SEVEN AND FIVE SOCIETY OF ARTISTS
The Seven and Five Society was a London art group of seven painters and five sculptors created in 1919 and they had their first exhibition at Walker's Gallery in 1920. The group intended to encompass traditional, conservative artistic sensibilities and their first exhibition catalogue said, '[we] feel that there has of late been too much pioneering along too many lines in altogether too much of a hurry.' In 1924 Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) became a member and elected chairman in 1926 and when, in 1934, he introduced a ruling restricting the work shown at the Society's exhibitions to non-representational only, the effect was to create a schism in the group that resulted in several of its members leaving including Cedric Morris, John Aldridge, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, all of whom moved to Suffolk and together set up the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. In 1935, the group was renamed the Seven and Five Abstract Group and in 1935 the Zwemmer Gallery in Charing Cross Road, London, staged the first exhibition of entirely abstract works in Britain.