David Haycock will talk about his book 

on
THURSDAY OCTOBER 29TH SOLD OUT

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 17TH (now added)

at 7.30 PM IN THE SPENCER GALLERY

tickets £5 (concessions friends and Custodians only)

tickets on Sale from Sept 17th from the Gallery or from Maura Carr on  01628 530181

Crisis of Brilliance tells the story of Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer, who were five of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. From diverse backgrounds they met at the Slade School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in London between 1908 and 1910, in what their teacher, Henry Tonks, later described as the School’s ‘last crisis of brilliance’. Between 1910 and 1918 they and their art school friends loved, talked and fought; they advised, admired, conspired and sometimes disparaged each others’ artistic ambitions and creations. The Bloomsbury Group critic Roger Fry called them ‘les jeunes’; they were the ‘Young British Artists’ of their day. They formed gangs and created or joined new movements (the Slade Coster Gang, the Neo-Primitives, the Futurists, the Vorticists); they hung out in the most stylish cafes and restaurants in London and founded their own night-club; they led the way in fashion with their avant-garde clothes and haircuts; they slept with their models and with prostitutes; their tempestuous love affairs descended into obsession, murder and suicide.

It’s not biography in the traditional sense at all but a history of art, artists and their times and interestingly this is the first time that there has ever been a study of these artists as a group.

David Boyd Haycock grew up in West Africa, East Anglia and North Yorkshire; he read Modern History at St John’s College, Oxford, and Art History at the University of Sussex, before studying for a PhD at Birkbeck College, London. He worked in publishing, and as an archaeologist, before becoming an academic historian and then a museum curator. His two areas of particular interest are the intellectual history (broadly speaking) of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and the history of art in early to mid twentieth-century Britain.  If there is a unifying thread to his work, it is biography. His primary interest is in how individuals express their ideas, their personalities and their individual experiences and engagement with the culture and society that surrounds them: be that though ideas and beliefs (intellectual history) or paintings and drawings (art history).