Circles and Squares: The Lives and Art of the Hampstead Modernists
CAROLINE MACLEAN
(BLOOMSBURY, 320 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064
It has never been easy to define or date modernism in Britain. Broadly, we understand it to have arrived some time between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the Second World War, and to have involved the rejection of established traditions in art and conventional ways of living and a move away from realism towards experimentation. Now, in her confident and intelligent new book, art historian Caroline Maclean pinpoints a time – the 1930s; a place – the lower slopes of Hampstead in north London; and a cast of interconnected artists, to make the case that modernism happened then and there.
One of the strengths of her book is that she is equally, if not more, interested in the ideas and work of her subjects as in their tangled personal lives. Even so, the love affair which began on a Norfolk beach in 1931 between the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth opens her account and remains central and, although her account is mainly taken from secondary sources, she has had access to fresh material in a long exchange of letters between them. Both were married: Hepworth had a son with the artist Jack Skeaping and Nicholson had three small children with his wife, Winifred, also a gifted painter.