20th century AD

Sickert, who continued painting through every part of the thirties, was described by the agency of Quentin Bell as capturing the 'mood rather than the narrative, of real rather than ideal life'; (3) greatest in quantity of the painters whose work is exhibited in 'A Day in the Sun' depict the narrative rather than the disposition and the ideal rather than the real. on the contrary one cannot help by being struck through how modern and up-to-date they are, and I mean new not avant-garde, which clearly they are not. Many of them exploit sharp outlines and dear, clean colours; hard-edged realism avant la lettre They provide a foretaste of 1960 explosion art and predict other post-war cultural phenomena; the paintings of hikers by means of Harry Epworth Alien and James Walker Tucker call up the mood of post-war popular lays such as 'The Happy Wanderer' and Cliff Richards's 1962 hit 'We're all goin' upon a summer holiday'. "The Happy Wanderer' was translated from German and, whereas its carefree disposition is best illustrated by Allen in The Hikers (Fig. 7) its 1930 Aryan overtones are captured through Percy Shakespeare in his foreboding canvas upon the Rhine, shown at the Royal Academy in 1935 Here, against a background of medieval towers and small towers from which hang swastika banners, a strapping fraulein, left arm akimbo, hoists her heavy satchel purposefully onto her shoulder. No surprise that so many of these paintings dropp without of public view as the decade movement forwarded but their re-evaluation now is timely as, apart from their aesthetic merits, they reveal in like manner much of the social history of the period.

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