Christopher Woodwas an English painter born in Knowsley,near Liverpool.

Wood studied architecture at Liverpool University,where he met Augustus John,who encouraged him to be a painter.He trained to be a painter in Paris,where he met Picasso and Diaghilev,and he travelled around Europe and north Africa between 1922 and 1924.He met Ben Nicholson in 1926; Nicholson's dedication to his work had a great influence and Wood subsequently exhibited with him.Like Nicholson,he admired Alfred Wallis.He painted coastal scenes,and his finest works are considered to be those painted in Brittany.Addicted to opium,he fell under a train in 1930,either by accident or design.

Christopher Wood played a pivotal role in the development of modernism in Britain in the 1920s.Admired by such giants as Picasso and Cocteau,he was acclaimed as one of the leading painters of his generation.His reputation is justified by paintings of Cornwall and Brittany made in the final two years of his life.These works achieve a compelling poetic intensity,yet it remains difficult to separate Wood's achievement from the legend that surrounded the artist after his dramatic suicide at the age of twenty-nine.

As well as exploring Wood's career and art in detail,Virginia Button traces the development of a glamorous narrative of tragic genius in the decades following his death.She discusses the types of masculinity that gained currency in the inter-war years,showing how Wood came to be seen as emblematic of a doomed generation.Virginia Button is a writer and curator based in Cornwall,and the author of The Turner Prize.

Introduction

1 Life and Legend

2 Going Modern:Paris and the Cult of Youth

3 Being British:Cumbria, Cornwall, Cornouaille

4 A Hope in the Void:Christopher Wood and English Neo-Romanticism

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index