50 Ans d'Art Moderne

The British contribution was chosen by an international committee for the exhibition of which Sir Philip Henry and Sir Herbert Read were members. Artists selected included Sickert, Pail Nash, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore Writing in Time and Tide (26 April, Eric Newton observed.  "The Brussels International Fair contains, in most of the national pavilions, adequate sample of national painting and sculpture. The British pavilion is one of the new that has either not thought fit or has not been able to advertise its own artists though almost everything else that Britain can produce is to be found there. But by far the most memorable exhibition of art within the exhibition’s perimeter is that entitled Fifty Years of Modern Art, a show of nearly 350 paintings and sculptures covering the restless, complicate and, in parts, magnificent first half of our own century. I can remember no exhibition that has so bravely and intelligently tackled an almost impossible task. It was not, of course, the task of selecting the 350 best products of fifty years. What the International Committee responsible for the show have presumably wished to do is to discover a general direction, impose a pattern on the whole, so that what once seemed to lack all coherence except that of a determination to experiment at all costs, now begins to make sense and even to look like an inevitable development."