Third Text, Vol.

22, Issue 2, March, 2008, 145156

Realism versus Realism

in British Art of the 1950s
Juliet Steyn

Never, in all its history did mankind so urgently require a Realist literature
as it does today, and perhaps never before have the traditions of great Realism
been so deeply buried under a rubble of social and artistic prejudice.1

So wrote the Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukcs, in Studies in European

Realism published in Britain in 1950. It was a plea that had particular
resonance. The 1950s witnessed the celebration and decline of Realism
as a viable artistic attitude in the visual arts. In a decade marked by
austerity and postwar recovery, Realism became an important issue in
1 Gyrgy Georg Lukcs, in
Studies in European literature and theatre, TV and film, politics and philosophy. It played a
Realism: A Sociological crucial role in determining the debates on the nature and functions of art
Survey of the Writings of
Balzac, Stendal, Zola,
and raised questions about the role of the artist. What ensued in those
Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, years was called a battle of styles a battle at one level between realism
was first published by and abstraction. But this was not simply a contest between two oppos-
Britain Hillway Publishing,
1950. It was republished
ing aesthetic modes, tastes or different styles: the polarity in the
by the Merlin Press, artworld at that moment not only needs to be written into a history of
London 1972, p 18. All postwar British art, and European art2 but into a global history of politi-
quotes are from this
edition.
cal polarisation in the Cold War.3
It is important now to remember that in the 1950s people associated
2 It is beyond the scope of
this article to chart these art with particular sets of values and ideologies. Realism was caught in
histories; however, it the centre of an arena: claimed by some, like the art critic David
should be pointed out that Sylvester, who wished to rehabilitate the tradition and autonomy of
British artists were in
contact with art and artists European painting. In the now legendary article of 1954, The Kitchen
from Italy and France in Sink, published in the journal Encounter, he argued:
particular and many
traveled regularly to Italy.
In 1953 Artists for Peace
I think we are going to see a renewal of realist painting with all that this
was launched. The British brings with it of the expression of human feelings. I believe that we are
sponsors included Carel going to get away from formalism and art for arts sake.4
Weight, Josef Herman and
Ruskin Spear. Picasso,
Matisse and Lger
It was associated by others, such as John Berger, who was close to
contributed works to the although not a member of the Communist Party, with democratic values
exhibition. Picasso was in so far as it would help people to know and claim their social rights.
famously refused entry into
the UK for his political And for others again, such as Communist Party members, it was the tool
associations. to create a culture that was socialist and democratic in content and

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2008)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820802012737
146

British in its form.5 Despite these competing expectations, for many it

seemed Realism represented an aesthetic that was not reducible to the
simple political polarities of leftright. The critic Albert Garrett, writing
in Studio, argued the need for Realism, especially today, is undoubtedly
an urgent one.6 While in the Spectator, M H Middleton argued:

