Unit One

Unit One. A group of eleven avant-garde British artists formed in 1933. Its birth was announced in a letter to The Times by Paul Nash, published on 12 June of that year. The members were the painters John Armstrong (1893–1973), John Bigge (1892–1973), Burra, Hillier (who replaced Frances Hodgkins, named in Nash's letter), Nash, Nicholson, and Wadsworth; the sculptors Hepworth and Moore; and the architects Colin Lucas (1906–84) and Wells Coates (1895–1958), who was also one of the outstanding industrial designers of the day. Douglas Cooper was secretary. In April 1934 the group published a book, Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture, edited by Herbert Read, which was originally intended as the first of a series. In his introduction Read explained that the name was chosen because ‘though as persons, each artist is a unit, in the social structure they must, to the extent of their common interests be one'. He said that the group ‘arose almost spontaneously among a few artists well-known to each other, out of a consciousness of their mutual sympathies and common necessities'. Coinciding with the publication of the book, they held their only group exhibition, at the Mayor Gallery, London (founded in 1933 by Fred Mayor (1903–73), one of the most progressive British art dealers of this period). Between May 1934 and April 1935 a reduced version of the exhibition toured to six provincial venues (Liverpool, Manchester, Hanley, Derby, Swansea, and Belfast). It attracted a good deal of publicity (much of it negative) and helped to stimulate interest in avant-garde art (according to the Irish News, the show was ‘the first collection of modern art ever exhibited in Belfast'). Despite their ‘mutual sympathies', the artists of Unit One had no common doctrine or programme and the group was breaking up by the time the exhibition tour ended. However, although it was short-lived, Unit One made a considerable impact on British art of the 1930s, and the two main trends it represented (abstraction and Surrealism) were shown in two major exhibitions in London in 1936: ‘Abstract and Concrete’ at the Lefevre Gallery, and the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries.