The best books on Modern British Painting

Before we talk about your selection of books, what is distinctive about modern British painting? 

Globally, Modernism refers to a movement in society and culture from the first decades of the twentieth century that tried to reconcile aesthetic experience with modern industrial life. In Britain, this movement had its own variants. The roots go back to late nineteenth-century precedents. Artists around the world made use of new images, techniques and materials to reflect in their art what they saw as the realities and tumult of contemporary society in their day. These concerns spanned a great deal of the twentieth century, culminating in abstract art and its developments in the 1960s.

In fact, one might say that, by the 1960s, Modernism had become a dominant idea in art. This is what contemporary art was supposed to aspire to. Such notions were based on a rather narrow theory relating to painting in particular. It was the highly influential American art critic Clement Greenberg who championed it, and the artists he had anointed as the torch-bearers for the apotheosis of this twentieth century movement were its standard bearers. Most of them were American.

And yet, as we’ll see, artists the world over interpreted Modernism’s concerns in very distinctive, idiosyncratic ways. This is very clear in the British variant, as exemplified in the painting of artists like Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Richard Smith, who we will discuss in detail. There’s an obvious visual relationship between Hockney and Bacon or Hockney and Smith. And there’s the peculiar Englishness of these artists, as there was with the Neo-Romantics, and their English-accented echoes of life in America as a kind of reprisal of the theme of the Englishman abroad. There was a dialogue between British and North American artists that was part of the increasingly international nature of contemporary art production.

Lisa Tickner’s book, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: Art in Early Twentieth Century Britain considers how painters were like early ambassadors of Modernism to the UK. Why is this book important to understand modern British painting?

There are interesting parallels in pre-First World War cultural moments and what was happening in the late 1950s and 1960s. Both involved seismic shifts in culture through technology, which affected how people see themselves. An influx of American advertising, accessible journalism and pop imagery created a great shift that has echoes in the way that the web has changed our lives in the last 20 years. I believe there’s a technological and cultural revolution during the 1950s and 1960s that harks back to the early 20th century, when the exponential growth of the city, the change in speed of life with more widespread use of the motorcar and the cable. The world was being experienced in different ways, physically and visually.

Lisa Tickner conveys these seismic shifts brilliantly. She’s able to take a single work by an artist and from that extrapolate not only their place in the culture, but so much fascinating detail about the culture itself. What’s key here is to understand how artists and their work reflect a whole shift in subjectivity. It’s very rare to find an art historian who pays such close attention to the art object and at the same time can talk with such breadth about the wider culture. There are plenty of art historians who will tell you all there is to know about a given object, but they can’t fit it into a bigger picture. What makes this object relevant or revealing? Tickner does so brilliantly. Selecting even a half dozen works and artists she is able to convey how together they describe the whole paradigm shift in modern experience. Victorian Britain was a very different place from modern Britain. Artists can provide the signposts that help us to get from one to the other.

The shift in subjectivity was also accompanied by a shift in subject matter. When we talk about British painting we might think of landscape or portraiture—Gainsborough, Constable, Turner. David Alan Mellor’s book, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55, addresses this shift. He traces a visionary tradition in British art going back to at least William Blake. 

This was the book that convinced me as an undergraduate to pursue a PhD. In the 1980s when I was a student, the study of modern British art was still very rudimentary. There was really only one broad study by Charles Harrison called English Art and Modernism, based on the premise that British Modernism is merely where British art intersected with French art—early 20th-century abstraction, impressionism and the like—and it reaches its culmination with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in the 1930s, when these and other artists in Britain became part of an international movement with Mondrian and others. It’s a brilliantly written book but was a very formalist, teleological account. Moreover, it was written in the 1960s during that Greenbergian moment in art criticism. I think it’s telling that Harrison could never do the second planned volume; to my mind Modernism simply doesn’t work that way.

“Victorian Britain was a very different place from modern Britain. Artists can provide the signposts that help us to get from one to the other”

David Mellor, by contrast, is a historian of modern British art in an altogether different register, because he sees it as part of a much broader, intersecting culture. The artists and the type of art he was talking about in his book had simply been completely marginalised since that moment in the 1960s because they didn’t fit that neat Franco-American idea of what modern progressive painting was all about. Mellor was finding a way of recuperating a conservative, traditionalist and very particular kind of British-inflected modern art.

In doing so, he was uncovering lost subject matter and important historical concerns that were either deemed irrelevant previously or were outright eradicated by Harrison’s formalist account. I say he’s recuperating the artists, but one thing that is very clear and quite refreshing is that he is admiring of the art itself. Not to say that he’s one of those art historians who writes about a subject because he or she thinks they’re ‘great,’ necessarily. Artists are seen for their significance for their moment and the way they open up questions about the wider culture. Mellor has an extraordinary breadth of cultural references. So while he may be talking about a painter, he can relate that artist’s work to photography and film and in later studies to television too.

