Exhibition

Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960

Thursday, February 12, 2026–Sunday, August 9, 2026
Second-floor galleries

Free admission

Twentieth-century Britain saw the emergence of some of the most distinctive and influential artists of modern times, including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Francis Bacon. Their work continues to resonate and inspire today, yet “going modern and being British,” as the surrealist landscape painter Paul Nash observed, was never straightforward. The century brought dramatic change: astonishing new technologies, the final expansion and then the fall of empire, the rise of socialism and fascism, the traumas of two World Wars, and the pathbreaking innovations of Europe’s modern artists. How could Britain, with its strong sense of identity and attachment to tradition, foster its own authentic modernism?

This exhibition, drawn from the collection of the Yale Center for British Art, highlights the diverse responses of British artists to the question of what it meant to be modern. It ranges across the urban impressionism of Walter Sickert and the Camden Town Group; the paintings of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group, as experimental in art as in life; the abstraction of Ben Nicholson; the groundbreaking sculpture of Moore and Hepworth; and the London School’s bleak yet humane vision. Their work not only encompassed the abstract and the representational, the geometric and the expressive, and the natural and the artificial; it also brought them together in increasingly distinctive and powerful ways.