Insane Acquaintances: Visual Modernism and Public Taste in Britain, 1910-1951

Insane Acquaintances explores a range of exhibitions, organisations and institutions that mediated and promoted modernism in Britain. In a series of case studies on subjects ranging from the first Postimpressionist exhibition in London in 1910, the teaching of modernist art in schools, the decoration and design of the modernist home, the International Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936 and the Festival of Britain in 1951, Insane Acquaintances charts some of the ways in which modernism not only sought to improve the quality of art but also the quality of art’s reception in Britain. It also provides an institutional history of some of the groups and organisations that fostered modernist art in Britain during that period.