The story of interwar British modernism has often been told in terms of sharp dichotomies. This began in the 1930s, with artists and critics pitting the fantasies of surrealism against cold, geometric abstraction. After the war there came C.P. Snow's distinction between reactionary and progressive modernists, Peter Bürger's between avant-garde and modernism, and more recently Charles Harrison's between ‘anarchic’ and ‘socialist’ aesthetic philosophies – all of these more or less mapping onto the original surrealism/abstraction dispute. Dominating this set of rather fine distinctions is Snow's broad-brush account of the ‘two cultures', applied like a whitewash over all of the detail and complexity of cultural politics. Edward Juler's admirable Grown but Not Made is an attempt to recover the networks of communication, metaphor and creative collaboration that drew interwar British modernists to biological form, breaking down not only Snow's, but also the whole host of either/or critical positions.

In this Juler has allies from the period. Henry Moore, whose lithe carvings dominate the book, wrote in 1937 that ‘all good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements’, arguing that even the simplest ‘rounded forms’ can ‘convey an idea of fruitfulness, maturity, probably because the earth, women's breasts, and most fruits are rounded’ (quotes from Moore's essay in The Painter's Object, 1937). Moore claimed that his sculpture gained ‘vitality’ through this ‘humanist organic element’, a concept which fits into Juler's broad category of ‘biomorphism’. This term does much work in the book, and is well suited to the sculptures under discussion. In a particularly pleasing section, Juler explores the importance of the egg as a sculptural form, concluding that ‘it was not simply that the egg represented the apogee of Modernist formal simplicity … it was also that, in its boundless capacity for growth, the ovum offered a potent metaphor for the illimitability of the creative process’ (p. 67). Thinking of sculpture in this way is itself a fecund process: it is obvious, but needed to be stated, that the making – through carving, cutting, casting and shaping – of interwar British sculptures was also a process of unmaking, of returning creativity to its biological beginnings.

Juler sees this biomorphism in the visual arts as a response to the ‘New Biology’, a broad category which ‘represented an array of neo-idealistic scientific perspectives – including such movements as neo-Lamarckism and neo-vitalism – which variously sought to question the legitimacy of the predominant mechanistic and positivistic scientific attitudes of the period’ (pp. 4–5). The benefit of referring en bloc to a whole style of biological research is that it allows Juler efficiently to demonstrate the importance of the life sciences for modern artists and their critics. For example, Chapter 2, ‘Metamorphosis’, begins with an interesting discussion of Henry Moore's ‘transformation drawings’, relating these to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's On Growth and Form (1917). Likewise the account of the aesthetics of ‘organicism’ in Chapter 3 and crystalline form in Chapter 4 are particularly rewarding. The book is at its best when speculative biological work is allied to art through astute analysis of individual sculptures. And, in line with recent work across linking the arts and sciences, Juler is also very good on the way in which scientific metaphors were picked up and liberally deployed by artists and critics.

Where the book is less convincing is in its handling of the ‘New Biology’ itself. Certainly there were dramatic changes in the biological sciences between the wars – notably, and of greatest relevance here, in embryology and genetics. But the links between the work of Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, C.H. Waddington and the host of others mentioned are not well captured by the terms ‘neo-Lamarckian’ or ‘neo-vitalist’, which are required to do too much work. In general – and as I have said, I think that overall this is a virtue – Juler's tendency is to synthesize. But if anything the history of the scientific work done in this period appears ever more complex.

Some of the complexities (perhaps most) were political – but unlike previous writers on the art and science of interwar Britain Juler remains generally quiet on ideological matters. One of the rare incursions of politics into the book occurs in a discussion of reproduction, femininity and sculptural form. But here we are told that ‘society’ was under ‘pressure’ from a handful of malign eugenicists, and that this had the effect of ‘politicising motherhood’ (p. 74). Hence Juler can only weakly conclude that art critics of the 1930s who invoked notions of womanhood and fecundity ‘inadvertently stepped into a battle being fought over women's rights and responsibilities by implicitly linking femininity to natural cycles and generative energies’ (p. 74). The situation seems to me to be almost exactly the other way round. ‘Society’ is not a separate category onto which eugenics was projected, any more than ‘motherhood’ is an apolitical category onto which birth control was imposed. Society and motherhood were and are produced through (amongst other things) scientific discourse. The regret is that art here ‘steps into the battle’ rather than (again, partly) constituting the categories.

I suspect that the difficulty here is in moving from work (scientific and artistic) that is radical in its concept of society to contemporary critical appraisal that is anything but. This, of course, is a problem for anyone working in the interwar years, marked as they are in science as well as art by critical work that is markedly inferior to the practices on which it depends.