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Ceri Thomas explores the state of British art under an unravelling
Union Jack.

British Art
Julian Freeman



Southbank Publishing
£8.99 Paperback
ISBN 1870206762


Even before one gets to the opening words of the first chapter – ‘Bloody foreigners’ – the reader is confronted by a book cover sporting an unruly, wavy version of the Union Jack and commendations from no less than three senior, male luminaries. The first of these, Robin Simon, announces that Julian Freeman’s 366-page volume amounts to ‘[a]n irresistible torrent of eloquence, knowledge and enthusiasm. A book to listen to, to learn from and above all, to enjoy…’ Indeed, some sixteen torrential chapters follow, all delivered in an often highly conversational style and all teeming with sometimes quirky information and unashamedly partisan opinions. You almost feel that the author is a television presenter: I was certainly reminded of Matthew Collings’s book This is Modern Art (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999) and Andrew Graham-Dixon’s British Art (BBC Books, 1996), both of which accompanied a television series and neither of which is cited by Freeman.

   The coverage concentrates upon the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with some reference to earlier landmark works by the likes of Holbein and Hogarth. However, the material is not arranged chronologically and so departs from the approach of earlier art historical surveys – see for example William Gaunt’s A Concise History of English Painting (Thames & Hudson, 1964) or Frances Spalding’s British Art since 1900 (Thames & Hudson, 1986). Instead, and as one might expect from a brand new publication, its contents are considered according to theme, geography and category.

   The book’s topicality is further reinforced by the provocative themes of beneficial immigration (especially though not exclusively in chapters one, entitled ‘Border Crossings: A Foreword’, twelve, ‘Your Ugly Mug’, and thirteen, ‘Hashed, Bashed and Despatched: Sculpture’) and habitual war (described in chapter fifteen as ‘never… entirely absent from modern Britain’).

   In terms of geography, Freeman devotes separate, consecutive chapters to (the whole of) Ireland, Scotland and Wales – but not England – and thus acknowledges yet more areas of lively debate in the wake of the Northern Ireland settlement and the implementation of devolution. His treatment of these geographical parts deserves a closer look, not least because although Spalding’s pre-devolution survey did acknowledge ‘the overriding supremacy of London’, and the importance of Irish and Scottish art, Welsh art remained invisible for her.

   The inclusion of Wales by Freeman is, therefore, a step in the right direction but a very flawed one. The first page of chapter five, ‘Wales’, begins with a controversial opening quote by David Bell (superficially contextualised only twenty pages later) and a troubling definition of the principality/country as an amalgam of ‘the topographical extremities of Scotland, the wildernesses of Ireland, the Yorkshire Moors, the Derbyshire Dales and a few other spots thrown in’, that is, from the perspective of a landscape tourist.
This is subsequently compounded by factual inaccuracies surrounding the formation and composition of the Rhondda Group and 56 Group. For example, the Welsh-born Ernest Zobole is wrongly described as a ‘blow-in’ whilst the genuine ‘blow-in’ Michael Edmonds is given the surname Edwards. In a previous chapter, David Tress is misleadingly described as a Welshman. Further on, Ceri Richards’s middle name is misspelled twice, though this may be an oversight by the picture researcher, as indeed the mis-attribution of a painting by Wilf Roberts to Will Roberts almost certainly is.

   There are two other major curiosities in his take on Wales.
Firstly, there is the reference to ‘more recent re-evaluations’ and ‘a
very particular, unusual and very young art history’, yet the only book reference is to Eric Rowan’s now outdated Art in Wales: An Illustrated History, 1850-1980 (Welsh Arts Council/University of Wales Press, 1985). Secondly, Wales is allocated as many illustrations as Ireland and Scotland put together. In fact, the balance of high quality, full-colour illustrations throughout the book – including those in the chapters on landscape painting, print-making,
industry and portraiture – can seem rather at odds with the text.

   Nevertheless, the author comes into his own when, for instance,
defending drawing (in chapter two) and attacking much of post-
Coldstream minimalism and conceptual art, the YBAs (Young British Artists) and the contemporary art scene, none of which is illustrated – see chapters two, eleven, thirteen and sixteen. Accompanying the peak of this attack in the final chapter is the ‘individual versus the state’ theme which Freeman introduced in chapter one. This matches the spirit of the book in its entirety and its protagonist, who is duly established as the latest in a line of highly distinctive cultural commentators to have emerged in the last decade.

   In short, one is left to feel that Freeman, in his brave examination of British art and what he sees as its complexity and fragmentation since 1945, has taken his readers/listeners not on a sedate ‘… walk round the rusty pier’ so much as on a bracing, roller-coaster journey through the flotsam and jetsam of a shape-shifting (and perhaps unravelling) union flag.