20th century AD

Sickert, who continued painting over the thirties, was described by dint 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 frame of mind and the ideal rather than the real. on the other hand one cannot help by being struck by the agency of 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 detonation 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 canzonets 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 by means of Percy Shakespeare in his foreboding canvas upon the Rhine, shown at the Royal Academy in 1935 Here, against a background of medieval towers and pinnacles from which hang swastika banners, a strapping fraulein, left arm akimbo, hoists her heavy satchel purposefully onto her shoulder. No awe that so many of these paintings dropp on the outside of public view as the decade advanceed but their re-evaluation now is timely as, apart from their aesthetic merits, they reveal with equal reason much of the social history of the period.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Apollo Magazine Ltd

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group