During his lifetime Brangwyn made large donations of his works to museums in the United Kingdom and abroad, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the William Morris Gallery, the Albertina in Vienna and the Gruuthuse in Bruges. As a result of this munificence, substantial drawings by Brangwyn, especially his celebrated large sheets in red and black chalk, only rarely appear on the market. Ö The endless extant sketches that he made on the backs of envelopes, letterheads and scraps of paper are evidence that for Brangwyn drawing was a compulsion. In her forthcoming catalogue raisonnÈ, Dr. Libby Horner has recorded over three thousand drawings by Brangwyn. Ö The drawings that became Esserís collection, which have lain hidden for over half a century, were made up of works that Brangwyn, with characteristic modesty, had left in his studio with a written instruction, ëmost of this lot destroyí. Never intended for presentation, they explore and resolve alternative compositions and the relation of figures to each other and to the space they occupy.

Unsung heroes aside, the greatest strength of this catalogue comes from the large number of remarkable works by women artists. This goes some way to redressing an imbalance: the story of 20th century British Art is told almost always through the work of male artists in spite of the fact that more women than men went to art school in the first half of the 20th century. The Liss Fine Art bias towards women is not intentional. Yet in the search for the best of the less familiar of 20th century British art a disproportionate number of works by women artists come to the fore. This catalogue includes outstanding works by Margaret Gere, Clare Leighton, Kathleen Guthrie, Rachel Reckitt, Barbara Jones, Mary Adshead, Evelyn Dunbar, Paule Vezelay, Muriel Pemberton and Dorothy Mahoney.

This catalogue presents a view of the First World War through a multifarious record of two and three dimensional works of art: paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, reliefs, posters, postcards, photographs, silhouettes and ceramics appear in the following pages. The material has been grouped into 14 subsections under the general headings of Combat, The Home Front and The Aftermath. These groupings highlight the themes that inspired both the fine and popular arts, although some are looser in association than others, and none are mutually exclusive. The introduction gives a more general survey of the underlying factors that influenced or determined the visual responses to the First World War.†Although outside the remit of this catalogue, the accompanying exhibition includes other†wartime objects from the collection of David and Judith Cohen, including trench art, commemorative ware, sweetheart brooches, games, puzzles and miniatures.

This book is illustrated with a series of specially commissioned photographs that record some of the least known but most remarkable mural cycles in Great Britain. In the vast majority of cases these works have previously only been reproduced in black and white if at all. Today murals are rarely seen as the artist intended. Often they are partially obscured, especially where there has been a change of building use. Frequently works are completely covered up or painted over examples include murals by Mary Sargent Florence, Mary Adshead, Eric Ravilious, Dora Carrington, William Roberts and Gilbert Spencer. Where murals survive they are more often than not displaced works. Historic photographs showing John Piperís The Englishmanís Home at The Festival of Britain, in situ on the river side of the Homes and Gardens Pavilion on Belvedere Road, come as a revelation; a digital reconstruction of Frank Brangwynís Empire panels for The House of Lords, seen in situ as they were originally intended, gives a dramatically more favourable impression than their final installation in The Brangwyn Hall, Swansea.

The murals that were produced in this country in the twentieth century remain as one of the great inventive achievements in modern British art. Highly original in their approach to design, balancing varying degrees of modernity or tradition, they demonstrate the creative drive of their makers and contain singular expressions of the aesthetic, personal and social concerns that typify the ages from which they come. Some are celebrations of simple human pleasures, perhaps to decorate a refreshment room, an ocean liner or a dining room. Others are intended to be the highest expressions of their art, ambitious allegorical or decorative compositions that like the frescoes of the Renaissance would speak through the ages to later generations. The individuals and committees who commissioned them similarly believed they would both represent the best that Britain had to offer and mark the high accomplishment of contemporary society, elevating the public and private spaces they occupied and inspiring moral purpose.

