Title: Artists of Their Time: The Postwar Battle for Realism in Literature and Painting
Abstract:From the establishment of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1940, cultural regeneration was anticipated as a vital part of the reconstruction of Britain.The means of ...From the establishment of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) in 1940, cultural regeneration was anticipated as a vital part of the reconstruction of Britain.The means of achieving this rejuvenation, however, remained conflicted once the Second World War was over.Although innovation was, as ever, an artistic priority, the pull of pre-war class and aesthetic certainties was also strong: to Norman Mackenzie, postwar Britain was in a 'stalemate state, that curious interval in our social history, in which there was no way back to the world which had gutted out into war yet no clear way forward to a really new society'. 1 Before the war began, Georg Lukács had attempted to move the debate around art's social contract beyond the presiding battle-lines.Its terms, he claimed in a 1938 essay, 'are not classics versus modernists; discussion must focus instead on the question: which are the progressive trends in the literature of today?'He added: 'It is the fate of realism that hangs in the balance.' 2 In the postwar discussions focused upon British literature, a binary (and frequently nostalgic) logic prevailed in the 1 Norman Mackenzie, 'After the Stalemate State' in Norman Mackenzie (ed.),Read More