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Dr Alex Bickley Trott is a Visiting Research Fellow from 1 October 2025 to 31 March 2026.
Alex Bickley Trott is Associate Professor and Programme Director for Art and Design at Oxford Brookes University. She studied at Royal Holloway University of London (BA & PhD), and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA), and previously taught at Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London. She teaches modern and contemporary art on the BA and MFA Fine Art programmes, and is supervisor to research students on text- and practice-based projects. Her research has covered topics in avant-garde art practice from the nineteenth century to the present day, with a particular interest in postwar British art.
Eden Come Home: Contexts of Decline of Neo-Romanticism
The research undertaken during this Fellowship contributes to the completion of a book focused on the rapid, seemingly brutal transition in mid-century British art, from the overriding dominance of Neo-Romanticism, to Pop, abstraction, and conceptual art practice. This transition is often attributed to a simple change of fashions, perceived as an inevitable, and typically favourable, shift towards US-inspired aesthetics and ideologies that more closely align with the prevailing tastes of subsequent decades. This research revisits and reinterprets this episode in art and cultural history, during which there was growing hostility between factions representing divergent aesthetic practice. If part of the dispute was about the legitimacy of changing social and cultural influences, so too did it centre on the ability of different art practices to represent the nature of being, when the threat of nuclear war gave such questions increased vitality. The research further examines how the concerns of mid-century figurative practice, such as those of Neo-Romanticism, have persisted. What I term the British cultural historic – encapsulating shared ideas of the social and cultural past, in particular as they were formed in response to the land, sea, as well as ancient and folk cultures – reemerges as a productive method through which to understand contemporary concerns of nationalism, natural and cultural ecologies, and modern warfare.
