First Look | Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960
Lucinda Lax, Interim Head of the Curatorial Division and Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, YCBA, and Rachel Stratton, independent scholar and curator of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, in a conversation moderated by Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor of the History of Art, Yale
About this program
What makes British modernism so distinctive? Join exhibition curators Lucinda Lax and Rachel Stratton, along with Joanna Fiduccia, Assistant Professor of the History of Art, as they discuss this question and the newly opened exhibition Going Modern: British Art 1900–1960. Artworks on view trace the shifts in artistic practice that took place in Britain during a sixty-year period marked by tumultuous societal and cultural changes—including two World Wars, the expansion and fall of the British empire, the rise of new political movements, the advent of radical new artistic movements in Europe, and the growth of new technologies.
After the talk, head to the galleries with Kathleen Quaintance and Madeline Porsella, PhD candidates in the History of Art at Yale, to look closer at key works.
About Lucinda Lax
Lucinda Lax is Curator of Paintings and Sculpture and Interim Head of the Curatorial Division at the YCBA. She came to Yale from Edinburgh, where she was a Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland. Lax recently undertook the reinstallation of the YCBA’s permanent collection, showing for the first time its full chronological range in a single cohesive display. She also curated the YCBA’s recent exhibition on J. M. W. Turner, the first in more than thirty years to bring together a selection of the virtuosic and complex artist’s paintings, watercolors, and prints drawn from the YCBA’s exceptional holdings.
About Rachel Stratton
Rachel Stratton is an independent scholar and curator of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and a former Postdoctoral Research Associate at the YCBA. She authored the gallery interpretation for Going Modern: Art in Britain, 1900–1960 and has curated multiple exhibitions for the YCBA, including Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi–A Marvellous Entanglement (Yale School of Architecture, 2023) and the forthcoming retrospective Gwen John: Strange Beauties (Spring 2026), for which she is coeditor of the catalogue.
About Joanna Fiduccia
Joanna Fiduccia is Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Yale, where she specializes in modern European art and the historical avant-garde. Her research explores the relationship between aesthetic forms and political formations, in particular the nation, through the history of modern sculpture and experimental art practices. Her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, will be published with Yale University Press in March 2026.
