YOU ENTER A small exhibition. On one wall, an oil painting shows a complex arrangement of articulated, angular forms in white and blue, arranged over and around a plain red shape, perhaps a truncated rectangle viewed obliquely; a brown column divides the scene into uneven halves. A comparable arrangement of dynamic forms, but of curves rather than jags, appears on the cover of a thin book, presented nearby in a glass case. Walking around it, you see that the book is opened to a short poem whose title suggests a siren sounded after dinner, which the poem proceeds to evoke through repetitions, ellipses and fragments: single words isolated on lines, pileups of present participles. Another wall holds a work in watercolour and pencil on paper. It shows two figures at a table, their eyes meeting yours. Their arms are looped and, like the table before them, they are flattened in space. The eyes of the figure with beard and hat are cartoonishly enlarged. Nearby this artwork is another glass case, with a small, plain, slightly scruffy pamphlet, opened at a poem that begins abruptly: ‘I mingle with your bones’, a mixed image of carnage and carnality that leads into a poem that, in a dense and sinuous syntax, imagines a stand-off between the speaker and God. Your exhibition guide informs you that the works here were painted or published between 1914 and 1915 by writers or artists who grew up in the Jewish East End of London in the early twentieth century.

Wandering through this imaginary exhibition, two things may have been apparent to you. Firstly, that something interesting was going on in this place and at this point. There is evidence of a cultural phenomenon that will reward investigation. The second thing that the above works indicate is that any attempt to explain that phenomenon must take into account how different the works are from each other, which is as striking as the connections we can draw between them. Even a superficial glance at the works shows receptivity to a range of cultural influences, affecting different artists and writers to different degrees.