Access Art - Art and History

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Works of art help to tell a story. They can provide us with information about
a period in history, about a person, a way of life. On the simplest level,
looking at a painting or sculpture can tell us a lot about how people lived,
what they wore, what they did with their time. On another level, a work of
art tells us what the artist felt was important during the time he or she was
working. We can learn about his or her feelings, emotions and concerns
through the pictures and sculpture they have created. This table shows
the decades from 1890–1940. The second column links these dates to
major international events; the third column indicates what was going on
in the international art world at the time, and the fourth column shows what
some of the artists displayed in the Collection were doing.

date	international events	in the art world	artists represented in the collection
1890s	Discovery of X-rays; birth of cinema	Degas, The Blue Dancers; Matisse, The Dinner Table	1893 - Aubrey Beardsley, Winifred Emery

1900-1910	First flight by Orville and Wright Development of colour photography	1901 - Pablo Picasso holds his first exhibition in Paris	1900 - Walter Sickert, Church at Dieppe 1904 - Sir William Rothenstein, Industrial Landscape

1910-1920	World War 1 Russian Revolution	1910 - a watercolour by Wassily Kandinski is the first abstract painting	1910 - Eric Gill, A Roland for an Oliver, (sculpture) 1914 - Lucien Pisarro, Blossom, Sun and Mist, Chipperfield

1920-1930	First transatlantic flight Discovery of penicillin	1926 - Claude Monet completes his last Water Lilies painting	1924 - Mark Gertler, The Artist’s Mother 1928 - Christopher Wood, Roses in a White Jug

1930-1940	Spanish Civil War World War 2	1930 - Salvador Dali joins the Surrealist movement 1937 - Pablo Picasso paints Guernica	1933 - Stanley Spencer, Villagers and Saints 1939 - Duncan Grant, Still Life with bust of Vanessa Bell