{"id":82140,"date":"1987-04-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1987-04-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/what-happened-to-british-art\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:47:38","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:47:38","slug":"what-happened-to-british-art","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/what-happened-to-british-art\/","title":{"rendered":"What happened to British art?"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>here is, I would guess, a sizable group of people who, despite their routine sympathy with internationally recognized (read Franco-American) achievements in twentieth-century art, find the thought of a large British retrospective something less than exciting. As with the Whitney Biennials, a vaguely purgatorial aura might be said to surround the prospect. Both types of exhibitions provide \u201copportunities\u201d not to be missed, yet they do this without promising the stuff of deep aesthetic challenge. In fact, they almost guarantee the very opposite, which is to say a deployment of trends and some insignificant degree of titillation, the latter felt most keenly in contexts having nothing to do with art.<\/p>\n

The current British twentieth-century retrospective at the Royal Academy in London\u2014which is supplemented by a rather meek show entitled \u201cSalon de refus\u00e9s\u201d at the nearby Albemarle Gallery\u2014does comparatively little to improve the image of modern British painting and sculpture.<\/a>[1]<\/a> Rather than undertake much in the way of revision, the retrospective prefers instead to provide a comprehensive overview of artists and movements that are recognized by nonspecialists but not normally available for examination in depth.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there are some biases of omission and some rather weird internal emphases in the show, expressed in what appear to be overt acts of over- or under-representation. For example, the two periods of internationalism (read abstraction), in the 19 30s and 1960s, are deliberately neglected, which marks the nearest thing in the exhibition to a modified perspective on modern British work, and the modification is comparatively subtle. The Albemarle show rectifies the 1930s problem up to a point, but nothing helps the 1960s one. Apparently with the passage of time the French-inspired work of the Nicholson-Hepworth circle has become less of a threat to native artistic pride than the American incursions initiated by Patrick Heron in the mid-1950s. Whatever the case, the Royal Academy exhibition is about as \u201cBritish\u201d as it can be without being historically absurd. This means that it stresses representational work or abstract work that seems to engage notions of \u201cmeaning\u201d in some readily definable way. In other words, \u201cart for art\u2019s sake\u201d has a rough time in the Royal Academy show, but then again it\u2019s been having a rough time nearly everywhere in recent years, and the signpost is always the same: American painting of the 1962-67 period is suppressed.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case, the Royal Academy exhibition is about as \u201cBritish\u201d as it can be without being historically absurd.<\/p>\n

This suppression is arguably less problematic in a British retrospective than it might be in other contexts\u2014the reason being that British painters, despite their enthusiasms, never managed to make much of importance from American examples. They understood Mir\u00f3 and Mondrian in the 1930s far better than they understood Louis, Noland, and Olitski in the early 1960s, largely, one suspects, because color was not so frontal an issue in the earlier period, while clear \u201cplastic relationships\u201d were. If Roger Fry accomplished nothing else for British art, he at least set up the critical conditions for intelligent British contributions to 1930s cubo-surrealism. The strongest and most self-knowing work at both the Royal Academy and the Albemarle Gallery represents this contribution\u2014sometimes, as in Ceri Richard\u2019s partly painted wood relief, Mother and Child<\/em> (1938), brilliantly. This piece (which is at the Albemarle Gallery) is about as compelling an object as one can find from 1938 anywhere.<\/p>\n

But masterpieces are not what a modern British retrospective is about. There are very few works from any period in the century that belong in museums or collections outside Britain. This is something the Royal Academy exhibition very nearly flaunts, making \u201cinsularity\u201d a point of satisfaction rather than embarrassment. A stubborn, complacent, inward-looking sense of opposition to any other culture is evident throughout this exhibition. Could it be otherwise? Probably not, for to probe the depths of modern British work (some sculpture excluded, of course) is to discover a peculiarly self-contained commodity which one cannot calibrate aesthetically\u2014or in any other reliable way\u2014with modern international developments at large. For better or worse, modern British an remains British first and modern second. The Royal Academy show confirms our sense that what used to be called the \u201cBritish School\u201d has survived the now nearly complete twentieth century as an aesthetic identity largely, if not absolutely, separate from all other \u201cschools.\u201d The work shown together at the Royal Academy seems comfortable there, as it would be nowhere else.<\/p>\n

