There's No Such Thing as British Art

Britishness conveyed through visual art suggests both a spectrum of alliance and an assumption of complicity (with Britishness), which is increasingly untenable in the context of regional political devolution. Untenable because in the field of contemporary British culture means there is always a dominant regional inflection; regional and inter-regional identities often prevail over the national. For many the term Britishness increasingly means not Greatness but Englishness. This essay discusses this through a range of postwar and contemporary exhibitions, critical overviews, characterizations and related political discourse, and visual art practices that develop and contribute to the idea of an explicitly contemporary English Art.

2021

The aim of this paper is to identify the various branches of art in Britain and critically examine their formation, considering factors such as the government and political system, the education system, the history of the nation, the customs and habits of the people, religion, and more. To achieve a comprehensive analysis, this study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to understand the various components that have contributed to the development of art in Britain. The examination will focus on specific examples from architecture, cinema, and music, providing valuable insights into the historical and societal contexts that shaped these art forms.

Angles, 2018

The fairly recent reassessment of the value of British art means it has been possible to read some of its micro-histories as original and inventive rather than simply derivative of French or American art, especially early modern art. In this regard, Dana Arnold and David Peters Corbett's 2013 collection of essays A Companion to British Art, 1600 to the Present, appears as one of the latest attempts at reassessing the value of a national tradition which was long disparaged, even by English and British critics, for its supposedly misguided association with bourgeois patrons whose tastes were often decried as philistine. One of the chapters in the volume demonstrates how British modernism, for example, while it has often been considered as belated and undemonstrative, can today be appraised in a less universalist manner, and that in a more relativist period, it might be evaluated again, its author, Janet Wolff, going as far as to wonder whether realist or figurative art of the time-among which much of the productions of the Bloomsbury Group-might just as well be considered the art of modernity (Wolff 2013: 60-75). This type of reassessment which started in the second part of the 20 th century had to contend with centuries of aesthetic dismissal-which famously finds its roots in the iconoclasm which followed the English Reformationand the ingrained idea that artistic experimentation was not a British forte. It took the-short-lived-audacity of Pop in the 1960s, and then the brash confidence of Young British Artists in the 1990s to put an end to the country's artistic marginalisation and to allow its artists to showcase some of its idiosyncrasies as cutting-edge rather than parochial. This article will focus on recent trends in contemporary British art, particularly on the way in which specifically national attitudes to presenting, as well as to financing and commissioning works have opened up possibilities for the creation of

A Companion to British Art 1600 to the Present, 2013

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Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2015

Special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. With essays by Julie Codell, Jason Edwards, Sarah V. Turner, Adrianne Rubin, Dana Garvey, Imogen Hart, Colette Crossman, Lene Østermark-Johansen, Jane Hawkes, Anthony Burton, and Amy Von Lintel

Identities, 2016

Taking the view that national art museums should represent the multifarious populations they serve, this article explores racial material in Tate Britain's high-profile exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past (2015). The exhibition gave extensive coverage to two aspects of empire: hybrid fusions and the myth of white heroism, but gave limited attention to colonization as a maximally coercive system built on racist imaginings and abuse. Through cross-examination of the exhibition's content and absences, I explore whether Tate Britain is setting out the 'building blocks' for more diverse practice.

With the advent of the Second World War, a number of British artists left their urban environments for the relative peace and safety of rural and coastal residence in Cornwall. This paper examines a particular place in time: St Ives in the 1940s and 50s. It begins by tracking the artistic biographies of two of the leading exponents of British abstract art: Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. It considers their encounter with the coastal paintings of Alfred Wallis and their subsequent move to the town where he had worked. The paper is framed by a theoretical perspective derived from the work of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and his conceptualisation of artistic avant-gardes. It consequently employs a three-level approach involving analysis of biographical habitus and field structures. The paper shows how artists of a certain habitus constituted themselves as an avant-garde by positioning themselves within the art field, and within the broader social space. Configurations of social, economic and cultural capital will be examined to show the education and formation of a particular British artistic style which, for a time at least, became an international avant-garde. The work of such painters as Heron, Barnes-Graham, Lanyon, and Wells will also be considered. Finally, the paper explores how such a social analytical approach to aesthetics enriches and deepens our understanding of both the 'rules' and values of art. The presentation will take the form of a discursive montage using text, diagrams, biographical analyses together with several examples of paintings and sculpture.

