Page 45 - Studio International - April 1967

the old world in new and shattered circumstances.' 3 This calligraphic tendency in the Seven and Five was taken
up briefly by a group of which Hitchens was a member, showing
The styles of painting which flourished in England
under the title of 'Objective Abstractions' at the Zwemmer Gallery
during the war revived on the one hand the romanticism
in 1934. Rodrigo Moynihan, another member, did show abstract
of the early nineteenth century, and on the other the work painted in a freely-brushed manner (Fig 18), but
social realism of the early twentieth. By the end of the the main importance of this particular exhibition lay,
war the initiative had passed from Europe to America paradoxically, in bringing together publicly for the first time some
where an art had developed that was vital and creative of the artists who were to form the Euston Road School four
years later.
enough to upset entirely the premises upon which the
4 Quoted from letter Nov. 1966.
achievements of the '30s had been based.
q
5 Quoted from letter.
6 Nash's concept of abstract art in the early thirties may be
1 From `Wilcoxism', reprinted in 'Since Cezanne' 1922. better understood in the light of his belief that Picasso was 'the
2 (Though many of them did. Hitchens was considerably affected greatest of all abstract painters' (Listener, 17.8.1932).
by Bell's 'Art' and Moore has explicitly acknowledged a debt to 7 From Myfanwy Piper, 'Back in the Thirties' in Art and
Fry's 'Vision and Design'.) Literature, No. 7.

Above Fig. 15 Paul Nash
Composition c. 1934
Oil on hardboard
5x 3½ in.
Coll: Christopher Seagrim
Top right Fig. 16 Edward Wadsworth
Composition on blue ground 1933-4
Tempera on board
24+ x 35 in.
Piccadilly Gallery
Centre right Fig. 17 John Bigge
Composition 1933
Oil on canvas
Exhibited with Unit One
Probably the weakest member of Unit One,
John Bigge was considerably influenced by the
'art non-figuratif' element of the Ecole de Paris —
as represented in Abstraction-Creation, and by the
English version of this style which Wadsworth
provided. Bigge exhibited with the Surrealists in 1936
Bottom right Fig. 18 Rodrigo Moynihan
Objective abstraction 1933
Oil on canvas
Courtesy: Tate Gallery, London