The Victorian tradition of monumental commemorative sculpture, figurative works cast in bronze, continued well into the new century. In counterpoint to this was the new Modernist method – of direct carving and ‘truth to material’ – in which the sculptor let the process of making the work dictate its final form. This Modernist Primitivism – inspired by ancient and non-Western art and imported from Paris – found roots in Britain through Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and later acclaim through the work of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

The Post-War period saw an emphatic return to metal casting, although this time in the hands of a group of young sculptors – the likes of Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi, Lynn Chadwick and William Turnbull – whose work was expressionistic, seeking to express the human condition in the shadow of the Cold War. By the 60s, led by the likes of Anthony Caro, colour – flat and candy-bright – became a vital element, in work which was now more constructed than sculpted, using prefabricated industrial materials and their inherent suggestion of the Readymade.

At the end of the 19th century, the artists’ colonies of rural France and the cafes and ateliers of Paris were full of British painters seeking a new means of expression to capture the modern world. They returned fully-conversant in the visual language and ideas of the French avant-garde: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism & Symbolism.

Meanwhile, taste at home had remained rather conservative and Victorian. As a consequence, British art in the early century is subtle in its modernity, elegantly poised between the traditional and the new. Significantly, it is this very restraint – the paring down of colour and composition - that made the transition to abstraction in the 20s & 30s all the more uninhibited.

Named after the seedy district of North London that was the backdrop to both their art and lives, the Camden Town Group, founded by Walter Sickert in 1911, was inspired by French Post-Impressionism, although their view of life in the modern city was somewhat darker than their Parisian counterparts. They painted the underbelly of London in the new century – alienated couples in murky interiors, prostitutes laid out on broken bedsteads as classical nudes, the lime-lit world of the music hall.

Key figures in the Group, aside from Sickert, were Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman & Charles Ginner.

Scotland has long had close cultural allegiances to France and so it was no surprise that its artists travelled to Paris for an education in how to be thoroughly modern. From the Barbizon School, through Manet, to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, the French influence on late 19th century Scottish painting is clear. For the younger generation – Fergusson, Cadell, Peploe & Hunter – it was the high-intensity of the Fauvist palette and the way their works were structured through blocks of independent colours that was most influential – and which led to these four painters later being dubbed the ‘Scottish Colourists’.

Feted for their high voltage landscapes and still-lives, the Colourists also captured the spirit of beau-monde Edinburgh and Glasgow in the early decades of the 20th century.

Bloomsbury was as much an idea about a new way of living as it was a specific group of artists – indeed its central figures were not just the painters Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, but also their patrons, lovers and a number of writers including E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf.

The Bloomsbury painters were inspired both by the bright palette and simplified forms of French Post-Impressionism, which Fry had been influential in bringing to London in 1910, and by Cubism and its embrace of the Primitive. The Group’s radical aesthetic insisted everything should be beautiful, but also be expressive of the modern era: very much an update (and an antithesis) of William Morris. However, like Morris, they founded a fully-functioning workshop – Omega – to bring this idea to a wider audience through furniture and textile design and household objects. The Omega Workshop’s unmistakeable style – bright, geometric, primitive – was to become highly influential on art and design in the 20s and 30s.

Founded in 1914 by the artist and writer Percy Wyndham-Lewis, Vorticism’s aesthetic of speed and dynamism was an attempt to capture the experience of life in the ‘Machine Age’. It combined Cubism’s fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the urban industrial environment. The horror of World War One laid waste Vorticism’s idolisation of a highly mechanised future, but like Italian Futurism, which shared some of its ideals and impetus, this was Modernism as rebellion, driven by a firm anti-establishment stance.

In the aftermath of the War, Surrealism offered an alternate form of social and political revolution that centred on the individual and the unfettered freedoms of the unconscious mind. British artists experienced it first-hand in Paris, but the key conduit was the painter and poet, Roland Penrose, who organised the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, which led to the fusion of an English Surrealist movement in art. Among the 390 exhibits were pieces by Paul Nash and Edward Burra, and Henry Moore.

