Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group (Tate/Abrams), Ed. by Robert Upstone

Britainwasn't the birthplace of modern art, but responded in the early 20th century to developments on the European continent. The Camden Town Group was a short-lived band of Londoners who (in 1911-1912) took up the call to paint the modern world. Modern Painters, the catalog for a recent retrospective at Tate Britain, shows that members of the Town Group were not avant-garde but worked key elements of modernity, including anti-naturalistic colors and simplified forms, into their depictions of urban life. The color plates reveal a bold vision of the changing society unfolding before the artists' eyes. Ben Nicholson represents the next generation of British painters, influenced by Cubism and, as shown in the catalog devoted to his work, increasingly drawn to abstraction and Mondrian's geometric color blocks.