The Seven and Five Society was an art group of seven painters and five sculptors created in 1919 and based in London. The group was originally intended to encompass traditional, conservative artistic sensibilities. The first exhibition catalogue said, " efeel that there has of late been too much pioneering along too many lines in altogether too much of a hurry." Artist

Ben Nicholson Benjamin Lauder Nicholson, OM (10 April 1894 – 6 February 1982) was an English painter of abstract compositions (sometimes in low relief), landscapes, and still-life. He was one of the leading promoters of abstract art in England. Backg ...

joined in 1924, followed

Henry Moore Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract art, abstract monumental Bronze sculpture, bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. Moore ...

and Barbara Hepworth, and changed the society into a

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

ic one and expelled the non-modernist artists. In 1935, the group was renamed the Seven and Five Abstract Group. At the Zwemmer Gallery in

Charing Cross Road Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus (the intersection with Oxford Street), which then merges into Tottenham Court Road. It leads from the north in the direc ...

, London, they staged the first exhibition of entirely abstract works in Britain."Seven and Five Society"
tate.org.uk. Retrieved 24 February 2021.

Name

The first intention of the group was to include seven painters and five sculptors (‘VII and V’). This became ‘Seven & Five’ and, after a suggestion by Nicholson, simply '7 & 5'.

Name

Exhibitions

Members

References

Further reading