“…an insult to the taste of the English people.” #ArtQuake1910 #oldstreetpublishing

The second of the two recent released from Old Street Publishing, in their ‘Great Events’ series, is the intriguingly titled “Art-Quake 1910” by David Boyd Hancock. Subtitled “The Manet and the Post-Impressionists Exhibition’, it takes a look at another controversial exhibition of artworks; one which took place in Britain and had a different intention to the Nazi one. Boyd Haycock specialises in modern British art, and with a major book about Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer under his belt, he’s well placed to tell this story. 1910 was a year about which Virginia Woolf declared: “On or about December 1910, human character changed”, and although she may not have been referring directly to the exhibition, it was indeed part of that change. British art (and indeed British society) had been struck in the doldrums during the Victorian era, but at the start of the 20th century things began to change. Europe had been embracing Modernism for…