The London Group: 100 years of independent exhibiting

The London Group is an artist-run exhibiting society, founded in London in 1913, that exists so independent-minded artists can show their work together without waiting for an academy’s approval. For more than a hundred years it has been run by its own members, who elect each other and hang their own shows, which is why it remains one of the most quietly radical institutions in British art. Its story is, in many ways, the story of how modern art got onto British walls at all.

What is the London Group and why was it founded?

The London Group was founded to give modern British artists a place to exhibit on their own terms. In the early twentieth century, the dominant route to public attention ran through the Royal Academy, whose taste was conservative and whose selection juries could shut out anything that looked too new. A number of younger artists had already formed smaller societies in frustration, and in 1913 several of these merged into a single, larger body that could carry more weight. The aim was simple and has barely changed since: a society owned and governed by working artists, where members decide what is shown rather than a gatekeeping institution. That principle of independence is the thread running through its entire history.

How does the Camden Town Group fit in?

The London Group grew directly out of the Camden Town Group and other small circles that decided they were stronger together. The Camden Town painters, led by Walter Sickert, had spent the years around 1911 painting unglamorous London life in bright, French-influenced colour, but they held only a handful of shows before recognising the limits of staying small. Merging into a broader society in 1913 gave them, and artists working in other styles, a common platform with real visibility. If you have read our guide to the Camden Town Group, this is the next chapter: the moment a tight, short-lived circle became part of something built to last.

What did independent exhibiting actually mean?

Independent exhibiting meant that artists, not an establishment jury, controlled who showed and what hung on the wall. In practice this gave the group room to be genuinely broad. It could hold figurative painters and abstract experimenters in the same room, sculptors alongside printmakers, the established beside the newly elected. That openness was the whole point. Rather than enforcing a single house style, the society set out to represent the living range of British art as its members understood it.

The radical idea was modest in form and large in consequence: let artists run the room.

This self-governing model also meant the group could absorb new movements as they arrived, instead of resisting them the way a fixed institution tends to. Over the decades its exhibitions became a kind of rolling record of what serious British artists were actually making.

How has the London Group lasted so long?

The London Group has lasted because its structure is built to renew itself rather than to defend a moment. New members are elected by existing ones, which keeps fresh work and fresh thinking flowing in, while the society’s independence from any single dealer or academy means no outside body can quietly retire it. Plenty of art movements burn brightly and fade within a few years, as the Camden Town Group itself did. The London Group avoided that fate precisely because it was never a movement with a fixed style to outgrow. It was a framework, and a framework can keep going as long as artists want to use it.

Where does it sit in the wider art world today?

Today the London Group sits in the tradition of artist-led, membership-based exhibiting societies that still shape how independent work reaches the public. It holds open exhibitions, which any artist can enter, alongside shows of its members’ work, continuing the same jury-by-artists approach it began with. This puts it in good company. London has long supported member-run and independent spaces that show contemporary British art outside the commercial mainstream, from riverside societies to specialist dealers in modern British painting. If you want to understand the lineage in person, somewhere like Bankside Gallery on the South Bank, home to long-established artist societies, gives a feel for how these member-led bodies present work, while a dealer such as Beaux Arts London shows the kind of modern British painting the London Group helped make visible in the first place.

Why the London Group still matters

The London Group still matters because it proved that artists can organise their own visibility and keep doing it for over a century. Its centenary in 2013 was not a nostalgia exercise but a quiet vindication of an idea that once looked risky: that you do not need an establishment’s permission to be taken seriously, only the willingness to band together and put the work up. That idea now feels almost obvious, which is the surest sign of how thoroughly it won. Every artist-run space, open exhibition and self-selected group show in Britain today is, in a sense, working in the tradition the London Group made durable. A hundred years on, the wall is still theirs to fill.