Sussex Modernism
Focusing in on one particular region enables the comparison of different modernist movements and media across a long chronological span.
Installation Views, Sussex Modernism, 2025, Towner Eastbourne. Photos by Rob Harris
The Sussex Modernism project engages with museums, galleries and archives in the region, many of which have strong modernist collections and exhibition histories. These include: Towner, Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, Charleston, Monk’s House, West Dean, Farleys House and Gallery, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Rye Art Gallery, the Keep, and many others. Sussex Modernism also looks into the lives of artists, writers and musicians who have been less recognised, and it also brings in contemporary artists in whose work modernism continues to reverberate.
Dr Hope Wolf has recently published a book Sussex Modernism with Yale University Press (April 2025). It compares how artists and writers harnessed the landscapes, cultures and histories of their locations to reimagine how art should be made and life lived. The book was the basis of a Sussex Modernism exhibition she has curated at Towner Eastbourne which runs from May 23 - September 28 2025. Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present, the show features surprising juxtapositions and jostling perspectives. It traces artworks’ varied, and sometimes conflicting, relationships to different modernist movements. It tells a new story about the ways in which art, cultures and places outside of metropolitan centres have been seen.
The Towner exhibition expands on a show Wolf curated at Two Temple Place, London, in 2017 (Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion). It also builds on Wolf’s later curatorial work, for instance on two artists influenced by surrealism and psychoanalysis who came to Sussex at the end of their lives: ‘A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff, and the Birth of Psychorealism’, which toured between the De La Warr Pavilion, Camden Arts Centre and Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange (2018-19).
The Centre for Modernist Studies runs talks, conferences, and courses related to Sussex Modernism. This includes the recent ‘Artist in the Archives’ initiative. Dr Alistair Davies ran a lecture series on Sussex Modernism at Towner, and again, with Wolf, at Towner and the De La Warr Pavilion. Dr Annabel Haynes, with Wolf, ran a symposium on Craft Modernism. Professor Pam Thurschwell organised conferences on Henry James at Lamb House and on Quadrophenia. Dr Helen Tyson and Wolf ran a symposium at the De La Warr Pavilion entitled ‘Virus of Hate: Responses to Fascism in Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Modernism’. When the Modernist Studies Association conference came to Sussex in 2015, run by Professor Sara Crangle, multiple regional venues were visited.
Students at Sussex have been brought into the Sussex Modernism project. A group of third years worked with Wolf on a Heritage Lottery Fund project to preserve the Berwick murals. Wolf and Tyson worked with students on a co-curated text exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion called ‘1935’. A new ‘Sussex Modernism’ module will run at the University from 2025.
For further information about the Sussex Modernism project please contact Hope Wolf (h.wolf@sussex.ac.uk).
Contact
Please contact Dr Hope Wolf, H.Wolf@sussex.ac.uk for information about Sussex Modernism.