The paintings produced during both Wars represented a new departure: the aim was no longer to produce eulogies to heroic military leaders and national triumph. Rather, artists sought to portray the impact of war on society as a whole, in battle and on the home front their body of work providing a unique portrait of a nation in bloody conflict and social upheaval. The artists of both Wars adapted and directed their work towards national needs, recognising the importance of recording as well as responding to the events and individuals around them, often taking huge risks to create their works. Some paid with their lives. Eric Ravilious, death in 1942 was one of the great tragedies of the War Artists schemes.
The pictures reproduced in this catalogue capture the breadth of experience of civilian and military life. the national mood at home and the contrasting and varied responses to the two World Wars. They also provide a fascinating cross-section of artistic practice during two of the most critical periods in twentieth-century British history.

This current catalogue has been two years in the making. The 150 objects chosen have been divided into three sections: Paintings, Works on Paper, and Design. The Design section is fascinating because it presents items that are rarely seen, comprising works in plaster, works on tracing paper, works on lithographic zinc plates, original wood-blocks, copper plates, stage sets, and poster designs. Neither pure paintings, pure drawings nor pure sculptures, they are seen as commercially problematic. In this catalogue they are celebrated. The immediacy and the beauty of the original wood-blocks by Frank Brangwyn, the original copper plates by Robert Sargent Austin, and the plaster maquettes by James Woodford, are, we hope, self-evident.

Cecil Stephenson was one of the pioneers of abstract art in England, along with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, John Piper, Edward Wadsworth and half-a-dozen others. This move towards abstraction had two principal strands, one leaning towards surrealism and the other to geo-metric abstraction, or Constructivism as it came to be known. Stephenson and his friends were mostly in the latter camp, and the London Gallery exhibition drew them together along with a distinguished group of foreign exhibitors including Moholy-Nagy, Calder, Giacometti, Helion and Naum Gabo. Just as Mondrian began his journey towards non-figuration through the modification and simplification of forms, natural and man-made ñ branches of trees and elements of church architecture ñ so Stephenson began his through isolating and refining industrial elements ñ cogs, axles, wheels, pistons, etc – derived from the multiple pieces of machinery he managed to house within his Hampstead studio.

Canney was an innovator, and discovered the possibilities created by the invention of a new medium. Alkyd oil paint was developed in the 30s and 40s for industrial processes which required special paint finish. The addition of alkyd resin to oil paint gives more flexibility when dry and speeds up the drying process. This medium was to have a profound influence on Canney’s work in his later years. Michael Canney’s art developed throughout his life, but once he had adopted the Constructivist style he continued it. Experimenting with both composition and media, his work combines visual beauty and a love for materials, with a sharp intellectual study of form, geometry and balance. His own very particular style developed alongside some of the major names of the modern movement in British art. This comprehensive show of Canney’s work provides the opportunity to enjoy, and reassess his own contribution to 20th century British abstract art.

Many of the artists featured in this catalogue ó Monnington, Jas Wood, Banting, Colquhoun, Stephenson, Medley, Rowntree, Vaughan, Canney and Nockolds ómoved freely between figurative and abstract art. It was part of their journey. In their ambitious exploration to find a pure art that went beyond reality, they often stopped, or hesitated, and in many cases returned to figurative painting. Artists such as Bush, Knights, Kelly and Cundall remained throughout their lives purely figurative. Their best work, however, is underpinned by an economy of design, which not only verges on the abstract, but was fed by the compositional purity developed by the pursuit of abstraction.

There is no obvious explanation for todayís neglect of artists such as Sir Frank Brangwyn, Albert de Belleroche, Clara Klinghoffer, Richard Carline, Charles Cundall and Sir Gerald Kelly. They were hugely celebrated in their day, and it is only a matter of time before the pendulum swings back. Art moves in and out of fashion: what one generation celebrates, the next forgets or rejects. The works of art do not change, nor their quality; in the life cycle of fashion it is only perceptions that alter What Monnington termed ëworks with integrityí will always stand the test of time.