Papers by Michael Clegg
Tate Papers, 29, 2018
When Tate’s modern British galleries reopened, refurbished and rehung, in 1957, the gallery’s Dir... more When Tate’s modern British galleries reopened, refurbished and rehung, in 1957, the gallery’s Director, Sir John Rothenstein, was entering the twilight of his career, yet within the new hang he introduced innovative approaches to display. This paper examines Rothenstein’s innovations and discusses his continued use of nationhood as an organising principle for displaying Tate’s permanent collection, revealing how it engaged with contemporary society and politics, including the Suez Crisis and questions of post-imperial national identity.
British Art Studies, 8, 2018
This article examines the coverage of the visual arts by Monitor, the pioneer arts magazine serie... more This article examines the coverage of the visual arts by Monitor, the pioneer arts magazine series broadcast by the BBC between 1958 and 1965. It explores Monitor’s place in the evolution of approaches to visual art on British television and assesses Monitor’s wider impact on the “art support system” (in Margaret Garlake’s phrase) of the late 1950s and 1960s. Through readings of three Monitor films (“Scottish Painters”, about Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, “George Chapman: Painter in Wales”, and “Private View”) it argues, firstly, that a new emphasis on story or parable by programme makers came at the expense of engagement with critical debate of the kind maintained by print media and radio, and, secondly, that by the turn of the 1960s television was shaping the approach of commercial galleries whilst simultaneously masking its institutional power to viewers in favour of a disinterested, everyman pose.
Print Quarterly, 36:4, 2019
A number of errors have entered the literature relating to the 'Coronation Lithographs', publishe... more A number of errors have entered the literature relating to the 'Coronation Lithographs', published in 1953 by the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. This paper reviews the available evidence, presents a revised list of contents for the series, and addresses inaccuracies related to contributions from specific artists.
Talks by Michael Clegg
Paul Mellon Centre, 2019
In early 1958, the tiny space of the St George’s Gallery in Cork Street, London, was decked out w... more In early 1958, the tiny space of the St George’s Gallery in Cork Street, London, was decked out with ‘redoubtable specimens’ of ‘primitive’ African carving (in the words of Art News). The occasion was the launch of Vertical Suite in Black, six prints that were attributed by their creator, Merlyn Evans, to the inspiration of African and Oceanic sources and that followed Evans’ major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery two years earlier. By the 1950s, ‘primitivist’ ideas already had a long history within modernist images and texts: appropriations from distant, often colonised, cultures had been deployed by both early twentieth-century cubists and interwar Surrealists. In Britain, related concepts had been utilised within Vorticism ahead of the First World War and had informed an ethnographic turn within the art institutions of the late 1940s. This presentation asks what it meant for Evans to invoke African and Oceanic precedents at the end of the 1950s, half a century after the initial cubist move and when Europe’s colonial presence was entering full-scale retreat. It suggests that a close visual analysis of Vertical Suite, combined with sensitivity to contextual information, shows how the prints offered an informed and critical (if idiosyncratic) consideration of the history of ‘primitivism’ in Britain and on the continent. The suite also, however, diverged from other responses to that same history being pursued by younger contemporaries, including members of the Independent Group and in particular Eduardo Paolozzi. Through a comparison of Evans’ work with these alternatives, the presentation proposes ways in which we might reconsider periodisation and narratives of progress in British post-war art history.
Conference Presentations by Michael Clegg
Paul Mellon Centre - DRN Summer Symposium, 2009
This paper centres on a detailed visual analysis of pictures from the 1947 series of Lyons Lithog... more This paper centres on a detailed visual analysis of pictures from the 1947 series of Lyons Lithographs. It argues that despite a marked absence of the recent war in the overt content of the series, some, at least, of the images bear traces of the conflict and its impact on Britons’ domestic life as well as the moral shock of Nazi atrocity.
The 1947 Lyons Lithographs were the first of three series commissioned by the catering company to decorate its restaurants and which were also sold directly to the public. In as much as the series has been considered by art historians to date, it has been in terms of its realisation of an ‘art for the people’ ethic, aligned with the cultural policy of the 1945 Labour government. In this paper, by contrast, I give serious consideration to three of its specific images: People by Barnett Freedman, technical director for the series as a whole; Hastings by Edwin La Dell; and The Flight into Egypt by former war artist Mary Kessell. Pre-war commentators had argued that a popular audience would necessitate a broad social realism: art that could represent the ‘passing scene’ (Kenneth Clark) and ‘comment upon social and political aspects of life in Britain today’ (the Artists’ International Association). However, I argue that in these three works engagement with contemporary concerns is achieved, instead, through symbol and allusion.
Association for Art History - Annual Conference, 2019
This paper explores how the cultural politics of landscape and of printmaking came together in im... more This paper explores how the cultural politics of landscape and of printmaking came together in images created in Britain in the immediate post-war years. It argues that prints, oriented to a popular audience and everyday settings, provided a space in which entrenched meanings of countryside and cityscape could be rethought and reimagined.
In 1951, Lynton Lamb produced a pair of images, one for each of two print schemes aiming to bring art into the everyday lives and spaces of ‘ordinary Britons’. One, made for the 1951 (Festival of Britain) Lithographs, treated the traditional subject of a country house set amongst parkland; this was at a time when the iconography of the country house had been appropriated by conservative critics of the 1945 Labour government. The other, published by J. Lyons & Co in a cheap edition and used to decorate their teashops, shows a town hall set within an urban streetscape. Its version of the human-formed landscape and of cultural heritage - connoting the quotidian, the municipal and the democratic - is the apparent antithesis of the country house.