Among modern British painting books, you’ve chosen three monographs about artists significant for their moment. There’s a great deal that has been written about Francis Bacon. Why choose this Thames & Hudson edition by John Russell—which was first published many years ago—as opposed to the many others out there?

I once worked on an exhibition of Picasso and British art, and it was an enlightening experience for me as a historian of British art. If you’re working with British artists, you start by reading everything about that artist. And I mean everything. In most cases, you’ll do that in a day. With Picasso, obviously you’re not going to be able to do that. The material is simply too abundant.

“Bacon is very easily situated into a painterly tradition of using paints and the material itself as vehicles of meaning”

Similarly with Francis Bacon, in contrast to many British artists, there’s a huge literature, and it has mushroomed in recent years. That interests me. People have written about Bacon from a sociological point of view and a psychological point of view, they’ve looked at his work in a French Structuralist way and in a Postmodern way. I think the brilliance of John Russell’s book is that he writes with a great sophistication. His is no bland, formal biographical account, but has a simplicity and clarity to it. The writing itself is very beautiful in its simplicity.

Moreover, he really gets to all the really fundamental things about Bacon and his art and the concerns that underlie it, not to mention his later influence and everything that happened subsequently. The book was the result of conversations that he’d had with Bacon over many years so there’s an immediacy of account here. Although they’re also very heavily edited and moved around chronologically, Russell’s independence in arranging the material is not at all problematic. The accounts are credibly in Bacon’s own voice, and as a result have achieved a kind of iconic status.

Do you feel that Bacon is in some way the archetypal British modernist painter?

I hesitate to say yes, but it’s quite hard to think of a modern British painter who’s more important than him. In a way, I believe he is archetypal, even if it would be difficult to say exactly what that means, really. Another reason I hesitate, perhaps is because in his lifetime, and particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a way of marginalising British art by stereotyping it as figurative. And if any art that matters at that time in Britain is still figurative, it therefore cannot be as great as that of someone like Mark Rothko’s, of this visual tradition of Modernism that culminates in the vision of American abstraction.

Go to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, where until recently, there will be one exhibition room after another of French artists and artists from America. There is without a doubt a very important formal aspect to Bacon’s work. He’s very easily situated into a painterly tradition of using paints and the material itself as vehicles of meaning, aside from the image-making. Bacon himself would say, rightly, that that tradition isn’t particularly British, because the father figures are Rembrandt or Velazquez.

Bacon’s abstraction is wilfully anti-abstract. The thing I love about Bacon is his ambition: an artist who only wants to paint about life and death and the horror of living in a godless world. There were so many vain, self-important artists in any given period. He says, well, maybe history will judge that the 20th century had a great artist or maybe it will not. Not every century does.

Let’s talk about David Hockney. We started the conversation talking about how technological shifts had ushered in a paradigm shift in perception and subjectivity early in the 20th century. Here’s an artist that straddles the previous century and our own. Hockney is at times very high-tech, while at the same time he is a living testament to modern British painting. 

The book I chose is Hockney on Hockney, which I actually came to quite late, though it seems it has been a formative work for a number of colleagues too.  I read it in preparation for the Tate exhibition that I co-curated in 2017. Much of what historians and critics have written about him is almost universally bogged down in biography. He’s such a flamboyant and colourful character, and a wit, I suppose it’s easily done.

Now Hockney on Hockney is biographical too of course. He wrote it at what now seems very early on in his career, because he started painting so young, but even here his thought is very developed and mature. It was published in 1976, so he was approaching 40 and already a public figure, though his first exhibition was only in 1963. That’s only 13 years before this collection of essays was published, but he manages to fill 300 pages, and it’s anything but fluff. There is a lot of detail, about his life and work, about the period. It’s based around interviews in which Hockney talks about precursors, contemporaries and a large cast of characters that people his life and work.

A lot of his work does come out of his life, because he’s concerned primarily about the language of painting, the suspension of disbelief that we all rely on for painting to work, the conventions which make paintings legible and make them into an experience. Take the recent immersive exhibition, yet again based around him questioning and thinking about and challenging what it means to experience art—the space in painting perspective, shadow repetition, depth and perception – all those very fundamental things that go into picture making. It’s almost unimaginable that Hockney would make sculpture because for him it’s all about picture making.

And occasionally, he goes off and does something that seems crazy and unrelated, but it always comes back to that central painterly concern. In this book you really have the sense that this subject matter isn’t ever of secondary importance. Sometimes Hockney will go off and paint a ‘great’ subject—double portraits of friends, or the Grand Canyon, or whatever. More often though it’s a self-portrait or simply the people or the stuff around him. The subject is not central, because ultimately that’s not what he’s concerned about in his work. It’s the making and the language of painting that are his concern. That makes him quintessentially modern.

