The Fifties: Art from The British Council Collection

 

An exhibition of this size and scope can make no claims to provide a definitive account of British painting in the Fifties. Even so, it provides an illuminating and fascinating glimpse, however arbitrary, of the variety and quality of paintings made in England in a period that is now far enough away for us to see it with some historical perspective. It reveals a remarkable spectrum of practice, ranging from programmatic constructivisms, through varieties of abstraction more or less referential to perceived phenomena and natural objects, to a distinctive documentary realism. In what artists wrote and said at the time we discover corresponding divergencies of theory, or, to be more precise, widely varying thoughts about their practice. For British artists tend to the particular rather than to the general in their statements about art, and even when they align themselves with more rigorously theoretical movements in European art (constructivism, realism or surrealism, for examples) their commitment is more often than not compromised by an individualistic pragmatism, their art and utterance alike inflected by the metaphorical and the poetic.

 

If the best British art in this century, of whatever persuasion, can be said to have had an overriding characteristic, it is in its tendency towards an empirical eclecticism, as against that utopian striving for the pure and absolute that animated, in different ways, the major European and American modernisms. The obstinate individualism of British artists makes for stylistic diversity and distinctively personal emphases of expression even amongst artists with broadly sympathetic aims or affinities of interest. British efforts to create stylistic 'schools' or unified 'groups' have rarely lasted long, or gone beyond loose associations based as much upon friendship and academic or geographical proximity as on aesthetic policy or political ideology. Even so, looking back now it is possible to discern cross-currents and correspondences sufficient to indicate that British painting in the Fifties, whilst maintaining its idiosyncratic impurities of intention, successfully re-negotiated crucial links to contemporary painting on the continent, especially in its non-figurative manifestations.

In the immediate context, two cases are especially notable;

William Gear’s close links with Cobra between 1948-51; and Roger Hilton’s close association with Constant Nieuwenhuys which brought him to Amsterdam and first-hand contact with Mondrian’s paintings in 1953, and which effected a dramatic development in his work at that time.

Mel Gooding

The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Mel Gooding, entries and artists’ biographies by Tamsyn Woollcoombe and contemporary portrait photographs by Roger Mayne. ISBN 0 86355 391 5

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Documentary

    The term ‘Documentary’ was not coined until the 1920s, and then used by the British film-maker, John Grierson, to refer to moving pictures. It has a long and continuous history in British photography, reaching back to the invention of the medium. Many critics claimed that the documentary impulse, which can perhaps be best defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world, is inherent in the medium itself. It was this view which came to be known as the realist paradigm - the belief that a photograph represents a ‘slice of reality’ easily understood by the viewer. This belief governed understanding of photography from the moment of its invention in the era of positivism in the 19th Century, until it was itself subject to interrogation in the 1980s.

    Early British practitioners included John Thomson whose visual essay Street Life in London (1876) documented the life of the London poor, and Hill and Adamson who portrayed, in the mid 1840s, the customs and way of life of the fisher folk of Newhaven near Edinburgh. In the early 20th century, following the emergence of documentary film-making and Mass Observation (a study undertaken in the North of England by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson), this new aesthetic found its most persuasive outlet in the mass circulation weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life. In time, however, pressure from advertisers combined with the restrictions of group journalism and curtailed the independence of creative photographers, with only exceptional individuals such as Bill Brandt able to survive as both a photojournalist and an independent photographer. His images of Britain’s class-ridden society along with his more experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a profound influence on a younger generation and established Brant as a major creative force in the development of modernism in Britain.

    Mass Observation was designed to emulate the radical achievements of the worker-photography movement which had arisen in Germany during the 1920s. It proved influential on the evolution of British documentary, especially on those photographers associated with the Side Gallery in Newcastle. The gallery fostered a regional, community-oriented form of documentary practice. Its philosophy was rooted firmly in the notion that an authentic document can only be generated by those familiar with the local community. Photographers associated with Side Gallery included Sirkka Konttinen, Isabella Jedrecyck, Graham Smith, Peter Fryer, Chris Killip and Julian Germain.

    It was, however, across the Atlantic that the more enduring legacy concerning the ethics and status of documentary was to be found in the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of the American rural poor during the Depression. One of its outstanding photographers was Walker Evans whose use of signs and symbols (such as billboards and advertising hoardings) as images of desire created a text or narrative to accompany the careful sequencing of images. The direct inheritors of the photograph as social sign were the American photographers of the ‘social landscape’, namely Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whose unsympathetic vision of the American landscape reflected the anxieties of urban life during the booming consumer decade - store fronts, billboards, graffiti and advertising. They chose to portray people, situations and artefacts in a casual and objective way that allowed the viewer to interpret the work freely; a strategy that became known as the ‘snapshot aesthetic’. One of those who experienced many of these developments first hand was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. His work was widely reproduced in the 1960s and his book A Day Off (1974) proved a particular inspiration for the generation of documentary photographers who developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    Relevant websites:
    The work of early documentary photographs can be found in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society www.rps.org)
    The Mass Observation archive is held by the University of Sussex www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/
    The work of the Side Gallery can be seen at     www.amber-online.com/gallery/
    The archive for the Farm Security Administration is now in the Print and Reading Room Collections of the Library of Congress in Washington www.loc.gov/rr/print

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.