Art In Britain Research Articles

Media, Art and Politics: The Centenary of the First World War in Britain

Peter Goodwin takes a critical look at how the media and arts in Britain have responded to the centenary of the First World War. He asks what this tells us about popular consciousness and the mechanisms of bourgeois ideology in Britain in the second decade of the 21st century.This contribution is a podcast of a Communication and Media Researach Institute (CAMRI) seminar that took place on January 21, 2015, at the University of Westminster.

Nicholas Alfrey, Joy Sleeman and Ben Tufnell, Uncommon Ground. Land Art in Britain,

Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979 is the catalogue of the eponymous travelling exhibition organised by the Arts Council Collection, originally held at Southampton City Art Gallery in May-August 2013 and curated by Nicholas Alfrey, Joy Sleeman and Ben Tufnell. It is a relatively modest 128—page but extremely well—conceived and richly illustrated sourcebook. The exhibiting artists are Roger Ackling, Keith Arnatt, Boyle Family, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Tony Cragg, Jan Dibbets, Barry Fl...

The Usefulness of a Critical Discourse Analysis Approach to the Study of Newspaper Reviews of Contemporary African Art in Britain

This paper discusses how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be applied to the study of newspaper reviews of contemporary African art in Britain. CDA is an approach that has developed over the past decades, and it is usually employed in an interdisciplinary setting to interpret “language use” (in its broadest sense). One of its characteristics is that it goes against the notion that research is “objective,” but instead dependent on the context in which it is conducted. An important purpose of CDA is to investigate and reveal power relations that are otherwise difficult to detect, and herein lies the critical stance of the approach. Not generally thought of as significant from a wider social or political point of view, the art review can be a powerful means of “innocent” communication, and the British art critic is thus seen as part of a larger structure that produces (and re-produces) knowledge about African culture in the UK. The article does not propose a meticulous methodological framework but shows that CDA, due to its flexibility and heterogeneity, may function as a useful approach when studying newspaper reviews of contemporary African art in Britain.

New Media Art, Participation, Social Engagement and Public Funding

This article investigates the current condition of new media art in Britain, examining how cuts to arts funding have affected the art form’s infrastructure and capacity for survival and growth. It considers media art in relation to other contemporary art practices, particularly in relation to its inherent capacity for enhanced and sustained user participation, and asks why it is that, though government agendas favour participatory art as ‘socially useful’, media art appears to have been hit harder than other art forms. The article puts forward four reasons that could explain this paradox, and argues the importance of the survival of new media art, not as isolated practices invited to exist within mainstream contexts, but as a distinct art form.

‘An Art of Our Own’: State Patronage of the Visual Arts in Wales, 1945–1967

The formation of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) in 1945 marked the introduction of official state patronage for the arts in Britain. But while research has focused on ACGB's contribution to English cultural life, little has been written about its influence throughout the rest of Great Britain. This paper addresses this gap by examining ACGB's Welsh Committee's contribution to the visual arts in post-war Wales. It argues the Welsh Committee not only helped develop greater ‘knowledge, practice and interest’ in contemporary Welsh art, but also strengthened Welsh national identity, thereby illustrating the ‘plurinational’ character of British cultural policy.

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

Modernizing the Mikado: Japan, Japanism and the Limitations of the Avant-garde

On the Ways of Viewing Spanish Art

Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1920. Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, edited by Nigel Glendinning and Hilary Macartney, Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010, i–xx + 307pp., 17 col. and 56 b. & w. illus., £50.00

Frederick Antal and Peter Peri: Art, Scholarship and Social Purpose

Tracing the lives of two Hungarian émigrés, the art historian Frederick Antal (1887–1954) and the artist Peter Peri (1899–1967), this article explores their attempts to place the visual arts at the centre of their political beliefs. Both men participated in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, after which they each settled in Germany. Antal edited the journal Kritische Berichte in Berlin while undertaking research on Italian Renaissance painting. Péri was a sculptor and printmaker associated with the Activists and other avant-garde groups in Central Europe. On the accession to power of the Nazi party in 1933, both men fled to England where they pursued their work in a different environment with very different institutional patterns. Antal became the leading practitioner of the social history of art in Britain, and a formative influence on Anthony Blunt and John Pope-Hennessy. Péri, who was already turning away from abstraction in art, revised his practice in England to develop a Realist manner employing industrial materials. This article does not attempt to analyse the forces that shaped their development. Instead, it presents a narrative of their careers that may serve to question the perceived major tendencies in European art and culture and their reception in Britain during the 1930s. Towards the end of their lives, the two figures were linked through their separate influence on the young John Berger. The character of Janos Lavin in Berger's first novel (A Painter of our Time, 1958) is a composite of the two Hungarians: a veiled tribute to both figures, whom Berger acknowledged as the inspiration behind his initial ideas on art and society.

Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1920. Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort

This exceptionally well produced volume appears as a kind of posthumous Festschrift for Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, long-time curator of the Warburg Institute’s photographic collection and for many decades until her death in 2006 Britain’s most admired scholar of Spanish art. The book’s editors and principal authors, who pay handsome tributes to Harris Frankfort as both a researcher and a generous mentor, have themselves been collecting material relating to the knowledge of Spanish art in Britain for a good many years. The extraordinary degree of detail and precision they have achieved in this specialist field is the most remarkable thing about this publication which also valuably reprints three of Harris Frankfort’s own papers relevant to their theme. Of the fifteen new essays published here, Nigel Glendinning has contributed no fewer than eight, and his co-editor Hilary Macartney four. The remaining contributions come from Sarah Symmons (on responses to Spanish art from British women), Jeremy Roe (a number-crunching piece on the importation to Britain of Spanish pictures) and Marjorie Trusted (principally devoted to museum collecting).

Empire to nation: art, history and the visualization of maritime Britain, 1768-1829

'Empire to Nation' offers a new consideration of the image of the sea in British visual culture during a critical period for both the rise of the visual arts in Britain and the expansion of the nation's imperial power. It argues that maritime imagery was central to cultivating a sense of nationhood in relation to rapidly expanding geographical knowledge and burgeoning imperial ambition. At the same time, the growth of the maritime empire presented new opportunities for artistic enterprise. Taking as its starting point the year 1768, which marks the foundation of the Royal Academy and the launch of Captain Cook's first circumnavigation, it asserts that this was not just an interesting coincidence but symptomatic of the relationship between art and empire. This relationship was officially sanctioned in the establishment of the Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital and the installation there of J. M. W. Turner's great 'Battle of Trafalgar' in 1829, the year that closes this study. Between these two poles, the book traces a changing historical discourse that informed visual representation of maritime subjects.

Monitor: The Creation of the Television Arts Documentary

Monitor (BBC, 1958–65), a series which showcased the arts and their creators and was presented by Huw Wheldon, is now remembered as the flagship of late 1950s and early 1960s arts documentary television broadcasting. In Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain, John Walker describes Monitor as ‘a crucially important early series’ (1993: 45), arguing that ‘no one could deny its ground-breaking achievements’ (ibid.: 49). John Wyver, in Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain, called Monitor ‘among the BBC’s most celebrated contributions to “good broadcasting’’ ’ (2007: 27). In the edited collection Experimental British Television, Jamie Sexton refers to Monitor as the ‘BBC’s critically acclaimed arts series’ (Mulvey and Sexton 2007: 90), while Kay Dickinson, in the same collection, refers to it as a ‘well respected fortnightly Sunday arts magazine programme’, pointing out that this was where Ken Russell first made his name (ibid.: 70). Indeed the series is now most admired for Russell’s innovative composer biographies, the highlight of which is generally accepted to be his film on Elgar (BBC, 11 November 1962). Indeed, this film was chosen to mark the hundredth edition of the programme.

Communities, audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the showcasing of South Asian art

The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.

John Myerscough, The economic importance of the arts in Britain

"John Myerscough, The economic importance of the arts in Britain ." International Journal of Cultural Policy, 16(1), pp. 74–75

In Search of Hybridity: Inculturation, Interculturation and Transculturation in Contemporary Religious Art in Britain

AbstractThis essay explores contemporary religious art in Britain through the lens of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. While he leaves it rather ‘ambivalent’, this essay suggests that in visual representations, various forms of hybridity can be distinguished: inculturation, interculturation and transculturation. These three types, hijacked from religious dialogue discourses, show a variety of power relations in representation and context; while incultural elements are based on a dominant versus subordinate role, intercultural ones form a dialogue; both expand iconographic vocabularies. Transcultural symbols refer to those which are existing parts of a variety of iconographies; these thus ‘merge’ visually different cultural heritages; their interpretation is, in the true sense of Bhabha, hybrid. The essay concludes by referring to the limits of transcultural symbols, which accept losses, blurs and shifts. The entire analysis is based on Hindu and Christian iconographies exploited by Caroline Mackenzie in her four wooden panels located for the Catholic Church in St. Helen in Caerphilly (Wales), commissioned in 1999.

