British Artists You Should Know

Description

Does British art have its own character and what does it mean to be British? An opportunity to explore some well-loved, well-known artists alongside ones who are less known and to interrogate notions of Britishness at the same time. How British is the art of Hockney, for instance, who spent many formative years in California, or that of Turner who loved travel and who inspired the French Impressionists? How have preoccupations with class, gender, and ethnicity affected the education and reception of artists and how were these perceived shortcomings exploited by artist rivals?  Beginning with that eighteenth century documenter of British life, the sometimes xenophobic, William Hogarth right up to Sonia Boyce who has been commissioned to represent Britain at the prestigious 2022 Venice Biennale, the course will look at the likes of Hepworth who popularised abstraction and pioneered the void in British sculpture, Lucian Freud who arrived in Britain as part of the Kindertransport scheme and became one of the defining artists of his generation, his rival Francis Bacon who captured the horrors of the postwar Zeitgeist, as well as their successors who sought to make British art cool: from Pop artists through to yBas such as Tracey Emin.