THERESA THOMPSON is disappointed by the works of the Camden Town Group on display at Tate Britain

If you were asked to name an Impressionist, no problem: Degas, Monet, Manet . . . you could reel off a few. An Abstract Expressionist, trickier. A member of the Camden Town Group trickier still, until that eureka moment maybe when Walter Sickert's name comes up.

Well, all that is about to change with Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, an exhibition of over a hundred paintings at Tate Britain that highlights the work of a group of 16 artists brought together by Sickert in 1911. The best known members of this short-lived group, which lasted only 18 months, between 1911 and 1914 holding three exhibitions, were Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Lucien Pissarro, Spencer Gore, and of course, Sickert, the oldest of them and the best.

Calling themselves the Camden Town Group because several members lived there, they mostly painted scenes of everyday life in the rapidly developing city of London and its suburbs, with the occasional foray into the countryside. Formed for pragmatic reasons - there was more clout in having a name - they were inspired by the innovations going on across the Channel introduced to London audiences at Roger Fry's seminal exhibition of Manet and the Post-Impressionists the year before.

A gently satirical painting by Spencer Gore in the opening room at the Tate depicts one of the first exhibitions of Post-Impressionist art in London. Gore's bird's-eye view of Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery (1911) shows three recognisable Gauguins on the wall, all loaned by the collector Michael Sadler, Master of University College, Oxford, who initiated the exhibition and also bought this homage to it. Another art gallery features in Malcolm Drummond's oil painting, 19 Fitzroy Street, where three dark-suited figures bend over an artwork in the rented rooms that functioned as the group's base. They would gather there to show and sell their work on Saturday afternoons; nice social occasions with tea served by the cleaner, usually ending with them drifting along to the Criterion, a smart restaurant on Piccadilly Circus.

It was all very convivial. But were they really a group - unified artistically? Though sharing interests in subject matter and intent to make history' as British Post-Impressionists, stylistically they were dissimilar.

Curator Robert Upstone, who leads a research project into the group, has no doubt that they heralded a new spirit in British painting.

"We hope to reposition these artists," he said. "They occupy a very important place in British art, falling between the niceties of Edwardian art and full-blown modernism and abstraction."

Upstone argues that they brought two things into British art: colour, bold and anti-naturalistic, and design that simplifies forms and creates geometric interest. With the exception of Sickert who shunned bright colours, favouring deeper, darker Old Master tones, the group mostly adopted a vibrant Post-Impressionist palette of flat reds, purples, pinks and greens.

Middle-class - and all male - they tried to look at everyday life from a working-class perspective. They explored the world of domesticity, painting landladies with deadpan faces such as Gilman's Mrs Mounter at the Breakfast Table waiting while the tea stews to share a cuppa, and street life such as the coster girls in Sickert's Two Women and Ginner's Piccadilly Circus.

They also explored changing sexual attitudes in a frank way that shocked an audience more used to seeing nudes as goddesses or characters from ancient history. Instead, here were nudes justified by domestic settings, as well as naked prostitutes collapsed on cheap iron beds, sated or weary (or dead? Sickert's infamous Camden Town Murder series is also on show).

Times were a-changing, and some works capture vanishing scenes. For example, within a few years of Robert Bevan's elegant subtle toned composition, The Cabyard, Night, painted in 1910, to my mind one of the best pictures in the exhibition, motorised cabs had replaced horse-drawn.

Sickert, who had pioneered painting music hall scenes in the 1880s, passed on his interest to others in the group. Gore, for example, paints the patriotic ballet Rule Britannia at the Alhambra, Leicester Square in 1910, a hugely popular production that reflected growing tensions with Germany.

The First World War formed an invisible backdrop to much of their work. The poignant empty deckchairs in Sickert's Brighton Pierrots, for instance, the woman playing Tipperary on a highly polished piano in 1914 as the troops go off to war, Ginner's women at work in Blouse Factory, and the vacant places at the table and faces of the women in Gilman's Tea in the Bedsitter (1916). Walter Bayes's enormous The Underworld has Britons of all classes sheltering together from a bombing raid in the Elephant and Castle tube station.

But while this exhibition works as a portrait of a nation in transition, I found the paintings themselves, with a few notable exceptions, oddly lacking. Seeing a body of work together can show up shortcomings, and despite publicity blurb promises of the group's showing a bustling' metropolis, the paintings were strangely static. They were empty of life, of energy; the townscapes, specially the new garden city pictures, from Janet and John; the figures if standing Lowry-like, if seated disconsolate.

Inertia rules - colourful inertia, but inertia all the same. And I don't mean solely in Sickert's wonderful portrait of stifling dullness, Ennui, one of the highlights of the show and always a pleasure to see, or his variation on the theme where the man goes Off to the Pub.