Over a meal yesterday we were listening to the radio, and I remarked to my wife that almost none of the bands about which there was discussion were at all familiar to me. “I think I must have skipped a generation,” I said to her. “Well …. two actually!” was her response. Oh dear! She was probably right, although I am not all that much older than she is.
Reflecting on this exchange later it struck me that I have also missed out on a generation of artists. (Or perhaps at least two!) When we were studying art in school the art history lessons didn’t go beyond the impressionists (just as history lessons didn’t take us beyond the Great War.) I don’t think that this was necessarily because our teacher had never heard of any artists working more recently than that, but I do suspect that there was not a lot of accepted punditry for him to rely on. He wanted to know what the examiners would want to hear, and there was no body of established opinion about his contemporaries on which exam questions would be based. He played it safe!
Consequently I was never familiarised with the work of people such as William Coldstream, or Augustus and Gwen John, or Laura Knight. The St. Ives group never featured on my horizon, and it was only when I got to university that John Bratby impinged on my consciousness, and I think that Bomberg was a name I had heard, but about whom I knew nothing.
In recent years I have become aware of the huge gap in my knowledge of the development of art that I have been trying to fill, but instead of the kind of systematic survey that school provides the process has consisted of sporadic “raids” on history, as occasion and motivation provide. Oddly, I now find that I probably know more about the development of Italian art between the wars, and more about American art in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, than I do about British painting in those years.