During the years following World War II, Britain was plagued by privation, xenophobia, and humiliation from the loss of colonial territories and political power. At the same time, the country was in the midst of a dawning triumphalism, seen first in the Festival of Britain, then in the new Coventry Cathedral, and finally in the international status accorded to British art by the early 1960s. This book sets the visual arts in the social and political context of these complex years.Margaret Garlake establishes the intellectual, historical, and organizational frameworks within which art was made and received by critics and the public. She discusses problems raised by abstract art, links between art and politics (culminating in the Unknown Political Prisoner competition), and misapprehensions concerning art from the colonial territories. She describes such new institutions as the Arts and British Councils, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and commercial galleries, all of which played crucial roles in sustaining artists and promoting their work. She examines the perception of a national tradition, grounded visually in landscape and place but heavily influenced by politics. And she investigates the negotiations undertaken by artists and critics sensitive to the nuances of tradition to respond to the impact of an international, American- oriented art. Finally, Garlake focuses on the broad themes within which many artists worked, including public art, landscape, the city, and the human body as mother, sex object, survivor, or worker.

New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis)

Arts & Photography

Garlake, Margaret

History & Criticism

Paul Mellon Centre BA

Peter Lanyon stood at the forefront of landscape painting in Europe during the late 1950s and early 1960s. A prominent St. Ives artist, he was associated with Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo: his work also has affinities with Abstract Expressionism. Lanyon's career started just as the study of drawing was being liberated from nineteenth-century academic constrictions. His many drawings range from records of trips to the Netherlands and Italy to portrait sketches and abstract studies. Lanyon also used drawings extensively in the development of some of his most important paintings. In this substantial and original study, Margaret Garlake explores Lanyon's theory and practice of drawing: the contribution of drawings to the evocation of place in paintings; his use of models and the metamorphosis of the human body into landscape images, as well as his use of three-dimensional constructions as equivalents to drawing.

The Drawings of Peter Lanyon

Lanyon, Peter

Individual Artists

Ashgate Pub Ltd

<p>The Sculpture of Reg Butler is the first book to provide an overview of Butler's sculpture from 1949 (his first solo show) to his death in 1981, and to catalogue and illustrate all extant works. Margaret Garlake analyses the development, themes and visual and intellectual origins of the sculpture; considers why Butler has been largely ignored since the early 1960s; examines his studio practice and sculptural techniques, and assesses his work in the context of that of his contemporaries.</p>

The Sculpture of Reg Butler (The British Sculptors And Sculpture Series)

Lund Humphries

The Drawings of Peter Lanyon (Routledge Revivals)

This title was first published in 2003. Peter Lanyon stood at the forefront of landscape painting in Europe during the late 1950s and early 60s. A prominent St Ives artist, he was associated with Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo; his work also has affinities with abstract expressionism. Lanyon's career started just as the study of drawing was being liberated from 19th-century academic constrictions. His many drawings range from records of trips to the Netherlands and Italy to portrait sketches and abstract studies. Lanyon also used drawings extensively in the development of some of his most important paintings. In this study, Margaret Garlake explores Lanyon's theory and practice of drawing; the contribution of drawings to the evocation of place in paintings; his use of models and the metamorphosis of the human body into landscape images, as well as his use of three-dimensional constructions as equivalents to drawing.

Religion & Spirituality

Routledge

Drawing

St. Ives Artists: Peter Lanyon

Tate

<p>This catalogue accompanied the first exhibition to bring together the seminal group of paintings of London building sites by Frank Auerbach (born 1931). Produced between 1952 and 1962, the paintings are among the most profound responses made by any artist to the postwar urban landscape. These works chart the early development of Auerbach’s remarkable approach to painting, for which he is celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest living artists.</p>

Frank Auerbach: The London Building Sites 1952-1962 (The Courtauld Gallery)