Realism is contemplative and emotive, rather than didactic. It finds its

authority in a visual stimulus; it is the result not of an intellectual belief in
3 Serge Guilbaut, How New the social justification of naturalism, but of a need to find in the emphasis
York Stole the Idea of of some aspect of the natural world, re-enforcement for the expression of
Modern Art: Abstract an artistic sensibility.7
Expressionism, Freedom
and the Cold War,
University of Chicago The artist Carel Weight declared, To say that something is realistic is to
Press, Chicago and imply that it is the opposite of decorative, for decoration is a surface
London, 1983, Francis quality.8 Realism suggested a commitment to describing real events, to
Pohl, An American in
Venice: Ben Shan and showing things as they actually are or appear to be. It signified the
United States Foreign concrete and material in opposition to the abstract and ideal.
Policy at the 1954 Venice
Biennale, Art History, 4:1,
The works of European Realists, such as Andr Minaux, Renato
pp 80107 are but two Guttuso and Paul Rebeyrolle, were exhibited in London annually. Four
examples of art history French Realists, an exhibition of works by Andr Minaux, Ginette
published in the 1980s that
charted the effects of
Rapp, Roger Montan and Jean Vinay, took place at the Tate Gallery
aggressive postwar (Millbank) in 1955, and exhibitions of works by Gustave Courbet
American Cultural Policy. shown in 1953 and 1955 (when La Toilette de la Marie was on loan to
4 David Sylvester, The the National Gallery) elicited heated argument about the meaning of
Kitchen Sink, Encounter, Realism that lead C Newton in The Listener to assert, All one can be
December, 1954, p 62
sure of is in Courbets day realist meant not academic: today it means
5 Sam Aaronovitch, non-abstract9 and David Sylvester to claim, Courbet was no realist
Communist Review, June
1952, p 224 He was a romantic, because he believed in his own emotions as the
ultimate authority.10 Artists at the London Group exhibitions, at
6 Albert Garrett, The New
Realism in English Art, Zwemmers, at the Adams Gallery, even the Royal Academy were
Studio, June 1954, discussed as part of the Realist canon. But it was Helen Lessores Beaux
unpaginated, from authors
archive collection
Arts Gallery that became consistently identified as a stronghold for
todays inventive realism11 and the artists associated with the Beaux
7 M H Middleton, The
Spectator, 11 July 1952,
Arts Gallery became known as a Realist coterie. The most conspicuous
p 66 were four painters, the Beaux Arts quartet, Jack Smith, Edward
8 Carel Weight, The Artist,
Middleditch, Derrick Greaves and John Bratby.12 In 1955, Helen
April 1951, p 38 Lessore organised an exhibition of their works at Heffers in Cambridge,
9 C Newton, The Listener, and in 1956 they represented Britain at the Venice Biennale (with Lynn
10 July 1952, unpaginated, Chadwick and Ivon Hitchens). This appeared to be the triumphant
from authors archive vindication of Realism. Basil Taylor commented in The Spectator,
collection
when Jack Smith, John Bratby, Edward Middleditch were chosen by
10 David Sylvester, Round the British Council to appear at the 1956 Biennale, the realists so-
the London Galleries, The
Listener, 18 February called received their certificate of official approval; but it was also its
1954, p 304 swansong.13 1956 was also the year of the first large-scale exhibition of
11 The Times, 6 December American Abstract Expressionist painting at the Tate Gallery and the
1955, unpaginated, from first exhibition of Pop Art in This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel
authors archive collection
Gallery. It was also the year in which John Osbournes Look Back in
12 The Spectator, 5 October Anger was staged at the Royal Court. Crucially too, it was the year of
1955, unpaginated, from
authors archive collection
the Hungarian uprising and Suez. Naming his comment the Battle,
written in January 1956, John Berger remonstrated:
13 Basil Taylor, The
Spectator, 30 December
1955, unpaginated, from What is this movement? The kitchen-sink school? Social Realism? The
authors archive collection name, deprecating or proud, doesnt matter. It is a movement of protest.
 147

A protest of young zeal against old expediency? Partly. A political protest

against capitalism? Partly. A protest against art becoming a snob
commodity? Partly also. But above all it is a protest against the squalor of
indulgent dishonesty and self-deception: the kind of dishonesty which
pretends that five million Communist votes in France do not really reflect
the will of five million people: the kind of pathological self-deception
which claims that the action paintings included in the American exhibi-
tion at the Tate have anything to do with art.14

In this article I shall examine and identify some of the definitions and
practices of Realism in art and exhibitions in Britain between 1952 and
1956 the four years that arguably constituted a Realist moment in
British art.15 It is a moment that has been all but hidden or lost from
mainstream accounts of postwar British art.16
Realism is precariously balanced between two concerns: truth to
Jack Smith, Mother Bathing Child , 1953, oil on board, 1829 1219 mm. Collection: Tate, London. Courtesy the artist

visual experience and the imaginative transformation of reality via the

media hence its incongruities, prevarications and discrepancies. Take
Jack Smiths Mother and Child: the image in no way embellishes
the scene the room, the child, the table covered with things. It is the
picture itself that can be construed as beautiful, not the subject.
The painting does not efface itself before the scene it represents. The
14 John Berger, The Battle, artists attention to the act of painting goes hand in hand with what
The New Statesman and may be construed as indifference to what is represented. The patterns
Nation, 21 January 1956, of the brush, the creamy paint surface, insist upon our awareness of
p 71
the picture, which proclaims itself first as a solid material object and
15 Deborah Cherry and Juliet then allows us access to the contemporary world portrayed. The same
Steyn, The Moment of
Realism, Art Scribe, no 35, occurs in Mother Bathing Child, 1953. Imagination as the power of
June 1982, unpaginated, visualisation dominates: fantasy is banished. Smith saw himself as
from authors archive
collection
simply painting the world around him. Realism was a term he disliked
and was divorced from social or political imperatives. Smith argued,
16 The research for this article
was started some 25 years
Theres got to be a revolution in painting Youve got to go back to
ago when Prof. Deborah living, and the things around you.17 Fellow painter, Edward
Cherry and I proposed and Middleditch, agreed: The point about us is that we paint what we see
provided much of the
research for the exhibition
around us. But we try to give it a new vision.18 However, experience
The Forgotten Fifties, and personal history do not live outside discourse, history or politics.
Graves Gallery, Sheffield, They are fabricated within it. So, inadvertently, their work was drawn
1984.
into an arena of debate and struggle that had greater significance than
17 Jack Smith, quoted in choice of artistic style. The issues pertaining to Realism often involved
Heroes Every Day [no
author], Time, 26 July artists and critics in passionate and didactic exchanges.
In 1952 two exhibitions took place in London which claimed to
2 Edward Middleditch, The Butcher

1954, pp 523

18 Edward Middleditch, reveal the true meaning of Realism. Looking Forward was organised at
Kitchen Sink School, the Whitechapel Art Gallery by John Berger19 and Recent Trends in
Time, 12 March 1956,
p 70
Realist Painting was curated by David Sylvester, Robert Melville and
Peter Watson at the Institute of Contemporary Art.20 David Sylvester
19 Looking Forward,
Whitechapel Art Gallery,
writing retrospectively in 1953 about these two exhibitions commented:
23 September2 November In 1952 the London art world revealed a growing obsession with the
1952 contentious issue of whether a return to realism was desirable and possi-
20 In the same year, Five ble.21 Exhibitions are sites where ideas are mediated and values formed.
Young French Realists was They create meanings by bringing together works in particular ways out
held at the Arcade Gallery,
London. of which narratives emerge. In these exhibitions different claims were
made for Realism and different definitions produced for it. Between
21 David Sylvester, Realism
New and Old, Britain them a map of postwar Realism can be configured and drawn. In the
Today, 1953, p 11 catalogue introduction to Looking Forward, Berger stated:
148

Jack Smith, Mother Bathing Child, 1953, oil on board, 1829 1219 mm. Collection:
Tate, London. Courtesy the artist

The exhibition has a specific aim. That aim is to show a work of painters
22 Looking Forward, who draw their inspiration from a comparatively objective study of the
exhibition catalogue actual world: who inevitably look at a subject through their own person-
[unpaginated]. He curated alities but who are more concerned with the reality of that subject than
two more exhibitions with
with the reality of their feelings about it.22
this title, in 1953 again at
the Whitechapel Art
Gallery and in 1956 at the The young Realists, Berger claimed, look forward to the time when
South London Art Gallery. artists would again be able to communicate beyond artistic or social
 149

lites. He identified a Realist attitude in

which the world rather than the artist is
the subject of art.
Bergers choice of works was broad in
range. His belief that the realist attitude
breaks down the studio wall and projects
the artist into ordinary life23 led him to
select pictures that showed working-class
people at home and at work, and the land-
scape of urban and industrial culture. He
brought together disparate artists whose
attitudes were more or less shared but
whose affiliations to politics were not at
all clear. He focused on British artists,
many of whom had been in the armed
forces and received ex-service grants to
study after the Second World War.
Amongst those included were: Jack Smith,
Edward Middleditch, Derrick Greaves,
John Bratby, George Fullard and Josef
Herman. Berger was congratulated in
Studio for merging the sharply distinctive
individuals into a coherent group.24 The
exhibition tried to foster a group identity,
to create both aesthetic and ideological
alignments through a sense of collective
purpose in which notions of art would be
dissociated from self-expression. For
Berger the vital factor that distinguished
Realism from Naturalism was drawing
the interrogation of appearances that was
to be pursued to its extreme.
Realism in Looking Forward was
interpreted as the depiction of ordinary
life identified with the lives of the work-
ing classes. Art, Berger argued, should
communicate common experience
Edward Middleditch, The Butcher, 1952, oil on board 87 54 cm. directly. It should not only depict famil-
The Estate of Edward Middleditch, courtesy James Hyman iar experience but interpret it with an
Gallery, London understanding of history. When review-
ing Prunella Cloughs exhibition at the
Leicester Galleries in 1953 Berger argued that she:

