The Leeds Arts Club and The New Age

Art and the First World War: Global to Local is a series of public talks co-hosted by Leeds Art Gallery, Legacies of War and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, to be held at Leeds Art Gallery, The Headrow, Leeds City Centre.

In this talk, Tom Steele will explore modernist art, literature and culture during the war years with reference to Leeds Arts Club, the literary magazine The New Age (which Arts Club co-founder Alfred Orage was editing at this time in London), Michael Sadler, and the letters between Herbert Read and Jacob Kramer. He will look at the emergence of the abstract expressionist aesthetic , taking in T.E. Hulme's pieces in The New Age, Vorticism and the Read-Kramer correspondence as well as some reflection on Read's war poetry.

Dr Tom Steele is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow but has now returned to the West Riding. Previously a Tutor Organiser for the WEA in Leeds and then Lecturer in the Department of Adult and Continuing Education at Leeds and Associate Lecturer in the Department of Fine Art, he ended his academic career as Reader in History and Theory of Adult Education at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on adult education, modern British and European cultural history as well as Alfred Orage and Herbert Read and their circles in Leeds and London.

See here for details regarding other talks in this series.

For more information on Legacies of War, contact Dr Claudia Sternberg.