The 'Britishness' of British art: Landscape, art and identity, 1951--1956

This study investigates how the production and discussion of landscape art in Britain during the period 1951–1956 can be related to the larger issue of nationalism during the Cold War era. These five years represented a transitional period in British social and political history; a term announced by the post-war civic optimism of the Festival of Britain and concluded by the governmental instability resulting from the Suez Crisis. Throughout the Second World War, and immediately afterwards, the Neo-Romantic landscape art of artists such as John Minton, Paul Nash and John Piper was celebrated as an established symbol of Britishness, while the national topography itself was viewed nostalgically as the hallowed ground of Shakespeare's “sceptre'd isle”. By the mid-1950s, however, the threat of atomic war had raised doubts as to even the probability of a future, and the old narratives of a timeless and inviolable land were shaken in a very physical sense. At the same time, the influence of American art and culture, the expanding global media and the new frontiers of science opened up fresh possibilities that challenged the isolationist preservation of an indigenous culture.; This dissertation examines the changing status of landscape art in the early 1950s through the examination of works that represented Britain at the Festival of Britain, the Venice Biennale and the Ten Years of English Landscape Painting exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The impact of developments in scientific technology on artist's perceptions of the environment is investigated through the Growth and Form exhibition, held at the ICA in 1951, and through an evaluation of the spiral paintings of Victor Pasmore. The works of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Francis Newton Souza, John Minton and Derrick Greaves are explored to show the ways that paintings, photographs and sculpture not only contributed to the discourse of collective identity but acted in the perpetuation of social divisions of gender, race and class; while the canvases of Graham Sutherland, L. S. Lowry, and Peter Lanyon reveal representations of landscape in the 1950s to be sites of anxiety, rather than security, concerning national, political and regional identity.