A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55

"This was the book that convinced me as an undergraduate to pursue a PhD. In the 1980s when I was a student, the study of modern British art was still very rudimentary. There was really only one broad study by Charles Harrison called English Art and Modernism , based on the premise that British Modernism is merely where British art intersected with French art—early 20th-century abstraction, impressionism and the like—and it reaches its culmination with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in the 1930s, when these and other artists in Britain became part of an international movement with Mondrian and others. It’s a brilliantly written book but was a very formalist, teleological account. Moreover, it was written in the 1960s during that Greenbergian moment in art criticism. I think it’s telling that Harrison could never do the second planned volume; to my mind Modernism simply doesn’t work that way. “Victorian Britain was a very different place from modern Britain. Artists can provide the signposts that help us to get from one to the other” David Mellor, by contrast, is a historian of modern British art in an altogether different register, because he sees it as part of a much broader, intersecting culture. The artists and the type of art he was talking about in his book had simply been completely marginalised since that moment in the 1960s because they didn’t fit that neat Franco-American idea of what modern progressive painting was all about. Mellor was finding a way of recuperating a conservative, traditionalist and very particular kind of British-inflected modern art. In doing so, he was uncovering lost subject matter and important historical concerns that were either deemed irrelevant previously or were outright eradicated by Harrison’s formalist account. I say he’s recuperating the artists, but one thing that is very clear and quite refreshing is that he is admiring of the art itself. Not to say that he’s one of those art historians who writes about a subject because he or she thinks they’re ‘great,’ necessarily. Artists are seen for their significance for their moment and the way they open up questions about the wider culture. Mellor has an extraordinary breadth of cultural references. So while he may be talking about a painter, he can relate that artist’s work to photography and film and in later studies to television too."