Early British Moderns

Three films to complement the exhibition Sargent to Freud: a drama, a comedy and a documentary, all featuring early British Modern painters, real and imagined.

13 January - Carrington

Christopher Hampton, Britain, 1995, 122 minutes

Playwright Christopher Hampton catches the spirit of Bloomsbury in this film biography of the painter Dora Carrington (Emma Thompson) and her companion, the eccentric and gay Edwardian writer Lytton Strachey (Jonathan Pryce).

January 20 - Ben Nicholson: Razor Edge

Britain, 60 minutes

This documentary looks back on the life and work of Ben Nicholson, arguably the modernist who jolted British Art out of the doldrums with his abstract style.

27 January - The Horse's Mouth

Ronald Neame, Britain, 1958, 93 minutes

Sir Alec Guinness stars in this adaptation of Joyce Cary's famous novel about a crazed modernist painter who may or may not be the genius he claims to be. One of the great British comedies of the 1950s, it portrays the painter Gully Jimson as a kind of comic King Lear, providing his own perpetual tempest.