Throughout the wretched process of British withdrawal from the European Union I have tended to avoid using this blog as a sounding board for my political opinions. Occasionally I have touched on the subject, but there have been three reasons why I have not thought it appropriate. In the first place the majority of my readers are not from the UK. Then, the primary reason for my writing has always been to look at my situation as an artist and to comment on the relationship between my life as an artist and other aspects of life. Finally, the entire question of British withdrawal from the EU tends to make me very angry indeed. The debate (if it can be called that) from beginning to end has taken place at an appallingly low level of information and argument. Having lost the referendum I have felt that little could be gained by my continuing to sound off about it. At the point at which the British government has finally taken us out of the Union, however, I feel that I want to make some statement about the misconceived nature of the entire process, specifically in relation to art.
A great deal has been made over the past three years or so about British particularism. The points on which we are alleged to be different from “Europeans” have been repeated ad nauseam, despite their often being simply historically or conceptually wrong. This is not an appropriate occasion on which to review that entire sorry business, but I do want to make one very strong assertion. The history of art in Britain has always been bound up intimately with that in other European countries, so that it makes little sense at all to speak of the history of “British” art.*
The following observations are in no particular order. A large proportion of British painters have spent time in Italy, and were influenced heavily by that experience. Turner is perhaps the most eminent of these. John Constable was received earlier and more warmly in Paris than he was in London. Continental artists (I have in mind especially Poussin) were highly regarded as models by their British colleagues in the Romantic movement. The title “Pre-Raphaelite” speaks for itself. In the early-modern period British painting was almost completely derivative. After the Great War British painting became almost completely deferential with regard to Parisian models, lately under the influence of the critic Roger Fry. One figure for whom I have always had great regard is Stanley Spencer, and he took as two his great inspirations Botticelli and Piero della Francesca. I could go on.
In looking at this question, of course, it would be one-sided to overlook the significance of the number of painters from continental Europe who spent significant parts of their careers in Britain. The story extends at least from Holbein onwards, and included (just off the top of my head) Van Dyke, Monet and Van Gogh. Recently I asked, during a visit to Italy, why the work of contemporary Italian artists was so difficult to find in Italy, and was told in reply that they are all in London!
The story will continue, of course. The ill-conceived, narrowly nationalist populism that has led to British withdrawal from the EU will not sever this connection at the level of the practise of the arts. We may have made an “exit” from the institutions of the European Union, but British artists will not be cutting their historic ties with their continental colleagues.
*I’m going to limit my remarks here to the history of painting, but I can’t resist the opportunity to point out that Chaucer spoke fluent Italian, worked in the country for several years, and drew much of the inspiration for his famous Canterbury Tales from Italian literary sources. Shakespeare, no less, adapted the plots of a large proportion of his plays from writers such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. A theory that I take seriously, maintains that, so prevalent is Italian influence in his writing, the famous “missing years” of his career were probably spent in Italy.
Very interesting.