Moorhouse, Paul

Wright, Barnaby

Paul Holberton Publishing

<p>Accompanying a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, this catalogue explores a remarkable and unprecedented series of paintings by Peter Lanyon (1918–1964), one of Britain’s most important and original post-War artists. Lanyon sought to create a new vision of landscape painting for the modern era. He considered himself to be extending the landscape traditions of earlier artists, in particular Turner, whom he admired greatly. Lanyon strove to find a language of painting that expressed his direct experience of the landscape which might also probe questions about the nature of our existence within the world. During the 1950s, he produced radical, near-abstract paintings of the tough coastal landscape of his native West Cornwall. He was fueled by a desire to experience that landscape as completely as possible. In the summer of 1956, Lanyon was walking across a high cliff top when he looked up, saw three gliders soaring overhead and realized that this was the experience he desired. He began gliding seriously in 1959 and went solo for the first time in 1960, clocking up many flying hours over the next few years. Freed from a land-bound perspective, Lanyon poured his new gliding experiences into his art, producing paintings that offer a thrilling sense of his encounters with the land, sea and air, collapsing the multiple perspectives of his flights into each new composition. The paintings are also profoundly shaped by Lanyon’s newfound glider pilot’s knowledge of the character of the air - its different movements, textures and forces, as well as the dangers and lifelines that it presents as one navigates through the thermals and up-draughts that are the invisible map essential for the glider’s survival in the sky. Lanyon’s gliding paintings stand as a unique achievement of twentieth-century art, reinventing and furthering the tradition of landscape painting in ways that can also be seen to engage deeply with the pressing existentialist concerns of the post-War world. This remarkable project was cut short by Lanyon’s unexpected death in August 1964 whilst in hospital recovering from a gliding accident. Accompanying the first ever exhibition devoted to Lanyon’s gliding paintings, this book will offer a pioneering account of this important but overlooked body of work, bringing together around fifteen major paintings from public and private collections internationally, alongside a small group of constructions.</p>

Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon's Gliding Paintings

Smiles, Sam

Treves, Toby

<p><div>In this trailblazing study, Margaret Garlake complicates traditional histories of British landscape art in the post-war period. Drawing together work from painters and photographers--many of them women--Garlake expands the conventional view of the genre to include both rural and urban subjects. In doing so, she brilliantly places the work within the context of physical changes wrought by postwar society, as the British countryside reverted to civilian use, cities were built, and artists adjusted to the landscape as a site of both tradition and modernity. Carefully researched and subtly argued, this book will deepen our understanding of a fascinating period in British art history.<br /> &nbsp;</div></p>

Artists Making Landscapes in Post-war Britain

Modern Art Press

It was a sensation, indeed, when the young British artists took over the art scene in the 1990s. But what came before them? With works from more than 100 artists, Blast to Freeze traces the epoch-making art movements of an entire British century, from the outbreak of World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union, beginning and ending with a decided break from the traditional. In 1914 a group of young British artists, the Vorticists, in their avant-garde journal Blast!, propagated a style that blended influences from French cubism and Italian futurism into an independent British modernism. In turn, mavericks such as Henry Moore and Francis Bacon are unthinkable without the British primitivists and surrealists of the 20s and 30s. The specifically British brand of pop art began with the legendary exhibitions of the Independent Group in the 50s, and in the 80s, new British sculpture emerged, represented by important proponents such as Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley. The YBAs, presented to the world in the exhibition Freeze, jointly organized by Damien Hirst and friends in the London Docklands in 1988, brings the survey to a close.

Blast To Freeze: British Art In The 20Th Century

Marlow, Tim

CORK, Richard

WILSON, ANDREW

Harrison, Charles

LEWISON, JEREMY

LYNTON, Norbert

Massey, Anne

Curtis, David

HEWISON, Robert

Causey, Andrew

Curtis, Penelope

de Ville, Nick

Hyman, James

Stephens, Christopher

Decorative Arts & Design

Hatje Cantz Publishers

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