For this project, the English Dept. COMMA Arnhold Research group collaborates with the Education Dept. of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Our undergraduate team has provided in-depth cultural contexts for the paintings and sculptures in the exhibit, “British Art from Whistler to World War II.” Click on each painting in the exhibit to discover poems and prose on the same topics, music from the same years, film clips that explore the same themes, and accounts of the works of art themselves and the worlds from which they come.  The goal is to enrich your sense of the forces at work in Britain, especially in the years between the two World Wars, from which this art came, and to show how other art forms, such as literature, film and music, represented these forces also.

This was the ‘Modernist Moment,” and the wild and experimental art of those years was born out of huge social changes: the trauma of the Great War, the mass movement of people to cities, the gaining of votes for women and the arrival of women in the public sphere, the full flowering of modern consumerism and pop culture, and the widespread use of new technologies from the airplane to mass electrification.  Art in the interwar years needed to experiment to grasp these changes and represent them. This project tracks a multitude of art forms as they grapple with the changes that still matter for our lives now.

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We also developed character studies – or fictional accounts of the paintings – to offer viewers the chance to experience art through different perspectives.

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