Studies an object as a geologist might study a stone, finding in its patina

23 Ibid clues to the history of its structure. If she paints a crane she admits the
reasons for its tracery: its open structure is planned to make it mobile: its
24 London Commentary,
Studio, 1952, unpaginated,
mobility demands an implication of space.25
from authors archive
collection The artist is an observer, a recorder of what exists out there. From scru-
25 John Berger, Machine-Life tiny of the particular, an artist can reveal typical truths about the world.
Painting, The New
Statesman and Nation,
Closely following the writing of Lukcs, Berger claimed that the
18 April 1953 typical character was one whose actions and circumstances defined and
150

embodied the social and historical forces of which he or she forms a

part. A synthesis between the particular and the general is achieved. In
the words of Lukcs:
True great realism depicts men and society as complete entities, instead of
showing merely one or the other of their aspects. Measured by this crite-
rion, artistic trends determined by either exclusive introspection or exclu-
sive extraversion equally impoverish and distort reality. Thus realism
means a three dimensionality, an all-roundedness, that endows with inde-
pendent characters and human relationships.26

Accordingly, Berger reasoned that there is a necessary link between

appearance and reality. By revealing this link the real relationships and
structures of society can be represented and understood. Hence for
Berger, Realism is a form of art that can go beyond mere appearances
and discover the inner workings of its object. Through the artists selec-
tion and presentation of the typical, the fundamental social and political
forces at work in society can be represented.
The depiction of the ordinary, the familiar and the working-class
subject took on particular meanings in the 1950s when the cultural distinc-
tiveness of working-class life was under scrutiny. In Representations of
Working Class Life, Stuart Laing argues that in the 1950s the sociological
analysis of working class life presented its material in a descriptive, evoc-
ative and experiential form in its effects as a kind of realist writing.27
Richard Hoggarts influential book, The Uses of Literacy, attempted
through dramatisation and narration to convey the reader directly
inside working-class culture. He attempts to describe working-class expe-
rience and to capture its essence: we must say that it is the sense of
concrete life. A life whose main stress is on the intimate, the sensory, the
detailed and the personal.28 Hoggarts description of working-class life
corresponds closely with Realist paintings in which the paint itself is
applied thickly, is dense and concrete and the subjects are derived from
the details or interstices of working-class life.
The discourses of Realist art which came from the political left
assumed that there was an authentic working-class experience, a singular
identity that was observable, knowable and transposable into paint.
Realism was formulated as a transparent medium which depicts and
captures a world out there. The artist takes as subject a particular slice
of life and makes a study of it.
Ghisha Koenig was exemplary in this respect. She visited factories
daily, making preparatory drawings in sketch books. She drew systemat-
ically, observing, scrutinising and studying the people at work, and their
26 Georg Lukcs, Studies in relationships to each other and to the machinery that surrounded them.
European Realism, op cit, She made hundreds of drawings on site. On returning to her studio, she
p6
would transpose these drawings onto long scrolls of paper. Details, atti-
27 Stuart Laing, tudes, poses, people, machine parts. Once transposed these would be
Representations of
Working Class Life 1957
imaginatively recomposed and created in clay as free-standing sculptural
1964, Macmillan, London, groups or in relief. Finally, they were cast into bronze. This elaborate
1986 procedure amounted to a work ethic shared by other artists. John
28 Richard Hoggart, The Uses Berger, for instance, clocked in daily with the workers at a bell factory in
of Literacy, was written in Croydon, South London, where he made a series of drawings and paint-
the late 1940s and
published by Chatto & ings. When the South Bank was being built for the Festival of Britain in
Windus, in 1957. 1951, he went day after day to draw at the building site.
 151

The representation of the working class was in and for itself

claimed as radical in providing, it was thought, a counter to the domi-
nant view that class consciousness was being eroded in the evolution of
capitalism without class. In an article entitled Capitalism without
Class? Westergaard argued that the structure of Western societies was
being recast in the mould of middle-class values and lifestyle and that
the claim of the end of ideology was a mirage. Power, he argued,
no longer derives from the accumulation of private property, but from
control over bureaucratic organisations.29 In his essay contribution to
The Forgotten Fifties, Looking Forward, John Berger recalled: We
saw that art was not exempt from class distinctions.30 During the
29 John Westergaard,
1950s inequality in income increased. Old disparities took on new
Capitalism without forms, or, as Professor Galbraith was later to put it, private affluence
Class?, New Left Review, was accompanied by public squalor.
1964, p 30
While Sylvester and Berger could concur in the claim that Realism
3 John Bratby, Dustbins, 1954, oil on panel, 112 101 cm, Royal College of Art Collection