N<\/span>ot surprisingly, the notion of a \u201cBritish School\u201d in the modern period was the subject of considerable discussion just after the turn of the century, when the first intellectually serious histories of modern art were being written. Of the important scholar\/ critics involved, two were Continental, Ca-mille Mauclair and Julius Meier-Graefe, and two were British, J. E. Phythian and D. S. MacColl. The British contribution to the early histories came about not so much because of the routine participation of British art in the early modern movement, but because of the tension between what constituted \u201cthe modern\u201d in England and elsewhere. MacColl, following in the critical footsteps of R. A. M. Stevenson, was an advocate of the contemporary supremacy of Impressionist art. Phythian, on the other hand, although as responsive as MacColl to the pictorial achievement of nineteenth-century France, posited a kind of separate-but-equal role for the modern French and English schools. In his Fifty Years of Modern Painting<\/em>, Phythian persistently, almost schizophrenically, develops this view, discussing in completely incompatible terms the achievements of the two schools. In Phythian\u2019s book, what separates them is the importance given to the treatment of subject, or to purely aesthetic manipulation. While clearly more at ease with French than English work, Phythian planted a critical suggestion that would grow like a weed in British soil: the existence of two \u201cmoderns\u201d rather than a single one primarily operative in France. By implication Britain was charged with the dignified role of stabilizing modernism by refusing to give up a national commitment to modern values that worked in opposition to those maintained on the Continent.<\/p>\n

Writing in 1903, Meier-Graefe seems almost to have had a premonition of Phythian\u2019s position. A considerable number of pages in his Entwicklungsgeschichte<\/em> (\u201cHistorical Developments\u201d) are devoted to demolishing any and all claims on behalf of Britain\u2019s role in modern art. While yielding eloquently to the singular importance of what he considers Constable\u2019s wholly independent achievement, Meier-Graefe is merciless toward the unintelligent \u201cplagiarisms\u201d of Reynolds and Turner. In Meier-Graefe\u2019s mind their plagiarisms combined with the \u201canti-art\u201d ignorance of the Pre-Raphaelites to produce a \u201cschool\u201d or \u201ctradition\u201d marked only by persistent aesthetic disaster with no claim to a positive role in developing modernism. Only to Burne-Jones did he pay a grudging compliment, saying that he \u201calways contrives to make a picture of some sort. His way though trite is true.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most formidable barrier to Meier-Graefe\u2019s attack was Whistler\u2019s art.<\/p>\n

The most formidable barrier to Meier-Graefe\u2019s attack was Whistler\u2019s art. In what he perceived as the thinness of pictorial ambition and accomplishment in Whistler, Meier-Graefe found the justification for arguing that as a \u201cpillar\u201d Whistler was just too weak for anything of importance to be rested upon him. In other words, nothing could reliably proceed from Whistler. The material concealment, the indirectness of mood, the \u201ctailoring\u201d of Whistler\u2019s paintings disqualified him from being an alternative modern point of origin to Meier-Graefe\u2019s beloved Manet. Whistler was ultimately a modern \u201cposeur\u201d for Meier-Graefe and \u201cfundamentally an unfrocked Pre-Raphaelite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taken in its historical context, Meier-Graefe\u2019s critical demolition of British modern art constitutes what was very likely intended as a friendly warning to a national culture he by no means disrespected across the board. Like his friend, the architectural theorist Muthesius, he was at least as much an Anglophile as a Francophile, yet in matters of modern pictorial art there was only France. Meier-Graefe was trying to convince the English no less than his native Germans of this idea, lest they fall prey on one side to the aesthetic Antichrists of Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, or to B\u00f6cklin on the other.<\/p>\n

