Elena Crippa Boeken

The publication offers a fresh examination of twentieth-century British art, challenging established narratives and exploring themes such as British Surrealism, patronage, and identity. Experts provide new insights that encourage readers to reconsider the connections between art and cultural history. Accompanied by striking visuals, it highlights the resilience of the British artistic tradition while prompting a deeper exploration of its evolution and significance in contemporary society.

All Too Human tells the story of how painters in twentieth-century Britain have used paint to record their personal, sensuous, immediate and often intense experiences of life. Spanning a century, this history encompasses a diverse but related group of painters who focused on the depiction of the human figure and everyday landscape they inhabited.

The radical project ‘an Exhibit’ emerged from a decade of testing the formats and possibilities of exhibition-making. A collaboration between two artists, Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore, and a critic and curator, Lawrence Alloway, the show was simultaneously an investigation into abstract environmental forms and a participatory experiment that would fundamentally transform the role of the viewer. Comprehensive documentation of the original exhibition is presented alongside coverage of other key projects from the era and contextualised through the detailed analysis of Elena Crippa. Archival texts conveying the different voices of ‘an Exhibit’s three creators and an essay from the time by David Sylvester are accompanied by new contributions by Martin Beck, Owen Hatherley and Lucy Steeds. This book addresses the diverse legacies of ‘an Exhibit’– from its reverberations in contemporary art practice to its influence on urban design and social housing.