30 John Berger, Looking was the depiction of social life, that was their only point of agreement.
Forward, in The Forgotten
Fifties, exhibition They differed in their interpretation of the means, articulation and
catalogue, p 46 subject of that reality. Sylvester wished to sever class consciousness

John Bratby, Dustbins, 1954, oil on panel, 112 101 cm, Royal College of Art Collection
152

from Realism and to remove from it any suggestion of class politics and
ideology. The theories of capitalism without class claimed that with
economic growth and class mobility, class conflict was becoming rapidly
out of date. Art criticism complied to produce a version of the postwar
consensus in which ideological differences, class divisions and structural
inequalities were being apparently eroded. The universal man was
being created.
In the exhibition Recent Trends in Realist Painting the selectors did
not show pictures which were concerned specifically with working-class
experience but instead chose works that were facing up to appearances.
In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Melville, Watson and
Sylvester stated that they had chosen a cross section, inevitably arbi-
trary of what has been done in recent years by painters who have been
prepared to face up to appearances.31 Realism in this context becomes
the antidote to abstraction. It was situated in the context of the grand
tradition of figurative art. The exhibition included works by Alberto
Giacometti, Francis Gruber and Francis Bacon. The exhibition gave
prominence to the art of Bacon in a medley of diverse French Realists
such as Minaux, Reyberolle, Bernard Buffet and Balthus along with
English painters such as Lucian Freud, William Coldstream and Graham
Sutherland.
Two years later in his The Kitchen Sink article, Sylvester was to crit-
31 David Sylvester, Recent icise Smith and Bratby for lacking the ability to draw things so they
Trends in Realist Art,
unpaginated, from authors
looked solid32 and to accuse them also of producing a social not a
archive collection visual realism.33 Realism becomes a way of judging artistic excellence
32 David Sylvester, The
a far remove from Bergers version that it helps people to perceive and
Kitchen Sink, Encounter, interpret what was most affecting them in their daily lives.
December, 1954, p 63 The debates which formed the sub-texts of these two exhibitions
4 Bernard Buffet, The Revolver , 1949, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008

33 Ibid, p 62 concerned the nature and function of art. Berger argued for an art that

Bernard Buffet, The Revolver, 1949, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2008
 153

would reveal the truth about society to itself. Melville, Sylvester and
Watson were concerned about the affective experience of art. We are
drawn into an aesthetic arena in which Bergers Marxist Humanism was
pitted against a fashionable existential angst.
Bacon was for Sylvester the Realist artist par excellence. But this
claim did not go unchallenged. Berger in 1954 argued that Bacons art
could not be Realist as it contained no concrete criticism of society and
did not offer any alternatives, structures though which reality could be
transformed. The conditions portrayed by Bacon led the spectator, in
Bergers view, to escape into existential nothingness:

If Bacons paintings began to deal with any of the real tragedy of our
time, they would shriek less. They would be less jealous of their horror
and they would never hypnotise. We, with all our consciences stirred,
would be too much involved to afford that luxury.34