Meier-Graefe\u2019s study, which was translated into English in 1908 (the same year Phythian\u2019s book was published), complemented the earlier pro-French \u201chistory\u201d of MacColl. Together the two histories provided the basic ideological substance of Roger Fry\u2019s monumental mission of bringing the message of French modernist art to Britain. C\u00e9zanne, Renoir, and, to a slightly lesser degree, Matisse became the focus of Fry\u2019s brilliantly argued critical theory, which featured the primacy of \u201cplastic\u201d relationships and maintained that the deepest aesthetic emotion derives from the comprehension of these relationships. For three decades Fry (together with Clive Bell) spoke eloquently to the British. Some artists listened immediately, like Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in the Teens, and others, like the members of the Nicholson circle, listened again in the 1930s. But the importance of French art to the majority of twentieth-century British artists was never secure. Most were affected, but few for very long.<\/p>\n

Instead, what have come to be characteristic \u201cBritish School\u201d attitudes filtered into the new century from Whistler, via Sickert in particular. They produced a lasting and cumulative effect that is amply documented by the Royal Academy exhibition. Sickert\u2019s circle\u2014including Gilman, Gore, and, to a lesser degree, Smith\u2014flirted for a time with late Impressionist and Post-Impressionist color without ever becoming comfortable with it. In their work, color relationships are frequently moody in the generic sense (rather than being decorative-plastic in the best French sense). Similarly, paint texture was for the Sickert circle an increasingly difficult problem the more distant it got from Whistler\u2019s impersonal finesse. Never do color and paint texture cooperate reliably. Only in the mild-mannered efforts of Gwen John or Lawrence Gowing in the Twenties and Thirties does anything like \u201cmaterial\u201d color develop.<\/p>\n

In Britain, it seems, from the last third of the nineteenth century onward, color was allowed to go in directions other than painting. First, color and ornament cavorted in the theoretical writings of Owen Jones. Then it was color and music, deployed by keyboard-driven colored light projections in the performance and theory of Rimington and then Klein. After its optical and ethical exhaustion in the hands of the first generation of Pre-Raphaelites, color seems never to have settled back into painting. So it was not destined to play a reliable role in twentieth-century British art, except in the sculpture of Anthony Caro, which in the Royal Academy show stands out as a brilliant, almost Michelangelesque, exception to this rule.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>ithout color and without physically responsive surfaces, what have twentieth-century British artists routinely had to work with? Essentially, they have had mood-evocative tonal refinement deriving, as Robert Rosenblum rightly notes in his catalogue essay, from Whistler, and they have had the photograph, a force already as active in Whistler\u2019s work as the much more overt influences of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese printmakers. At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems that something like \u201cphoto-mania\u201d constitutes the unifying base for British art in this century. A reliance on the narrative, decorative, and pictorial characteristics of the photograph\u2014as both a point of origin and a means of control-seems to echo over the vast range of superficially disparate work shown in the Royal Academy\u2019s exhibition.<\/p>\n

It is remarkable to read through the text of the exhibition catalogue with an eye to the number of times and the variety of ways that photography\u2014as a working tool or as an image reference\u2014is discussed. From Sickert to Bacon, from Nash and Spencer to Gilbert and George, the photograph appears as a necessary part of the discussion of both form and content. For much of the work of the Sixties and Seventies\u2014that of Hamilton, Blake, Freud, and Kitaj\u2014the photograph functions as a literal motif. For the work of the British Surrealists\u2014that of Burra and Wadsworth\u2014the notion of the \u201cdream photograph\u201d is courted even more persistently than it was by Magritte or Tanguy. Moore\u2019s Shelter Drawings<\/em> seem photographic in both their compositional and reportorial character. His sculpture, with its blandly rolling surfaces, recalls monumentalized photographic half-tones in three dimensions.<\/p>\n

The photograph effectively distances twentieth-century British art either from nature or from any painting- or sculpture-based processes of image development. The photograph as a complex graphic system, or as a register of smoothly variable half-tone, or as a provocative, pre-visualized condition of narrative, seems to constitute the \u201cdeep structure\u201d of modern British pictorial sensibility. Its ability to suggest form and imagery simultaneously strikes some kind of basic chord with still active \u201cBritish School\u201d notions of what art ought to be about. A dedication to the photograph, whether overt or covert, has effectively kept the national seal on British art, providing it with an insulation against all international currents which do not in some fashion share that dedication. Not surprisingly, the high point of British influence in international developments came in the late 1960s, when pictorial procedures keyed to reproductive processes were the rage everywhere.<\/p>\n

