of Art in London. There he joined a hugely talented group of young students that included Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, C.R.W. Nevison and Stanley Spencer: they would all go on to become some of the most important British artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Based on his 2009 book, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, in this lecture Dr. Haycock will look at how these five young students learnt from each other, how they responded to a revolutionary new period in art, and how their work and lives were irreparably changed by the impact of the First World War.