TWO world wars, five British monarchs, the emancipation of women and the first aeroplane flight – all changes that rocked the first half of the 20th century.

And their influence ricocheted through all facets of cultural life, from the food people ate to the clothes they wore.

The British art world was not immune – styles of painting and sculpture shifting under the winds of change.

Today, the Walker Art Gallery unveils its latest exhibition to the public – an ambitious journey through the developments in British art during this period.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about New Radicals: from Sickert to Freud is that all 50 works – including 16 by local artists – are are from the gallery’s permanent collection.

"It’s an opportunity for us to show how extensive and interesting our collections are for this period," says Reyahn King, National Museums Liverpool’s director of art galleries.

"It’s a difficult period to chart. There’s such a huge amount of change across the whole time that it’s really quite extraordinary."

The Walker has met this challenge by dividing the exhibition into four sections that each deal with a different theme.

First is Groups and Gatherings, which focuses on work created at a time when artists tended to gather together formally for collective exhibition and debate.

Walter Sickert’s Bathers, Dieppe (1902), shown on the cover of this supplement, is included in this section.

Son of a Danish artist and an illegitimate Irish dance, Sickert worked as an actor under the pseudonym Mr Nemo from the age of 18. He toured England with several well-known companies, appearing in Liverpool in a production of Henry V in April 1880.

"He was a founding member of the New English Art Club and was very influential," says King.

"That club very consciously looked to French Impressionism for their inspiration and you can see that in The Bathers – in the interest he’s taken in the colours of the seas and in his very unusual innovative composition.

"The sea fills the whole canvas so there’s no horizon."

The Modernists covers the post- World War I period of the 1920s and 30s, capturing the optimism of the time when the nation was hopeful of a new beginning.

Paul Nash’s celebration of new technology, Telecommunications, was created as a poster advertising new automatic telephones for the Post Office.