English Modernist Notebooks | The School Of Life

Regular price $39.90

The School of Life, the organisation founded in 2008 by renowned philosopher and author Alain de Botton and now headquartered in London, delivers with their typical elegant brilliance a series of exquisitely designed and sustainably produced notebooks, packaged in threes and covering a good range of character and societal types: meet 3 Notebooks, 3 Thinkers. Perfect gift for just about anybody if you choose right. A newly discontinued line, we've got the very last ones of these simply gorgeous small notebook packages - get them quick!

History is filled with some fascinating 'schools of thought' dedicated to tackling life's big problems in distinctive ways. Each notebook carries an introduction to a great English Modernist artist on the inside front page, their name beautifully printed on the cover - and is otherwise empty for your own projects. English Modernists featured in these notebooks: Hepworth, Moore, Nicholson.

When artists like Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson were starting out in the 1920s and 1930s English Modernism seemed like a contradiction. You could make traditional English art or you could embrace the Modernism coming from Paris, Berlin and Vienna, but you couldn’t be loyal to both. Either you were fond of villages, fields and family life or you were attracted to abstract forms and adventurous materials. One of the things art can do for us is reveal false dichotomies - show us when we are really faced with a failure of imagination, rather than a real impossibility. It was possible to love the simpler, authentic habits of provincial English life and be a modernist. But it took the imagination and determination of some pioneer artists to show how. 

  • set of three paper-bound notebooks
  • 125 x 178 mm with yellow contrast stitch
  • plain, grid and lined paper (one of each)
  • 64pp

About The School of Life Founded in 2008 by renowned philosopher and author Alain de Botton (a personal favourite of mine), the organisation now headquartered in London and with global outreach is devoted to developing emotional intelligence across the full range of a lived life, offering classes, workshops, events, publications and a range of objects to assist the quest for more meaningful life, society, business.