Title: A Crisis of Brilliance
Author: Haycock, David Boyd
Published by: Old Street Publishing
Year: 2010
First published: Old Street Publishing, 2009
Date reviewed: 10.15
ISBN: 978-1-906964-32-0

This book tells the story of five young British artists over the decade leading up to and through the first world war. All of them – Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington – studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. The phrase “A Crisis of Brilliance” was coined by Henry Tonks, drawing teacher at The Slade normally noted for his sarcasm towards his students and their work.

Like characters in a novel, the five artists’ hectic lives spin and weave around each other in breathless turmoil as they fall into and out of friendship and love with each other and with their sometime admirers and detractors. Critics, patrons, collectors, writers and poets dance around them as groups form and dissolve and arguments erupt and subside. Their complex relationships make quantum entanglement seem straightforward.

In his meticulously researched and annotated book Haycock paints his own word-picture of a time when Art in its broadest sense mattered, at least to the intelligentsia of the time. Artistic movements – neo-primitivism, post-impressionism, cubism, futurism, vorticism – were keenly debated. Inevitably the members of the Bloomsbury set flit in and out of the narrative, with some playing a more direct and significant role than others.

And then suddenly and apparently unexpectedly, war broke out. Within a few months public interest in ‘new’ art had evaporated. The artists themselves had to decide whether or not to join the flood of young men joining up to fight. Some later became official War Artists. The war challenged and changed each of them, with several achieving what would be regarded as their finest work. It also affected their physical and mental health in different ways.

The story really ends with the end of the war, but Haycock includes an epilogue briefly outlining the post-war lives of the five through to their deaths.

“A Crisis of Brilliance” is not an easy or quick read: I found I needed to take a break after about forty minutes. But it is highly rewarding and a notable achievement by the author. You can enjoy it just as a story, albeit one with extensive references to original sources, but it will also add significantly to your appreciation of the work of these British artists and their contemporaries.