A critical contextualizing of the early work of modernist painter Ceri Richards.

This study assesses Ceri Richards’s early art and career, documenting experimental drawings and constructions. The emerging analysis establishes a complex relation between this artist and his European contemporaries—prominently Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, and Hans Arp—contributing to an art historical study of the emergencies of modernism in Britain during the early twentieth century. The book includes a full account of Richards as a European modernist and of the dislocation of British artists’ engagement with, and Richards’s processing of, Paris surrealism; accompanying illustrations include previously unseen drawings and reconstructed early states, discussed here for the first time.