Why is the photograph so important to modern British art?<\/p>\n

Why is the photograph so important to modern British art? The simple answer is that the photograph is a readily available two-dimensional translation of whatever a camera can see (which is almost anything). Tensely sculptural in half-tone, and massively flat in graphic resolution, the photograph speaks to two traditional media in many different ways. Yet the photograph is never just abstract. It is both a thing in itself and <\/em>a conduit to the part of optical and material (and psychological) reality that \u201csponsors\u201d it. By definition the photograph has a subject-object balance, which British artists at least seem endlessly to enjoy unbalancing and rebalancing as they introduce the photograph directly or indirectly into the complex matrix of a less clearly defined medium like painting or sculpture.<\/p>\n

It is doubtful that modern British art would have cast its lot with photography so confidently had not photography performed so brilliantly in British hands in the early modern period. The progeny of Cameron and Evans gave about as strong an account of the pictorial and the sculptural potential of photography as anyone did anywhere in the world during the same historical period. Both the aesthetic and semiotic range of black-and-white photography emerged early on and with great force in England. One result has been that \u201ctributes\u201d are constantly paid to photography by other historically less secure media. The surest guarantee of Britishness in this century\u2019s art resides, it seems, in this act of \u201ctribute.\u201d More than any other medium practiced in Britain, photography has insisted on its material relevance to all forms of inquiry\u2014aesthetic and otherwise\u2014with the greatest confidence, and it possesses a clear body of evidence to back up its claims. Pre-Raphaelite painting established the condition necessary for British photography to proceed, but the child quickly excelled the parent to the point of effectively re-fathering the older medium. Rather like music in its effect on modern German art, photography in Britain after a certain point dictated the pace, character, and feeling of British art as a whole.<\/p>\n

A photo-dominated artistic situation similar to the British one might well have emerged in America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, but it did not. Most of the credit for preventing such a photographic dominance must go to Alfred Stieglitz, who believed so deeply in his medium that he wanted nothing more for it (and nothing less) than a share in the rich historical and contemporary texture of the traditionally major media of painting and sculpture. What Stieglitz did was to make photography \u201caccompany\u201d the major media from an interested but respectful distance; he hoped thereby to guarantee the aesthetic authenticity of the practices and effects of this most junior member of the high arts. Stieglitz was primarily interested in advancing photography as a particular form of artistic enterprise, related to, yet different from, all others. Relationships and differences were what Stieglitz and his circle rightly tried to sort out. It never occurred to them to approach what they did as a potentially self-sufficient substitute for the still vital activity of American and Continental painting and sculpture. British photography developed without<\/em> any sense of extra-media vitality, and it managed ultimately through its own considerable achievements to constitute the source for whatever aesthetic vitality might develop in the plastic arts in Britain.<\/p>\n

Arguably, this vitality has begun to wear pretty thin in modern British art. One comes away from the Royal Academy show feeling that Dorian\u2019s portrait has not only become grey with age but has very nearly disappeared.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n
  1. <\/a>\u201cBritish Art in the Twentieth Century: the Modern Movement\u201d is on view at the Royal Academy of Art in London through April 15. From there it travels to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. The exhibition\u2019s organizer is Susan Compton, assisted by Dr. Richard Cork, Norman Rosenthal, Dawn Ades, et al. The catalogue, with an introductory essay by Frederick Gore, has been published by Prestel (460 pages, $60). \u201cSalon des refuses\u201d was on display at the Albemarle Gallery in London from January 19 to March 13. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font> <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On \u201cBritish Art in the Twentieth Century\u201d at the Royal Academy of Art.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1442,"featured_media":130602,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[563],"issue":[3238],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":16,"value_formatted":16,"value":"16","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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