“The subject is not central, because ultimately that’s not what Hockney’s concerned about in his work. It’s the making and the language of painting that are his concern”

And that’s true I think even when the paintings are also quite personal. They are about art and tradition. Portraits of his mother draw out the fact that it is also about emotion and his own personal feelings, as do most of the portraits of people close to him, and even one or two commissions he may have come to regret. Here again, these are not particularly modernist concerns in that hard-edged Greenberg sense. In fact, they are explicitly anti-formalist in this way.

Hockney has consistently gone against the critical tide, and as a result his work is often quite groundbreaking, as when he graduates from the Royal College of Art with a fusion of abstraction and figuration. Will he be the successor to Bacon? Maybe. But then his work becomes more and more realistic and he gets ‘stuck’—until the next breakthrough. He has been on record critiquing conceptual art at the height of its influence. Although this made him seem out of touch, he managed to be high profile and marginal at the same time.

Hockney remains wildly popular, and seems to become more popular with every passing year. That has not dented his critical standing, however.

There are moments in his career where he almost unwittingly slips in something quite radical. Painting traditional marriage portraits of same-sex couples in 1968 for example.

Lastly, in our conversation on modern British painting books, let’s talk about the monograph Richard Smith: Artworks 1956–2013. Why is Smith important in this context? 

Richard Smith has a passionate following amongst a small number of people. He seems to be a very well-kept secret. This is the first substantial publication on him, as until now there have only been small exhibition catalogues or inclusion in several broader surveys of painting to mark him out. And yet there’s a great body of artwork, which isn’t particularly well known, and possibly under-appreciated even where he is known. His work is pivotal for understanding British Modernist painting.

There was in particular a show at the Barbican Centre about the art of the 1960s which set the stage for the rediscovery of Smith’s early work—big, brightly coloured paintings, three-dimensional, cigarette packet-based, shaped canvases. But, you know, there’s a whole series of equally groundbreaking works that followed which haven’t been revisited and which deserve to be. He had something of a revival in the 1990s, but still has not had his due considering the moment in which he worked, his circle of contemporaries and the prism that his work represents for the abiding concerns of painting in his day.

“Richard Smith has a passionate following amongst a small number of people. He seems to be a very well kept secret”

No one had previously looked at Smith’s career in its entirety. I think there’s a growing sense in looking back at this period in British painting that there isn’t a single modernist trajectory. Someone like Smith can be understood as a painter who was testing the boundaries of painting. His work has a kind of renewed relevance, not to mention an inherent beauty and power. He deserved revisiting from a social-historical perspective too, because he comes just before David Hockney and Co., but just after artists whose careers were basically delayed and defined by the war. In this way I believe he’s crucial to understanding Modernism in Britain.

Smith is an artistic figure between London and New York in a historical moment when there were barely any regular flights. In the mid-1950s these two cities were very far apart. We forget this nowadays. That transatlantic cultural traffic that we are now so familiar with was very muted in Smith’s day. He was truly a pioneer importing cultural influences into Britain at a time when it was less than obvious. In these ways, I think he’s a really instrumental figure in the evolution of North Atlantic art in the 20th century.

His painting incorporates a lot of the iconography of American consumerist culture. It’s surprising to see that reinterpreted for a British audience.

Pop art may appear superficial on the surface, but in drawing on the genre Smith is actually dealing with some quite serious arty questions, fundamental questions such as ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is painting?’. He did so, however, wanting to play with subject matter that was relevant to him, and that subject matter for him was pop music, pop cultural references, advertising, and whatever.

When we speak of British painting, most people would probably think in two dimensions, but a lot of Smith’s work seems almost architectonic. His kite paintings for example are very sculptural, projected canvases that recall the kinetic sculpture of Alexander Calder. It seems his work bridges not only the Atlantic but the divide between sculpture and painting too.

Absolutely. Not that he wasn’t interested in sculpture, but he was insistent that he was first and foremost a painter. There was one point where he made a series of works called ‘Sphinx’, which started off against the wall the way paintings might typically be exhibited. They were then projected from the gallery wall much more than they were hanging on it. These paintings became freestanding at that point. With this transformation of the two-dimensional plane into three dimensions, what he’s doing is asking how far can you stretch painting, if you’ll excuse the pun. How far can you stretch canvas without it becoming something other than a painting?

Any final thoughts about the durability of British modernist sensibilities in the digital age?

The great challenge for painting in a digital age is what is to become of the uniquely handmade, physical sensory object that is an artwork. Are digital reproduction and communication capable of creating an artefact? An aesthetic experience comparable to analog ways of making art? Hockney is constantly engaging with this dilemma. In a way, his interests allow him to because he’s interested in the language of images. They don’t need to be painted for him to do that. I believe painting will persist, as there’s a particularity about the physical act of painting that is unlike writing; it is a means of communication that’s unique.