There is a particular kind of tension that runs through twentieth-century British art, and Going Modern: British Art, 1900 to 1960 makes that tension its subject rather than something to be smoothed over. Drawing on the holdings of the Yale Center for British Art, the exhibition asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean for a nation as bound to tradition and continuity as Britain to go modern? Paul Nash's own phrase, that "going modern and being British" was never a comfortable fit, gives the show its title and its argument, and walking through the galleries, I found myself agreeing with him on every wall.
A century in search of its own modernism
The exhibition's real achievement is refusing to flatten British modernism into a single story. Instead, it lays out several overlapping and sometimes contradictory responses to the same historical pressure: two World Wars, the contraction of empire, the arrival of European avant-garde ideas, and the competing pull of socialism and fascism as political imaginaries. Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group open the show with an urban impressionism that feels deliberately unglamorous, domestic interiors, music halls, unheroic bodies in unheroic light. It is a modernism of subject matter as much as style, one that insists ordinary London life is a fit object for serious painting.
From there the exhibition moves through Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group, whose experiments with form were inseparable from their experiments in how to live, a reminder that formal innovation in this period was rarely just a painterly problem. Ben Nicholson's abstraction sits nearby, austere and quietly radical, a very different answer to the same modern question, and one that connects to ideas I've been working through since writing about Josef Albers. Then come Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, whose sculpture translates the same anxieties about tradition and rupture into biomorphic form, hollowing out the human figure until it becomes landscape, geological, almost geologic in its patience.
The London School and the pull toward the figure
For me, the exhibition's center of gravity is its final rooms, given over to the so-called London School, Bacon, Auerbach, and Lucian Freud among them. Their work has always struck me as the point where British modernism stops trying to resolve the tension Nash identified and instead paints directly from within it. Freud in particular refuses both abstraction's escape from the body and impressionism's softening of it. His figures are studied with an almost clinical attention, flesh rendered as weight, as sag, as history written onto skin, and that unflinching, humane bleakness is, I think, one of the most honest positions British art reached across the whole century.
As an artist who began in the figurative tradition before moving toward geometric abstraction, this is the room I kept returning to. There is something clarifying about standing in front of work that treats the human body as a legitimate, even urgent, subject for serious art, at a moment when so much of the art historical narrative pushes toward abstraction as the inevitable endpoint of modernism. Freud, Bacon, and Auerbach make the case, implicitly, through the sheer conviction of their brushwork, that figuration was never a rearguard action against modernism. It was one of modernism's most rigorous answers.
Why this matters for geometric practice today
What the exhibition does well, from an academic standpoint, is show that this figurative bleakness didn't emerge from nowhere. It has a lineage: Sickert's unsentimental urban realism, the Bloomsbury Group's insistence that form carries ethical weight, even Moore and Hepworth's abstraction of the body all set the conditions for the London School's return to the figure. Seeing the works in sequence lets you trace that inheritance rather than take it on faith. It reframes Freud not as an isolated eccentric holding out against abstraction, but as the culmination of decades of British artists wrestling with how to paint truthfully under modern conditions.
My own path led away from figuration and toward geometric abstraction, but standing in front of these works, I recognize the same underlying question: how do you paint honestly under modern conditions, without either retreating into sentiment or abandoning the human altogether? Color, in particular, carries that weight, and it's a question I've been sitting with since writing about how Bonnard uses color to hold a painting together. This exhibition is a useful corrective, a document of how contested and considered the commitment to the figure actually was, and how much intellectual weight it can carry. Freud's patient, almost forensic observation of the body remains a working reference point: proof that painting honestly is not a retreat from modernism but a continuing argument with it.
In short
Going Modern is a rewarding, intelligently structured exhibition that resists an easy or singular narrative of British modernism. It is especially rewarding if your own practice sits anywhere within the modernist conversation, whether you work figuratively or, like me, have moved toward abstraction. The show gives the figurative tradition its full art-historical weight rather than treating it as a footnote, and the closing sequence alone is worth the visit. Free admission, generous range. It runs through August 9, 2026, in the second-floor galleries, and a brochure is available for those who want to read further into the curatorial argument.
Works from my studio
The questions this exhibition raises, about structure, restraint, and what it means to paint honestly under modern conditions, are ones I return to in my own geometric abstract work. If the show's argument resonates with you, you might find related concerns in my paintings. The forms are different, but the underlying problem is the same.
Rise, 20x40 (geometric abstract, vertical composition) Beach, 30x30 (coastal geometry, restrained palette) Ebb and Flow, 36x48 (structure and movement)
You can explore the full collection at shiloratner.com.
