In 1910, Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill proposed building a solar temple, a latter-day Stonehenge populated with giant archetypal gods, on six acres of land attached to Asheham House at the foot of the Sussex Downs. After they failed to raise enough money, the house was turned into a holiday home by Virginia and Leonard Woolf. In a telling metaphor for the competing tensions in Sussex identity, it later passed into the hands of a local cement works and was demolished to make way for a landfill. The story of Asheham is one of many that make Sussex Modernism at the Towner Eastbourne Gallery one of the most thought-provoking and original exhibitions in the current summer season.
Curator Hope Wolf, a researcher at the University of Sussex, opens the show with a bang, or more precisely, the shocking pink cover of Blast, confronting the visitor with the Vorticist Manifesto —the iconic and iconoclastic 1914 mission statement of radical British modernism. A vehicle for the cosmopolitan avant-garde, Blast had nothing to do with stereotypical visions of rustic Sussex, which Wolf says is why it’s there.
“Blast is a London-based magazine,” Wolf tells Artlyst in an interview.” The Vorticists were closely associated with the city and its industrial areas. They celebrated the machine. They didn’t like ‘nature’ or art which was interested in nature. And they didn’t like art which was interested in tradition. This represents modernism in its most radical form, just before the outbreak of the First World War. But as we say in this show, there are lots of different modernisms, not just one, so this is a show that helps people compare and contrast those different movements, different ideas about how you make art, and how you live life as well.”
Spanning a period from the late 19th century to the present day, it weaves narratives of a shire sandwiched between the muck and brass of urban progress and the dreamscapes of south coast seas: a rest and recreation retreat for London’s culture warriors and a battleground for conflicting cosmopolitan and provincial ideals.
A mix of painting, sculpture, textile art, video, literature and music, it squeezes into a small space a kaleidoscopic crowd of perspectives on art, place, and politics, bringing into view overlooked and unjustly neglected creatives alongside some of the biggest beasts of their times. The dissident feminism of Virginia Woolf finds echoes in the subtly ambiguous Sussex landscapes of Hannah Gluckstein (also known as Gluck) or the anti-authoritarian novels of Annie Winifred Ellerman (also known as Bryher), women who challenged society’s conventions with degendered identities.
In one room, a broad-brushed expressionist abstract-figurative Ivon Hitchens mural of Sussex life, Day’s Rest, Day’s work, dialogues with Epstein’s Rom, a larger-than-life, stripped-down, neo-primitive stone head, perhaps a study for a solar temple god. Elsewhere, the proudly “provincial” self-taught Eastbourne artist Harold Mockford jousts with more worldly practitioners — Eric Ravilious’s fey landscapes or Edward Burra’s caustic crusade against “Sussex F**tists”. There’s a stylistic medley of local landmarks and scenes: Beachy Head Lighthouse, the sinuous meanders of the Cuckmere river; the fishing boats of Hastings beach; Edward Wadsworth’s trenchant satire of tradition and progress, “Sussex Bypass”, where a road-building labourer dozes among the tools of his trade against a background of archetypal white cliffs and whale-backed downs.
The show, based on Wolf’s newly published book of the same name, is populated with a rich cast of eccentrics. Here is Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the aristocratic anti-imperialist poet and Irish Home Rule campaigner, painted by his wife Lady Anne in orientalist garb astride an Arab stallion. Here too, is the queer art collector, impresario and surrealist gardener Edward James, founder of the West Dean Arts and crafts college, and David Bowie in Pierrot costume sauntering Pett Level beach for his Ashes to Ashes video.
It is a show that provokes reflection, comparing different ideas about making art and living life. Wolf says: “In times of crisis, art became essential not only to imagine alternative futures but to sustain hopes of any future at all.”
Sussex Modernism, Towner Eastbourne, 23 May – 28 September 2025
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