The paper considers Lamb’s work within the wider context of post-war prints. The images examined show how a simple alignment between countryside, tradition and political reaction, on the one hand, and town, modernity and social democracy, on the other, is inadequate to understand the mood, ideas and visual practice of a moment when democratic aspiration and high-cultural reaction contested notions of both art and landscape.
Modernism in the Home - University of Birmingham, 2019
In late 1930s Britain a growing movement advocated for the artists’ lithograph as a way to make m... more In late 1930s Britain a growing movement advocated for the artists’ lithograph as a way to make modern art affordable to ‘every purse’ and available in ‘every home’ (to quote contemporary phrases). The domestic encounter with original, contemporary art was seen to have a value which the museum object could not match. A concrete manifestation of this movement came with the Everyman Prints, published by the Artists’ International Association in 1940. The series included works by artists such as Vanessa Bell, John Piper and Carel Weight and impressions were available for a few pence from travelling exhibitions, as well as over the counter at Marks and Spencer. Some contemporaries interpreted the Everyman Prints as catering to a working-class audience with a stress on social (or socialist) realism, and this understanding has been adopted by subsequent scholars. However, In this paper I suggest that the primary audience was less ‘every’ householder than the young and aspirational, those who saw themselves creating a ‘modern home’, in the words of the series brochure, despite restricted means, through access to new technologies of reproduction for books, music and art. I argue that the initiative can be understood as an example in visual art of the ‘intermodern’, that is the pre-war cultural position identified by literary scholars such as Kristin Bluemel and Nick Hubble as a coalescence of progressive sections of the (lower) middle-class - and their political values - and aesthetic interests derived from modernism. In summary, attention to the Everyman Prints – and the wider movement they represented – shows how the apparently private space of the pre-war home could also be, for some, a place where an individual’s combined commitments to modernism and to a progressive politics were affirmed.
Uploads
Papers by Michael Clegg
Talks by Michael Clegg
Conference Presentations by Michael Clegg
The 1947 Lyons Lithographs were the first of three series commissioned by the catering company to decorate its restaurants and which were also sold directly to the public. In as much as the series has been considered by art historians to date, it has been in terms of its realisation of an ‘art for the people’ ethic, aligned with the cultural policy of the 1945 Labour government. In this paper, by contrast, I give serious consideration to three of its specific images: People by Barnett Freedman, technical director for the series as a whole; Hastings by Edwin La Dell; and The Flight into Egypt by former war artist Mary Kessell. Pre-war commentators had argued that a popular audience would necessitate a broad social realism: art that could represent the ‘passing scene’ (Kenneth Clark) and ‘comment upon social and political aspects of life in Britain today’ (the Artists’ International Association). However, I argue that in these three works engagement with contemporary concerns is achieved, instead, through symbol and allusion.
In 1951, Lynton Lamb produced a pair of images, one for each of two print schemes aiming to bring art into the everyday lives and spaces of ‘ordinary Britons’. One, made for the 1951 (Festival of Britain) Lithographs, treated the traditional subject of a country house set amongst parkland; this was at a time when the iconography of the country house had been appropriated by conservative critics of the 1945 Labour government. The other, published by J. Lyons & Co in a cheap edition and used to decorate their teashops, shows a town hall set within an urban streetscape. Its version of the human-formed landscape and of cultural heritage - connoting the quotidian, the municipal and the democratic - is the apparent antithesis of the country house.
The paper considers Lamb’s work within the wider context of post-war prints. The images examined show how a simple alignment between countryside, tradition and political reaction, on the one hand, and town, modernity and social democracy, on the other, is inadequate to understand the mood, ideas and visual practice of a moment when democratic aspiration and high-cultural reaction contested notions of both art and landscape.
The 1947 Lyons Lithographs were the first of three series commissioned by the catering company to decorate its restaurants and which were also sold directly to the public. In as much as the series has been considered by art historians to date, it has been in terms of its realisation of an ‘art for the people’ ethic, aligned with the cultural policy of the 1945 Labour government. In this paper, by contrast, I give serious consideration to three of its specific images: People by Barnett Freedman, technical director for the series as a whole; Hastings by Edwin La Dell; and The Flight into Egypt by former war artist Mary Kessell. Pre-war commentators had argued that a popular audience would necessitate a broad social realism: art that could represent the ‘passing scene’ (Kenneth Clark) and ‘comment upon social and political aspects of life in Britain today’ (the Artists’ International Association). However, I argue that in these three works engagement with contemporary concerns is achieved, instead, through symbol and allusion.
In 1951, Lynton Lamb produced a pair of images, one for each of two print schemes aiming to bring art into the everyday lives and spaces of ‘ordinary Britons’. One, made for the 1951 (Festival of Britain) Lithographs, treated the traditional subject of a country house set amongst parkland; this was at a time when the iconography of the country house had been appropriated by conservative critics of the 1945 Labour government. The other, published by J. Lyons & Co in a cheap edition and used to decorate their teashops, shows a town hall set within an urban streetscape. Its version of the human-formed landscape and of cultural heritage - connoting the quotidian, the municipal and the democratic - is the apparent antithesis of the country house.
The paper considers Lamb’s work within the wider context of post-war prints. The images examined show how a simple alignment between countryside, tradition and political reaction, on the one hand, and town, modernity and social democracy, on the other, is inadequate to understand the mood, ideas and visual practice of a moment when democratic aspiration and high-cultural reaction contested notions of both art and landscape.