SHOWCASING ART HISTORY SEASON X 2015 - 2016

Autumn term 2015

Fit for a new society: British post-war art, design and architecture c. 1945 – c. 1965

There are a number of significant exhibitions on post-war British art in 2015, including, among others, Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain and Henry Moore at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as well as our own Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon's Gliding Paintings (15 October 2015 – 17 January 2016). This autumn term intends to benefit from the fresh research and interest generated by these shows, with a number of their curators and other leading scholars in the field making up our panel of speakers.

In the immediate post-war period, British society was marked by the traumatic experiences of the recent past, by continuing rationing and economic deprivation, and by anxiety over an uncertain future. At the same time, it was also fired by a new, optimistic sense of purpose and by widespread consensus over welfare, reform and the common good. Such contradictory impulses likewise characterise a contemporary art world of exceptional complexity and variety in painting, sculpture, design and architecture. In sculpture, for instance, there were purely abstract works by Barbara Hepworth alongside the jagged, tortured human and animal forms, - the ‘iron waifs’ - of artists like Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, William Turnbull and others. Their response to the strains and anxieties of the period amounted to a veritable ‘geometry of fear’, as the influential critic Herbert Read put it. Henry Moore, too, produced work in that vein at the time, though is more closely associated in the public’s imagination with his large-scale commissions for timeless, semi-abstract outdoor figure subjects: family groups, mothers and children, and reclining figures.

The human form is equally significant in painting of the period, from the intense, sometimes anguished engagement with individual figures in portraits and figure motifs by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, to social realist depictions of the labouring poor, tenement dwellers and recent immigrants. Landscape, particularly the native landscape of Cornwall, continued to pre-occupy British artists, a number of whom sought to reinvent the traditions of the genre for a modern era. Although rooted in the experience of Cornish scenery, Peter Lanyon’s extraordinary, immersive gliding pictures, for instance, transcended the local and specific and powerfully appealed to an international audience for abstract modernism.

Like much contemporary ‘fine art’, design, too, absorbed the lessons of Continental European modernism and attempted to adjust them to local traditions and requirements. The most progressive designers intensively explored new materials and manufacturing processes in the pursuit of objects and interiors suited to less formal, more democratic ways of living. In this context, we shall look very closely at work produced for the Festival of Britain, a crucial event also for our examination of post-war architecture. Here, we shall investigate if (and if yes, how and why) the Festival’s domesticated, popular and somewhat cosy modernism transmogrified into the ‘new brutalism’ of London’s infamous 1960s housing estates. Throughout the series, we shall attempt to establish links between the arts and the new kind of society born out of the ruins of the Second World War

Images: William Turnbull in his Studio, early 1950s, public domain Festival of Britain, Visitors with the Dome of Discovery in the background, public domain

Speakers are: Dr Margaret Garlake (independent scholar), Dr Chris Stephens (Tate Britain), Toby Treves (Modern Art Press Ltd), Dr Sarah MacDougall (Ben Uri Gallery), Dr Ghislaine Wood (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia), Professor Martin Hammer (University of Kent), Dr Alan Powers (independent scholar) and Dr Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute)

Timetable: (titles in italics are confirmed)

October 6 Margaret Garlake Introduction: the British art world

October 13 Margaret Garlake Moore and the Geometry of Fear

October 20 Chris Stephens Barbara Hepworth

October 27 Toby Treves Peter Lanyon

November 3 Sarah MacDougall Painting and Social Realism

November 10 Ghislaine Wood Tradition and Modernity in Post-War British Design

November 17 Alan Powers Modernism in architecture 1930s – 1950s

November 24 Alan Powers New Brutalism

December 1 Martin Hammer Bacon – Painting after Photography

December 8 Jon Wood Henry Moore and followers 1950s – 1990s Suggested pre-course reading:

Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society, London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998

Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett (eds), British art in the cultural field, 1939-69, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012

James Hyman and Margaret Garlake, Henry Moore and the Geometry of Fear: Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, James Hyman Fine Art, 2002

Chris Stephens (ed.), Henry Moore, London, Tate Publishing, 2010

Chris Stephens (ed.), Barbara Hepworth: centenary, London, Tate Publishing 2003

Christopher Breward and Ghislaine Wood (eds.), British Design from 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age, exh. cat., London, V&A, 2012

Alan Powers, Britain in the series Modern Architectures in history, London, Reaktion, 2006