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A History of British Art
Andrew Graham-Dixon's A History of British Art begins with the unpromising acknowledgment that "the British are a tribe of writers, not painters ... we have never been truly possessed of a native visual imagination." Graham-Dixon's book is an attempt to challenge these assumptions about British art and its history and he does so through a striking reassessment of the "tradition of anti-art, which dominated Britain for more than a century after the start of the Reformation". In tracing "the nation's love-hate relationship with art" and the recurrent "iconophobia" which has often literally done such damage to British art, Graham-Dixon offers a refreshing perspective on a surprisingly neglected topic. Beginning with a consideration of what remains of a Catholic, pre-Reformation tradition in 15th-century English architecture and church art, Graham-Dixon reassesses the bad press accorded the Tudors. He offers illuminating accounts of the paradoxical embrace of Holbein and VanDyck by the English court, Holbein in particular exemplifying English values of "common sense, precision, empiricism, determination, a capacity for inward reflection and a strong consciousness of responsibility." Gainsborough and Reynolds are reluctantly classified as self-consciously derivative geniuses caught in the shadow of the past, whilst George Stubbs is given the rather surprising accolade that "a painting by him can hang next to a great Titian or Rembrandt." However, despite its occasionally grandiloquent claims, there are fine sections on the radical nature of Constable and Turner, the turn away from their innovations by the Victorians and the complex, often painful reception of modernism into the mainstream of 20th-century British art from Wyndham Lewis to Damien Hirst. Overall, this is an elegant and readable overview of British art. -- Jerry Brotton
- GenresArtHistoryArt History
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
89 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Graham-Dixon
28 books131 followersAndrew Graham-Dixon has presented six landmark series on art for the BBC, including the acclaimed A History of British Art, Renaissance and Art of Eternity, as well as numerous individual documentaries on art and artists. For more than twenty years he has published a weekly column on art, first in the Independent and, more recently, in the Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of acclaimed books, on subjects ranging from medieval painting and sculpture to the art of the present, including Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Art: The Definitive Visual Guide, and Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel.
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April 18, 2023
Well written, engaging and short survey with some interesting Obs, with attention paid to architecture and landscape design as well as paintings. In the introduction he quotes Douglas Lord saying “There is no tradition of English art, no continuity, but occasionally a meteor blazes its trail across the sky”. Graham-Dixon sets out to disprove this. I think he succeeds in establishing that there certainly is a tradition and continuity, but for long, long stretches of time it is not a very interesting one. “My wife, my horse, and myself” goes the refrain. BUT when originality does rear its head, my god!! Turner!! Blake!! Then dozens of weird side streets going from languid dream to unsettling nightmare — Richard Dadd, the Pre-Raphaelites, Hogarth, Lucian Freud. There is a real sick sense of humor to a lot of this stuff, a real frenzied imagination that bursts to get out. The parallel tradition of portraiture (Sargent, Joshua Reynolds etc) is much less interesting to read about but has produced some amazing images of its own, cold beauty and gentle humor in equal measure. I was just looking at the Sargents at the Met and they were captivating.
One thing he hammers in is just how much of an impact the Reformation made on art, far more than any other country. The tradition of religious art was ended abruptly, the altars stripped, the frescos whitewashed. So there is no thread of continuity like in Italy or even in France. This I suppose accounts for British art's dual nature as a somewhat boring tradition and one that occasionally produces these artists of stunning originality and genius.
Apropros of nothing here is a really interesting digression on American modern art that he makes in the middle of the first chapter.
“It seems eccentric to think of paintings like Newman's, or those of his contemporaries, Mark Rothko, or Ad Reinhardt as modern art, because they are so deeply nostalgic for the seventeenth century and for the fiercely anti-image Mosaic law which had so inspired the early Protestants. Perhaps it is no accident that many of these painters were Americans of Jewish descent: men who would, as Jews, have been very aware of the links between this aspect of aniconic Judaic culture and a Protestant aesthetic of significant blankness. Their works were to be followed by still more purged and empty canvases: pure black canvases, pure white canvases, fields of visionary emptiness. These objects were exhibited almost invariably inside a pure white cube. Then, finally, American artists invented Conceptual Art, Word Art. The pure white cube was embellished with text.
American artists have a greater sense of history than they are generally credited with. When Lawrence Weiner began to show his simple texts stencilled on to gallery walls in the early 1970s his work was hailed as the last word in late modernism. In fact it is nothing of the kind. It is really just the Ten Commandments, up on the church wall, all over again; the return of an old, old simplicity. Carl Andre, the Minimal sculptor, was almost the only American artist to acknowledge explicitly the links between American art and the aesthetics of the British Reformation. His mute rows of bricks, laid out on the gallery floor, were inspired, he once said, by the empty plinths he had seen in English churches on his holidays. In the American art gallery of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andre recognized, we may see an almost uncannily perfect image of the Reformed church. This was the radical space of Protestant theology remade in secular art of the twentieth century, the culmination of a British aesthetic, abandoned by the British themselves, achieved in a pure space where whiteness and the Word ruled triumphant.”
One thing he hammers in is just how much of an impact the Reformation made on art, far more than any other country. The tradition of religious art was ended abruptly, the altars stripped, the frescos whitewashed. So there is no thread of continuity like in Italy or even in France. This I suppose accounts for British art's dual nature as a somewhat boring tradition and one that occasionally produces these artists of stunning originality and genius.
Apropros of nothing here is a really interesting digression on American modern art that he makes in the middle of the first chapter.
“It seems eccentric to think of paintings like Newman's, or those of his contemporaries, Mark Rothko, or Ad Reinhardt as modern art, because they are so deeply nostalgic for the seventeenth century and for the fiercely anti-image Mosaic law which had so inspired the early Protestants. Perhaps it is no accident that many of these painters were Americans of Jewish descent: men who would, as Jews, have been very aware of the links between this aspect of aniconic Judaic culture and a Protestant aesthetic of significant blankness. Their works were to be followed by still more purged and empty canvases: pure black canvases, pure white canvases, fields of visionary emptiness. These objects were exhibited almost invariably inside a pure white cube. Then, finally, American artists invented Conceptual Art, Word Art. The pure white cube was embellished with text.
American artists have a greater sense of history than they are generally credited with. When Lawrence Weiner began to show his simple texts stencilled on to gallery walls in the early 1970s his work was hailed as the last word in late modernism. In fact it is nothing of the kind. It is really just the Ten Commandments, up on the church wall, all over again; the return of an old, old simplicity. Carl Andre, the Minimal sculptor, was almost the only American artist to acknowledge explicitly the links between American art and the aesthetics of the British Reformation. His mute rows of bricks, laid out on the gallery floor, were inspired, he once said, by the empty plinths he had seen in English churches on his holidays. In the American art gallery of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andre recognized, we may see an almost uncannily perfect image of the Reformed church. This was the radical space of Protestant theology remade in secular art of the twentieth century, the culmination of a British aesthetic, abandoned by the British themselves, achieved in a pure space where whiteness and the Word ruled triumphant.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review