How British art lost modernism and found its soul

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It was when 20th-century British artists stopped trying to be modernists that they started to create honest, significant work

What with Henry Moore at Tate and Paul Nash at Dulwich Picture Gallery, it seems the art of 20th-century Britain is enjoying an unexpected revival. Obviously, coincidences like this are just coincidences. But… makes you think, dunnit.

British art from the years 1900 to 1950 is unlikely to be found in huge quantities in many museums of modern art you visit around the world. The Moore show is at Tate Britain and not at Tate Modern: in his lifetime, had the two museums been divided, he’d have been at Modern. But nowadays, Francis Bacon is the first British artist of the 20th century who seriously holds his own in international collections. I’m sure lots of people will put me right on this one, but it’s my strong perception.

British art in 1930 is arguably comparable in quality with American art at the same moment: both countries were outside the avant-garde swim of continental Europe yet both had artists who created original homegrown interpretations of modern art. In the 1940s both took off for themselves, in radically divergent directions – while American painters and sculptors discovered an inner voice of abstraction, Britain found itself in existentialist figurative painting.

Of course, there were British abstract artists, before and after the 1940s, but they so often seem brittle and precious. I can’t keep awake in the pre-war abstraction room at Tate Britain. In the room that has paintings such as Kossoff’s Man in a Wheelchair, I feel I am seeing actual art.

It was as if, in the early 20th century, British artists put on modernist clothes but felt terribly uncomfortable in them. When Evelyn Waugh satirises British art deco in his novels, I suppose nowadays we’re supposed to shudder at his snobbery – but don’t you recognise the chilly British version of the international style he’s mocking?

When the British stopped trying to be modernists their art became more honest, more real and more significant – from the 50s painters to Gilbert and George to You Know Who. Our artists are better at living in this world than they are constructing utopias – and perhaps that speaks well of them, and us.

Jonathan Jones

 

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SourcedFrom The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk

Posted by admin   @   26 February 2010
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Feb 26, 2010
9:18 am
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