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The Evolving Definition of British Art
Works by Hurvin Anderson, David Hockney, Cecily Brown, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and others reveal the breadth of contemporary art in Great Britain.
H urvin Anderson has described himself as “the English boy in the Jamaican conversation”. This refers to the fact that he was the eighth and youngest child of parents who were part of the Windrush generation: the wave of Caribbean citizens who moved to Britain after the Second World War. The only one of his siblings born outside Jamaica, Anderson grew up in Birmingham. He claims, however, that his imagination was fired by family tales of the island he calls “the other place”, and questions of identity have pervaded his career.
In After a Road to Rome I (2006), on offer in The Contemporary Evening Auction at Sotheby’s London on 9 October, he paints St Catherine Parish, an industrial area in south-eastern Jamaica, at night time. Using diaphanous washes of inky black and emerald green, Anderson depicts unfinished houses and thick rainforest foliage. The surface thinness suggests the scene isn’t quite real or is based on a hazy memory. There’s a tension between recognition and disconnection, something exacerbated by the lack of human presence.
The work’s title reflects the context of its creation: during an artistic residency at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, where Anderson took inspiration from Nicolas Poussin’s painting in the collection, Landscape with Travellers Resting (1648), also known as “A Roman Road”. Both pictures feature a broad road cutting through a landscape – yet where Poussin set his scene in ancient Rome, Anderson located his in his memories of, and feelings about, St Catherine Parish (painting it some three years after his last visit to Jamaica). This is as much a mental landscape as a physical one.
“I don’t know it, and I know it,” he says of his parents’ homeland. “I have this romantic vision of [Jamaica], and a lot of [my] painting is fighting that romance”.
After a Road to Rome I features alongside works by a host of other British artists – including another depopulated landscape, David Hockney’s L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime (1968). The similarities between the two paintings largely end there.
Rendered in brilliant colour in the middle of the day, Hockney’s scene focuses on the modernist hotel, L’Arbois – and a verdant pine tree in front of it – in the small coastal town of Sainte-Maxime in the French Riviera.
It was painted during a visit by the artist and his then-boyfriend, Peter Schlesinger, to the home of the Oscar-winning film director, Tony Richardson, not far from St Tropez. Hockney travelled all around the local area, voraciously photographing spots and vistas that interested him.
L'Arbois, Sainte-Maxime was one of four paintings he created based on those images. This was Hockney’s first serious use of his own photographs as inspiration – a watershed moment, given how frequently he would adopt this practice in the decades ahead.
The four French paintings succeeded the sun-drenched pictures that Hockney made of Californian swimming pools in the mid-1960s. In their burgeoning naturalism, they also heralded a new direction in his art, evident in his famous double portraits of the late 1960s and early 1970s (such as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy at the Tate).
Hockney is an alumnus of the Royal College of Art, as is another artist represented in the Contemporary Evening Auction: Bridget Riley. Aged 93, she is six years his senior. She made her name in the early 1960s with abstract black-and-white paintings that comprised beguiling patterns of geometric shapes. These saw her become a key figure of the Op Art movement (so called because of the optical tricks that its works played on viewers).
In Gaillard 2 (1989), Riley showed an undiminished gift for beguiling patterns, using diagonal bands of rhombi to create a dynamic sense of movement from bottom left to top right. She also showed a mastery of colour unseen in her breakthrough works. Azure, vermilion, blazing orange, warm amber and emerald green: one after another, each pigment glimmers from the mosaic-like surface.
The gaillard, incidentally, was a Renaissance dance, much enjoyed by Queen Elizabeth I, and it offers an apt title for Riley’s painting, given the sense of motion.
Cecily Brown’s title for Satan’s Waitin’ (2008-9), in turn, calls to mind the altarpieces of Hieronymus Bosch. As does the painting’s vertical format. Veering between abstraction and figuration, Brown challenges the viewer to decipher infernal forms from her frenzied yet meticulously constructed web of painterly marks.
Three other British works from the Evening Auction and its accompanying Contemporary Day Auction on 10 October are worth mentioning – all of them portraits, of sorts. In Corner (2011), the sculptor Antony Gormley used cast iron blocks to reconstruct the mass of a human body, and create a solitary figure in a contemplative pose.
Sahara Longe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye – with the paintings, Edwina and Militant Pressures, respectively – both depict Black female subjects and thereby challenge longstanding Western tropes. Across the centuries, very few subjects of this type have been revered by artists in the grand manner of traditional portraiture.
In Militant Pressures, a black ballerina fills the picture plane. Dressed in a leotard and emerald tights, she exudes tranquility.
There’s nothing intrinsically British that unites the aforementioned works. However, what they share are creators who have challenged conventions and pushed artistic boundaries. As Gormley himself put it, art should aim to “change things. If it was immediately acceptable, it would not be doing [its] job”.
