Figurative painting in the twentieth century

Painter and writer Timothy Hyman RA and curator Roger Malbert discuss the artists who have chosen to pursue figurative painting over the last century.

With the arrival of abstraction and movements such as Abstract Expressionism in the 20th century, people began to see figurative painting as outdated and at odds with the very concept of modern art. Discussing Hyman's new book 'The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century', Hyman and Malbert highlight a range of Modernists who, despite their awareness of abstraction, chose to work in narrative and confessional modes. Works by often-marginalised artists such as Max Beckmann and Stanley Spencer, Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel, Charlotte Salomon and Henry Darger, express the possibility of a new kind of figuration, as well as a foundation for our questioning of formalist readings of 20th-century art.