Review: Modern Britain 1900-1960 @ the NGV

I was, I confess, initially a bit dubious about the latest exhibition to open at the National Gallery of Victoria's St Kilda Road complex, Modern Britain 1900-1960, when I first heard about it. In retrospect, I think I was perhaps subconciously expecting a collection of bland landscapes and terribly prim portraits; a visual reflection of the "ordinary decent" Britain whose citizens and standards Joe Orton so delighted in shocking.

Instead, it's a fascinating and focussed exploration of the impact of modernist art movements such as Post-Impressionism, Futurism, Surrealism and more, and how they first assailed and ultimately swept aside the stultifying hangover of Victorian values in British art.

In many ways, Modern Britain is a companion piece to last year's NGV exhibition, British Art and the 60s from Tate Britain, which was a detailed survey of art created in the decade when the world's eye swung away from the USA and back to the Britain of David Hockney, The Beatles and The Kray Twins. Unlike that exhibition, however, Modern Britain is drawn from the collections of numerous public galleries rather than just one institution, and is perhaps the richer thereby; coloured as it is by the tastes and interests of dozens of different curators at some 20 galleries, as well as a number of private collectors.

More than 250 works, representing 93 artists, have been taken down from the walls or dusted off from where they've languished in the vaults of galleries across Australia and New Zealand; and loaned to the NGV for this broad survey of art documenting the impact of two World Wars, and much more beside.

Viewing the vibrant, post-impressionistic works of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; and the paintings of Walter Sickert and other artists of the Camden Town Group, who championed the legitimacy of the everyday as a suitable subject for art in 1911; it's easy to imagine how exciting and confronting such works might have seemed when first seen by audiences who'd grown up on the formal artist conventions enshrined by the Royal Academy, and the refined artifice of the Pre-Raphaelites. So too with the dynamic, Futurist-inspired linocuts of Claude Flight, Lill Tschudi and Sybil Andrews; and Duncan Grant's superb The Bathers (c.1926-33), a glorious, ambitious evocation of masculine beauty and energy.

Grouped both chronologically and thematically, it's possible to gain a sense of the impact made by successive art movements as they rolled like waves across the English Channel from the Continent, and the corresponding social changes that accompanied them. Some artists, however, sank rather than swam, as was the case with the unfortunate, conflicted and presently under-rated Glyn Philpot (1884-1937), whose work is, for me, one of the real highlights of Modern Britain.

Like a character out of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisted, Philpot's life was a struggle between his Catholicism and his sexuality; a struggle which expressed itself, in part, in his richly textured, darkly luminous portraits of Italian soldiers and other young men from the working classes (shades of E.M. Forster's Maurice and the English fascination with rough trade, a factor present in the sexual assignations of another, more successful British artist, Francis Bacon). In Philpot's case, however, there was another conflict playing out in his work, which came to a head in 1931. Exposure to the decadent world of Weimar-era Berlin, followed by a stint in Paris where he explored the work of Picasso and the Surrealists, led to Philpot embracing both his sexuality and the modernist aesthetic, with fatal consequences.

The new painterly style he displayed upon his return to England, in a controversial solo show in 1932, shocked and scandalised the London art world. His painting The God Pan was rejected by the Royal Academy, and the society commissions he depended upon dried up almost completely. The following years saw Philpot beset by financial and personal difficulties, and led to his untimely death in 1937.

From forgotten artists such as Philpot and the wartime painter Louis Duffy, to artists of the stature of Augustus Johns and Lucian Freud, the breadth of work displayed in Modern Britain 1900-1960 is truly remarkable, as well as deeply engaging. It's a vibrant, dynamic exhibition, and one that I unreservedly recommend.