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Overturning decades of scholarly orthodoxies, James Fox makes a bold new argument about the First World War's cultural consequences.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. The outbreak of war and the business of art; 2. Perceptions of art; 3. The arts mobilize; 4. War pictures: truth, fiction, function; 5. Peace pictures: escapism, consolation, catharsis; 6. Art and society after the war; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
James Fox is an art historian and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, he received his Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2009 with a dissertation entitled 'Business unusual: art in Britain during the First World War, 1914-1918'. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Art Center at Yale University, and Churchill College, Cambridge. Fox has published widely on the cultural history of the First World War and modern British art, and has presented papers on the subjects in Europe, the United States and Canada. Fox appears frequently in the media: he has written for The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent, and is a BAFTA- and Royal Television Society-nominated documentary filmmaker for the BBC. In 2014 he was selected as one of Apollo magazine's forty most influential young people in the art world.
Summary
The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain.
