Frances Hodgkins and Cedric Morris: Solving 'the modern problem' through Romantic Modernism

This thesis explores the mutual support between Frances Hodgkins and Cedric Morris for the first time in the scholarly art-historical literature and will, consequently, open up revisionist ways of addressing questions of exchange and collaboration between artists. Between the First and Second World Wars, Hodgkins’s and Morris’s biographies as well as their art demonstrate shared cultural experiences and stylistic similarities. Together, these two British Modernists developed a distinctive pictorial language, which this thesis characterizes for the first time as “Romantic Modernism”. The interplay between eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British Romantics and the French avant-garde provided a significant aesthetic foundation from which Hodgkins’s and Morris’s own visionary painting evolved. This thesis proposes that Hodgkins and Morris were leading figures in the interwar British Modernist shift towards pastoral subject matter with their exchange of Romantic Modernist pictorial explorations. Yet, both artists have been and continue to be critically neglected and overshadowed by the perpetual canons of the widely-examined Neo-Romantics. The identification of Romantic Modernism, as a twentieth-century British modern movement, has never received art historical attention and will, therefore, redefine Modernism in Britain. By investigating the “modern” in Hodgkins’s and Morris’s art, which originated from Continental travels and time spent in Paris, their joint definitions of modernity provide a framework regarding their transnational influences and identities. Thus, this thesis presents an opportunity to widen the view to scholarly thought concerning the connection between British Modernism and “Englishness”. Identifying what came to be regarded as Hodgkins’s and Morris’s “disadvantages”— foreign nationality, gender, advanced age and same-sex relations— brings forth the objective of this thesis which will demonstrate why their participation and influential roles in the modern British context continue to be marginalized and will, subsequently, reposition both Hodgkins and Morris from the peripheries to the center of British Modernism.