This ground-breaking book re-conceptualises the history of English painting from 1914 to the end of the 1920s. Whereas most accounts of the period have tended to see English art as marked by a tension between the native tradition and Modernism. The modernity of English art rethinks the 1920s by offering a cultural history of this period. Whitin this context, the book explore the fate of both Modernist and non-Modernist painters. Established figures such as Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, as well as important but little-known artists like Charles Sims, John Armstrong and Ethelbert White, are discussed and illustrated in a series of innovative readings develop in the light of this strongly revisionist account of an important but neglected period of English art.