Modernist Period

When art critic Roger Fry organized the London exhibit Monet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910, paintings by Cézanne, van Gogh, and Seurat were shown in Britain for the first time. British artists, notably Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (sister to author Virginia Woolf), quickly experimented with this new modern style of painting, adapting to local, and often very personal, subject matter. Walter Sickert also worked in his own variant of impressionism at this time, painting dark scenes of urban life in London, including prostitutes and music halls.

In 1914, Wyndham Lewis published the first issue of Blast, a manifesto that called for a new modern English art. This art, which came to be known as vorticism, was inspired by the futurist writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who celebrated modernity, movement, speed, technology, and industry (see futurism). With the overwhelming devastation of World War I (much of which was caused by advances in technology), however, vorticist art disappeared.

Between the world wars, much of British art practice turned abstract (see abstract art). Ben Nicholson painted abstract pictures in sparse terms indebted to cubism. Nicholson's wife, Barbara Hepworth, created abstract sculptures that strove to discover beauty in natural forms and materials. Other artists in the 1930s joined the ranks of European artists practicing surrealism. Poet and collage artist Roland Penrose is responsible for bringing surrealism to Britain, forming the British Surrealist Group in 1935 and organizing a series of exhibitions in London in the years 193638 in collaboration with Max Ernst and Salvadore Dalí. Meanwhile, Henry Moore adopted surrealist motifs, making them part of his own unique anthropomorphic sculptural language. A significant exception to the dominance of interwar abstraction was the recluse Stanley Spencer, who evolved an idiosyncratic realism, painting religious and morality tales using contemporary figures and landscapes.

The devastation of World War II is measured in the works of several artists, most notably Francis Bacon, whose nightmarish contorted figures call forth a world haunted by the Holocaust and the atom bomb. Through Bacon, together with a number of other artists including Lucian Freud a figurative style of painting emerged in Britain that was subsequently termed the "School of London." The immediate postwar years were equally characterized by dramatic changes in public life as Clement Attlee's Labour government initiated a campaign of rapid rebuilding and established a welfare state that offered public housing and national health care. The utopian mood of these years is reflected, on the one hand, in the modernist-style housing blocks built throughout London by such architects as Ernö Goldfinger, and, on the other hand, by the neo-romantic revivalism of Sir Basil Spence. Goldfinger, inspired by Le Corbusier and Soviet architecture, specialized in heavy concrete buildings in which the edifice's structural frame was visible on its face. Spence's architectural masterpieces include Coventry Cathedral (completed 1961), built on the ruins of the bombed-out medieval structure, and Sussex University (completed 1961), which consists of a series of interlocking monastic spaces and which exemplifies the visionary and utopian dimension of British architecture during reconstruction.

Also in the 1950s, the "Independent Group" emerged as a casual, intellectual think tank that met regularly to discuss the mass media, technology, and popular culture. Among the group members were artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as the architect-partners Alison and Peter Smithson. Their activity resulted in a number of exhibitions, culminating in the 1956 show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery called This Is Tomorrow, which featured collages formed from American magazine advertisements. This group is widely viewed as anticipating pop art. Later in the 1950s, pop artists such as David Hockney emerged from London's Royal College of Art. Their art came to reflect the passage from the postwar poverty of the 1950s to the prosperity of "Swinging London" in the 1960s.

Contemporary Period

The high modernism associated with New York critic Clement Greenberg had arrived in Britain by the mid-1960s and was visible in the sculpture of Anthony Caro, who was part of the "New Generation." These sculptors were concerned with issues of balance and composition in their brightly colored abstract sculptures. A strong sculptural tradition emerged in Britain, which was adapted by Richard Long (who thought of nature walks as a form of sculpture). As early as 1969, however, the tradition began to be challenged. The artists Gilbert and George sought to redefine the art form in performance works such as Singing Sculpture (multiple performances, 196991), in which they simply covered themselves with metallic paint, stood upon a platform, sang a song, and declared their own bodies sculpture. Similarly, a generation of artists who created sculpture from material gleaned from store shelves and the rubbish heaps notably Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon broke free from traditional definitions of the art form.

In architecture, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster were starting to produce high-profile designs with highly adaptable, open spaces at their core. Their innovative use of prefabricated materials allowed for quick construction and environmentally efficient design.

By the time of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's resignation in 1993, British society had changed dramatically, with business and consumer culture at the center of modern life. From this milieu emerged a group of artists known for their self-promotion, publicity stunts, and art-market successes. Loosely associated with Goldsmiths College in London, these "Young British Artists" gained the patronage of advertising mogul Charles Saatchi and created deliberately provocative art, exemplified by Damien Hirst's sliced animal corpses and the Chapman Brothers' graphically sexual plastic sculptures. The group reached the height of its fame with the controversial exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997 and the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

In 2000 the Tate Modern was opened as a new home for the national modern and contemporary art collection; it is located in an industrial building that was renovated by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron. By the first years of the 21st century, the British art world, with London as its center, was prospering and producing a great number of artists of international renown, including Anish Kapoor and Yinka Shonibare, whose work emphasizes the entanglement of British culture and numerous other cultures, in an increasingly globalized world.

Michael Kitson

Reviewed by Eric M. Stryker and John J. Curley

Bibliography:

Beattie, Susan, The New Sculpture (1983).

Bindman, David, ed., The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of British Art (1985).

Born, Richard A., et al., From Blast to Pop: Aspects of Modern British Art, 1915- 1965 (1997).

Collings, Matthew, Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop (1998).

Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600- 1840, 3d ed. (1995).

Compton, Susan, and Rosenthal, Norman, eds., British Art in the 20th Century (1987).

Durant, David N., The Handbook of British Architectural Styles (1992; repr. 2001).

Farr, Dennis, English Art: 1870 1940 (1984).

Ford, Boris, ed., Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain, 9 vols. (1988).

Garlake, Margaret, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (1998).

Gaunt, William, English Painting: A Concise History (1964; repr. 1985).

Harrison, Martin, Transition: The London Art Scene in the Fifties (2002).

Jacob, Mary Jane, et al., A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture since 1965 (1987).

Kent, Sarah, Shark-Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s (1994).

Kroeber, Karl, British Romantic Art (1986).

Lambert, Margaret, and Marx, Enid, English Popular Art, new ed. (1990).

Lubbock, Jules, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 15501960 (1995).

McConkey, Kenneth, and Robins, Anna G., Impressionism in Britain (1995).

Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Englishness of English Art (1955; repr. 2003).

Piper, David, ed., The Genius of British Painting (1975).

Pragnell, Hubert, Britain: A Guide to Architectural Styles from 1066 to the Present Day, 2d ed. (2000).

Reynolds, Graham, British Portrait Miniatures (1998), English Watercolors, rev. ed. (1990), and Victorian Painting, rev. ed. (1987).

Saatchi Collection, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (1997).

Spalding, Frances, British Art since 1900 (1986).

Stallabrass, Julian, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (1999).

Summerson, John, Architecture in Britain 1530 1830, 9th ed. (1993).

Tickner, Lisa, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (2000).

Warner, Malcolm, et al., The Victorians: British Painting, 1837 1901 (1997).

Waterhouse, Ellis K., Painting in Britain: 1530 1790, 5th ed. (1993).

Watkin, David, English Architecture: A Concise History, rev. ed. (2001).

Whinney, Margaret, English Sculpture: 1720 1830 (1971).

Worsley, Giles, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age (1995).