British Art in the Cultural Field, 1939–69

Informed by new research, this rich collection of essays presents a fresh and thought provoking assessment of British Art in the Cultural Field, 1939 69. Locating influential artists, movements, institutions, and works in a changing cultural landscape, international art historians explore many different aspects of a central period in British art history. Paul Nash, in his article Going Modern and Being British of 1932, famously sought to reconcile these two seemingly conflicting identities. The post–war cultural scene saw a decisive reconfiguration of Britishness and modernity , following austerity, decolonisation and the rise of American influence. At the same time, British art became part of an increasingly transnational economy. Between 1939 and 1969, modernism , as it was understood in the twenties and thirties, gave way at some disputed moment in the 1960s to late or post modernism. Addressing the political economy of art at one end of the scale, and offering closely attentive readings of individual works at the other, these thought–provoking essays shed new light on British painting, sculpture, architecture and the institutions of the period from Schwitters to Bacon, Hamilton, the Independent Group, and Pop Art. Together, they make a major contribution to the latest thinking in the field for students, scholars and collectors of British twentieth–century art.

6 Notes on Contributors

8 Chapter 1 Being British and Going Somewhere
Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett

18 Chapter 2 The morrow we left behind : Landscape and the Rethinking of Modernism, 1939 53
Chris Stephens

36 Chapter 3 Sculpture for the Hand: Herbert Read in the Studio of Kurt Schwitters
Megan R. Luke

54 Chapter 4 Science, Art and Landscape in the Nuclear Age
Catherine Jolivette

72 Chapter 5 Photography into Building in Post–war Architecture: The Smithsons and James Stirling
Claire Zimmerman

90 Chapter 6 Realism, Brutalism, Pop
Alex Potts

116 Chapter 7 The Independent Group s Anthropology of Ourselves
Catherine Spencer

138 Chapter 8 Dada s Mama: Richard Hamilton s Queer Pop
Jonathan D. Katz

156 Chapter 9 Francis Bacon: Painting after Photography
Martin Hammer

174 Chapter 10 Vulgar Pictures: Bacon, de Kooning, and the Figure under Abstraction
Andrew R. Lee

196 Chapter 11 Export Britain : Pop Art, Mass Culture and the Export Drive
Lisa Tickner

222 Chapter 12 Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 54 64 Revisited
Andrew Stephenson

244 Chapter 13 Varieties of Belatedness and Provincialism: Decolonization and British Pop
Leon Wainwright

265 Index

Lisa Tickner is Professor Emerita of Art History at Middlesex University and Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she teaches an MA on Modernism in Britain, 1890 1970 . She is the author of four books, the co–editor of four more, and has published widely on topics in nineteenth– and twentieth–century British art history. Her publications include: Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution (2008); Dante Gabriel Rossetti (2003); Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (2000); and The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907 1914 (1988). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Trustee of the Art Fund.

David Peters Corbett is Professor of Art History and American Studies, and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. Editor of the journal Art History (2007–12), he has written widely on English and American art between 1850 and 1950 and is the author of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848 1914 (2004); The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880 1940 (2002); Walter Sickert (2001); and The Modernity of English Art, 1914–1930 (1997).