To celebrate The London Group’s centenary year in 2013. Ben Uri presents a major historical exhibition, ‘Uproar!’: The first 50 years of The London Group 1913-1963, examining the first half century in the group’s turbulent history.

The London Group exploded onto the British art scene in 1913 as a radical alternative to the art establishment and in the wake of two modernist exhibiting platforms, Frank Rutter's liberal Allied Artists’ Association and The Camden Town Group, headed by Walter Sickert, both of whose members the new group absorbed. The first minuted meeting took place on 25 October 1913, and Jacob Epstein is credited with coining the Group's name the following month.

The often inflammatory language of the press response to The London Group is exemplified by the ‘uproar’ which followed the exhibition of Mark Gertler’s The Creation of Eve at the Group’s third show in 1915, and which lends its name to this exhibition.

The half century surveyed explores: The London Group’s inception, its Camden Town Group roots, the controversy of the early (particularly First World War) years; the influence of Bloomsbury in the 1920s; the strong showing of Jewish and women artists, Official War Artists, avant-garde sculptors; the ‘shadow of the right’ during the 1930s; the participation of newly-arrived émigré artists during the 1930s and 1940s; and the contribution of specific artists’ groups, ranging from the Vorticists to the Surrealists, the Abstract-Creationists and the Euston Road School.

This is the first extensive survey of visual highlights from the Group’s extraordinary first 50 years. During these early decades, these often innovative and daring works consistently provoked a sense of ‘uproar’ stimulating the public’s appetite for the new.

This exhibition and book embody the essence of British modernism. 100 years later, many of these ‘Uproarious’ radicals are now cornerstones of twentieth century British art history.

Ben Uri Museum
108A Boundary Road
London NW8 0RH United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 76043991
info@benuri.org.uk
www.benuri.org.uk

Opening hours
Monday from 1.00pm to 5.30pm
Tuesday - Friday from 10.00am to 5.30pm
Sunday from 12.00pm to 4.00pm