Berger, in common with the Communist Party, held a notion of art

whose meanings could be shared, an art that creates its own audiences,
and an art in which the subjectivity of artists does not act as a barrier
to understanding. He opposed those artists who presented the spectator
with a rare, strange and exotic vision or, as he considered Bacon to
do, created an art of private fantasy that he believed was anti-humanist.
The illustrator and Communist Party member Paul Hogarth declared,
over-personalised and socially irresponsible art is encouraged as never
before, isolating the artist even more from the general public.35 Peter
de Francia was concerned to evolve a pictorial language that avoided
both, as he was to put it, subjectivism and all types of objective
formalism which through over-subjectivisation lead into abstraction.36
E P Thompson, a doyen of the New Left, argued that modernism was
the pessimistic culture of the bourgeoisie that prevented people from
34 John Berger, Francis knowing and demanding their social rights. Modernist art was for
Bacon, The New Thompson:
Statesman and Nation,
1954, p 11
the ideological defence of a dying civilisation. By their injection of
35 Paul Hogarth, Humanism pessimism, their dose of mystification and their continual avocation of
versus Despair in British
art Today, Marxist Art
withdrawal and retreat they are preventing the fresh air of the twentieth
Quarterly, 1955, p 37. century from reaching our veins.37
Hogarth in an act of
solidarity went to
Yugoslavia to help build
Bourgeois aesthetics maintains despair and weeps for the collapse of a
the railways after the war. world and the destruction of culture, whereas Marxists, Lukcs
He was an active argued: watch the birth-pangs of a new world and assist in mitigating
Communist Party member.
the pains of labour.38
36 Peter de Francia, The While the left sought an outward-looking art that would engage with
Forgotten Fifties, op cit,
p 48 social life to transform it, Sylvester valued Bacons art precisely for its
inwardness, artistic integrity and its subjective, flamboyant treatment
37 E P Thompson, Comments
on a Peoples Culture, Our of human appearance.39 It was during the 1950s that Sylvester started
Time, October, 1947, p 38 his campaign in support of Bacon. In 1953 Sylvester argued that Bacon
38 Georg Lukcs, Studies in was above all concerned with the human condition and that he dealt
European Realism, op cit, with it:
p2

39 David Sylvester, Realism Not at the literal level of observation but imaginatively crystallizing the
New and Old, op cit, p 10 conflicts into mythical figures In Bacons noiseless and oppressive
40 Ibid, p 11 spaces (as in our lives today) man confronts the unendurable.40
154

In his article, Realism New and Old, Sylvester argued that Bacon was a
Realist in so far as his works confront the reality of a world that is
hostile, violent and full of pain. Humanity is anguished, solitary and
fearful. Echoing the philosophical outlook of French existentialism,
Sylvester praised Bacon for imaginatively rendering anxiety. Reality is
Angst, the modern condition of anxiety. Robert Melville concurred:

Everything I am saying is meaningless if there is no other mode of knowl-

edge than the rational It seems to me that the symbols of Bacon
arouse a confused echo or perverse compound of feelings. The substance
which he derives from paint seems to work directly upon the nerves,
communicates, so to speak, with our own substance, matter to matter,
like a secret coupling.41

The value of Bacons art lies in its power to expound the modern condi-
tion. In Bacons art humanity is doomed to suffer, it is hopeless: individ-
ual problems cannot be solved through political will or action.
The shifts in critical standards were by the late 1950s in a process of
redefinition, making Realism in all of its guises vulnerable. Certain
works like those of Bacon were relabelled so that the offending cate-
gory of Realism should not taint them. Realism had come to represent
everything that was uncreative, inhibiting to artistic freedom, provincial
and ideological. By the latter part of the 1950s, Realism had become
associated with Socialism, which was itself connected with repression
and the Soviet bloc, while the free-market economy of America was
linked with freedom. There was a crossing of discourse in which free
choice, in the sense of purchasing power, became linked with the notion
of the free individual inhabiting a free society.
Abstract art purported to be the art of freedom. The American art
historian Meyer Shapiro, visiting London in 1956 at the time of the Tate
exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, wrote in The Listener: The
artists freedom is located more narrowly and more forcefully than ever
self.42 Abstract painting was positioned in a diametric contrast to
Realism that was proposed by its opponents as limiting to the creative
freedom of the artist. The artist and critic Patrick Heron in 1955 accused
Berger as possessing a proselytizing zeal, and the passion that drags art
41 Robert Melville, A Note
on the Recent Painting of in the wake of politics from familiar pulpits as the agent of the rgime.43
Francis Bacon, World G F Hudson, reviewing Herons book The Changing Forms of Art,
Review, 1952, p 31
argued:
42 Meyer Shapiro, The
Young American Painters Modern art is the art of a free society, and by freedom of the individual,
of Today, The Listener,
January, 1956, pp 1467
it lives in all its range and variety. The reader of Reveille (used by Berger
as non-comprehending low-brow) may not be among the connoisseurs of
43 Patrick Heron, Art is contemporary painting, but at least they democratically let it live, which
Autonomous in the 20th
Century, Britain Today, is more than the Bergers of the world are willing for it to do.44
September, 1955, p 291