Le premier art rupestre paléolithique du Royaume-Uni, les gravures de Creswell Crags (Derbyshire)

On April 14, 2003, I made the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. With Paul G. Bahn, we had always thought that it was very strange his absence. Actually, Church Hole is a station of great importance with a total (still provisional) of 215 figures perfectly identified, with a series of layouts like the presence of light low-reliefs or champlevé, the use of natural forms with some engraved elements, we can find items that are not very usual like dogs, birds and the technical convention that we call “the creswellian eye” who individualizes this art, but it is also very close of the esthetics and of the continental style. Datings with Uranium/Thorium carried out with the University of Bristol locate all this figures between 12.800 and 12.630 B.P. clearly creswellian.

Queer courtesan (sixteen processes of beautification)1

Qasim Riza Shaheen looks at the genesis of his performance work in the context of the National Review of Live Art, the major forum for live and performance art in Britain. His review of themes and their expression in performance covers his work Queer Courtesan and Conversing with Angels, and discusses in detail the development of his latest piece, 9 Acts of Reciprocity and its relation to his previous body of work Khusra: Stains & Stencils.

The “Great Obelisk” and Other Schemes: The Origins and Limits of Nationalist Sentiment in the Making of the Albert Memorial

The Albert Memorial is one of the most important and ambitious undertakings in the history of public art in Britain. 1 Erected to the memory of one man—Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel (181...

Exhibiting children at risk: child art, international exhibitions and Save the Children Fund in Vienna, 1919–1923

In November 1920 an exhibition of children’s art by the pupils of Franz Cizek’s Viennese Juvenile Art Class opened to the public in London under the auspices of the Save the Children Fund and went on to tour internationally. Supported by a network of influential educators, artists, architects, political and humanitarian activists, the exhibition represents an early example of a practice that became increasingly common during the twentieth century: the exhibiting of the art of children at risk from the effects of war by activists and non‐governmental aid agencies as a mechanism for raising public awareness and financial support for issues of child protection. This article will tell two intertwined stories. The first, and the primary focus of the article, concerns the exhibition as a humanitarian intervention in child relief in post‐First World War Vienna. Second, it briefly tells the story of the exhibition as an educational intervention that influenced the teaching of art in Britain and the USA. The article evaluates the success, or otherwise, of the exhibition in meeting its organisers’ aims. In so doing it explores the network of activists that supported the exhibition, and some of the methodological issues involved in mapping, researching and understanding the web of connections among a group of individuals which at first sight appears very disparate. Finally, historians are increasingly engaging with different methodologies and underused historical sources to counter the silences surrounding children’s testimonies in the archive. By comparing the 1920 exhibition with later examples, which represent explicit attempts to exhibit the work of children in war as a means of disseminating their impressions of conflict and their hopes for future peace and international cooperation, the article hopes to make a contribution to this debate by demonstrating that exhibitions of children’s artwork are valuable sites for exploring the emergence of the child’s “voice” through art.

Dating Celtic Art: a Major Radiocarbon Dating Programme of Iron Age and Early Roman Metalwork in Britain

This paper presents the first substantial set of radiocarbon determinations for the later Iron Age decorated metalwork known as Celtic art in Britain. Hitherto this material has been dated relatively on the basis of changes in decoration and form, which were then linked to materials with some absolute date. The latter process has tended to give relatively late dates, as most of the material with a firm date stems from the last century BC or after. This has meant that British Celtic art appears to be rather later than that on the Continent. Our results provide some tentative support for an earlier dating for at least some British material, more closely aligned to that on the Continent. Stead, building on earlier work, has developed a series of Stages or Styles for the decorations of Celtic art and we shall review these here. We also look at particular classes of artefacts and forms of deposition in the light of our new results. We conclude by drawing some contrasts between Bronze Age metalwork and that of Celtic art, reflecting on how far assumptions of a sequential series of changes, key to all forms of typology, are useful in the case of the latter.

Framing the outdoors: landscape and land art in Britain, 1973–1977

With the formation of the first sculpture parks in Britain in the 1970s, the gallery roof was lifted off — in both the literal and figurative sense — so that works of art could be displayed and exp...