Art-Quake, 1910

Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and van Gogh – all were introduced to the British public in a single exhibition in 1910. Reactions ranged from outrage to mockery to a sense of ecstatic liberation, as visitors to the Grafton Galleries found themselves face to face with works that seemed to turn 500 years of culture on their head. British painters were still working in the shadow of the Old Masters, but here were Continental artists reaching for the new light of Modernism.

Vividly evoking the personalities of Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group members who staged the exhibition, as well as the artists themselves, David Boyd Haycock captures not just a pivotal moment in British art but a whole society on the brink of upheaval. As Virginia Woolf remarked: ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed.’