The Reconciliation of Modernism

A critical contextualizing of the early work of modernist painter Ceri Richards. This study assesses Ceri Richards's early art and career, documenting experimental drawings and constructions. The emerging analysis establishes a complex relation between this artist and his European contemporaries--prominently Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, and Hans Arp--contributing to an art historical study of the emergencies of modernism in Britain during the early twentieth century. The book includes a full account of Richards as a European modernist and of the dislocation of British artists' engagement with, and Richards's processing of, Paris surrealism; accompanying illustrations include previously unseen drawings and reconstructed early states, discussed here for the first time.