44 G F Hudson, review of
In sum, Realism became identified with tyranny and authoritarian
Patrick Herons The regimes. A space was being cleared for an American version of modern-
Changing Forms of Art, ism. Abstract art hailed from the very country which Cold War rhetoric
The Twentieth Century,
February 1956, p 207
claimed as free while at the same time Senator McCarthys notorious
purges held sway. By 1959 Berger could write with conviction, Abstract
45 John Berger, Staying
Socialist, New Statesman, Expressionism and New Dadaism are sweeping the field. Nowhere in
31 October 1959, p 577 Western Europe is there a realist stronghold left.45
 155

This was also the first decade of the Arts Council, established after
the war in the wake of CEMA (the Council for the Encouragement of the
Arts). In 1945, Sir John Anderson, Chancellor of the Exchequer,
reported to the House of Commons the need to set up a Council to
encourage knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts.46 The
primary task of state patronage was to promote artistic excellence. These
standards were claimed as a universalism of the best, a diffusion of an
authoritative consensus, fabricated by a patrician Oxbridge class. The
Arts Council, in step with the ideology of consensus politics, also
embraced the special relationship with the USA.
In 1951, the American Government took the view that Cultural
activities are an indispensable tool of propaganda. In the same year The
Times Literary Supplement pondered:

Perhaps America is the only country capable of providing the West with
an ideology It is difficult to think that the West would adopt any other
than an American or an American sponsored one.47

The Arts Council complied and cooperated with the Tate Gallery in the
show Modern Art in the United States with a very generous subsidy
from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.48 An art that is time-
less, free from ideology came to be associated with the USA and was in
reality the art of the NATO alliance. This is not to invalidate the
contribution of individual American artists to twentieth-century art but
rather to remind us of the ways in which cultural practices worked to
secure American cultural hegemony in which postwar Europe became
an American settlement.
There is much we can now criticise about the cultural politics, art
criticism and visual art of the time: the failure of nerve on the part of the
Labour Party to pursue a radical social democratic project and instead to
go along with a politics of consensus; the complicity of successive
governments with American foreign policy; the inadequacies of critical
responses from the Left to the gulag; the archaic dogmatism of the
Communist Party for whom the aim of art was to set:

Problems and themes which serve the working class movement. While
not evading the specific or specialist problems, the themes of our work
must be chosen not on abstract grounds but because they represent real
problems.49

46 Hansard, House of But who failed to recognise either the heterogeneity of working-class life
Commons Debates, 12 or the specificity of Art. Theirs can be understood as nostalgia for a
June 1945, unpaginated,
from authors archive
quasi-transparent form of knowledge, free from illusion, free from error.
collection Their theory rested on the Leninist assumption that one political group
47 Times Literary
has the absolute claim to being the true representative of a class. The
Supplement, 24 August left intellectual spoke and was acknowledged as having the right to
1951, unpaginated, from speak the master truth. To be an artist seemed to have meant being the
authors archive collection
consciousness or conscience of us all.
48 Arts Council, 11th Report Realist art has been criticised as reducing or limiting analysis to the
1955/56, p 36
observation of the surface appearance of things and thus paradoxically
49 Sam Aaronovitch, The evading the real. Evasions and ambiguities are inherent to Realist theo-
Partys Cultural Work,
Communist Review, ries and practices. These shortcomings in part account for its demise in
January 1952, p 217 the visual arts and were confirmed by the massive import of American
156

modernism that convinced a new generation of artists and critics, as well

as public institutions, to embrace what was to become the dominant
movement of abstraction.
At the same time as making these criticisms we need also to recognise
the potential value of Realism (as TV, film and theatre amply evidence),
as a cultural practice in the postwar period when it worked in ways that
allowed representations into the domain of art of contemporary social
experience that offered critical alternatives to the prevailing ideology.
When Realist images in their various manifestations entered the
domain of art they mixed and mingled with the social and political
discourses and by so doing bestowed validity upon those whose experi-
ences they touched. We find Realism in different ways, in texts and
images, embracing some of the hopes, contradictions and social and
moral imperatives of the postwar years.
In remembering the debates that surrounded Realism and the images
made in its name, what is ultimately most important now is to learn
what was then possible and judge what is necessary for our own cultural
practices and values a relevance made all the more urgent and vivid by
so-called Reality television and the dearth of a critical language with
which to deal with it. The passion and intelligence of art criticism during
the Realist moment is striking. It was not afraid to ask what gives Art
value a question nowadays all too often eschewed by criticism and left
to the judgment of administrators of the instrumentalist agenda.