Museum History Journal, 2013

This paper examines the virtual invisibility of colonial art in British art museums today, despite a wealth of recent scholarship calling for empire to be understood as central to British art history. While history museums tend to take a broadly inclusive view of the subject, fine art institutions such as Tate continue to define British art in its narrowest geographic sense, despite Britain ruling over what at its peak was the world’s largest global empire. The art of colonial Britain is more likely to be seen in such institutions as the National Maritime Museum, where the grand oils of such artists as John Webber and William Hodges sit comfortably within a narrative about British exploration and empire. The exhibitions and collection displays at Tate, on the other hand, operate in effect as gate-keepers of an established British art historical canon, despite the institution’s acquisitions policy which promises to ‘frame and address changing historical narratives’. Why do colonial subjects continue to remain of minimal interest to British curators and directors today, despite a wealth of vigorous postcolonial scholarship over the last decade arguing that ‘the concept of empire belongs at the centre not the margins of British art’. (Barringer, Quilley, and Fordham. Art and the British Empire, 2007).

British Art Studies, 2021

Considering the wider cultural and political contexts of Brexit, we must also ask what it means to make, study, and curate "British" art in a neonationalist climate, particularly when the current UK Government exercises political control of the arts, intervening in decisions that curators and educators are trained to make. 6 In so doing, the history of Britain's resurgent and recurrent nationalisms simultaneously points to an orientation entwined, as Paul Gilroy has incisively shown over several decades, with the empire and its decline, racism, "postcolonial melancholia" and violence. 7 This begs the question of why the compulsion to study national schools endures. Brexit has amplified problems surrounding borders-physically and conceptually; within the UK and internationally-making Britain's status as an island more palpable. While the character of these tensions has shifted over time, both the first referendum to leave the EU, in 1975, and the most recent one, in 2016, have made the distinctions between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland more apparent and uncomfortable. 8 We encouraged responses to this provocation that consider the impact of these reconfigurations on art making, the interpretation of historical and contemporary art, and the wider cultural field. How does Brexit change conceptualisations-past and present-of English, Northern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh art? How is the imagery and language of Brexit entering into the cultural imagination of Britain? How can art history account for the art and culture of the "borderlands"? 9 What images and ideas of "British art" are being produced from beyond its physical borders? What can the longer histories of the artistic relationships between Britain and Europe tell us about how geographical and conceptual borders have been crossed, negotiated, and bypassed by cultural forms? And what can we learn from how the movement of European art historians to Britain in the past has shaped the field of art history? Finally, looking at the present, has Brexit instigated artists, writers, curators, and historians to imagine alternative forms of association and practice which reimagine or cast aside national frameworks? Response by Jenny Gaschke, Curator of European art pre-1900, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery British Art Remains European art "Si dans le contexte du Brexit, cette saison britannique trouve un écho particulier, elle n'en réaffirme pas moins avec force les liens indéfectibles tissés à travers l'histoire entre l'Angleterre et l'Aquitaine, restée toujours très anglophile". 10 With these words, the Mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, introduces the sumptuous exhibition catalogue Absolutely Bizarre! Les drôles d'histoires de l'Ecole de Bristol (1800-1840). The exhibition, which opened on 10 June 2021 and showcases eighty works by nineteenth-century artists including Francis Danby, Edward Bird, and Rolinda Sharples, has taken nearly five years to prepare (Fig. 2). It is a collaboration between the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, the Louvre, Paris, and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, with additional loans from the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath and Tate. Work on this international project started just a few months after the Brexit referendum and successfully bridged the transition period and the final departure of the UK from the EU.