In the late 20s and early 30s, London became a centre of the international Modernist movement, as a generation of artists, architects and designers from Europe arrived in the city, fleeing persecution and war on the Continent. The artists’ studios of Hampstead became a melting pot for alternate ideas for a new, radical Modern art, including Constructivism, Surrealism and Primitivism. These ideas were then given a uniquely British twist by artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Paul Nash – all of whom were involved in the various exhibiting societies, manifestos and periodicals that flourished, albeit often very briefly, as they and other artists crossed over between styles and ideas in a decidedly un-European way.

During the Second World War, this small fishing village at the western edge of Britain found itself as a viable alternative to London as the centre of avant-garde abstract art. The presence of major international artists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth & Naum Gabo inspired a new generation of painters: local boys such as Peter Lanyon and John Wells, and recent arrivals from the metropolis such as Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter. This younger generation, however, soon found their ideas ranging beyond Constructivism, towards a gestural expressionistic abstraction, which inevitably had them looking still further west, across the sea to New York

The idea of ‘St Ives’ has become shorthand for a form of abstraction inspired by the landscape – especially the movement of the sea and the dynamic interaction of earth and water at the coastline. In addition to this one must take into account the significant level of investigation that took place into pure abstraction by many St Ives artists.

The bomb-damaged city, haunted by the new phenomenon of a Cold War, inspired a form of figurative art in the early 50s that was both expressionistic, shot through with individual angst and political unrest, and yet, at the same time, was somehow cool and detached. Key figures included Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews & Francis Bacon & later dubbed the School of London. The group became the focus of a celebrated exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London 1976, The Human Clay, which sparked a revived interest in figurative painting in the 70s and 80s. Alongside these artists in the early 50s were the 'Kitchen Sink' painters, such as John Bratby and Jack Smith, whose paintings captured both the privations of the ration-book era and the first glimpses of the new Technicolor world of consumerism.

In 1956 a small group of American Abstract Expressionist paintings were shown at the Tate Gallery. For many British artists this first-hand experience of the New York School was less a revelation and more of a confirmation of the gestural, existential abstraction they had already been working on. This had its roots in the French tachistes such as Soulages and De Stael, in which the brushmark – the tache – didn’t have to ‘describe’ anything, but could stand in its own right as something meaningful and expressive. What the Americans did teach the British, though, was a new ambition for abstraction – as a universal, archetypal language – and the potential of physical scale as a means to achieve this. Key British artists involved in these developments include William Gear, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon.

Pop Art wasn’t invented in Manhattan in the early 60s, but at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the early 50s, with the founding of the Independent Group, a collaborative think-tank of writers, architects and artists, including Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, for whom popular culture – movies, magazines, music, science fiction – was as relevant a starting point for art as anything else. Pop culture was often appropriated directly into their work through collage – pre-figuring Andy Warhol’s use of silk-screened press photos and Roy Lichtenstein’s re-working of comics.

As the Swinging Sixties took off, British Pop inevitably became intertwined with music and fashion: Peter Blake designed the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album and Robyn Denny’s Austin Reed mural provided the visual back-beat to Carnaby Street and Cool Britannia.

The post-war Constructivist movement centred on a group of young London-based artists: Victor Pasmore, Adrian Heath, Kenneth & Mary Martin, Robert Adams and Anthony Hill. These artists were interested in creating a completely non-objective art that reflected the new technological era, both in its materials – plastics, sheet metals – and its form, which was structured through mathematical principles of proportion and harmony. For the Systems Group, formed in 1969, the importance of mathematics was taken further – no longer a means of organising elements within a composition, it became the start-point for generating images themselves.

A counterpoint to this systematic art was the hard-edge abstract movement, which although on the surface seems cut from the same cloth, was ordered more by colour relationships and an intuitive sense of balance and proportion. Key artists include Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bernard Cohen.