More about painting

I've been enjoying the British Masters series on BBC4. Oxbridge Art Historian Dr. James Fox stares at symbolically thorny twigs in front of a sunset glow and roves up and down damp northern streets. He also talks about British (for this, read English) Painters of the 20th Century. He sees an unheralded and almost-forgotten 'golden age' of figurative painting stretching from the end of the Edwardian era until the suicide of Keith Vaughan in the late 1970s, taking in Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton and Lucian Freud, after which it all became about pickled sharks, diamond skulls and money.

Cray Fields - Graham Sutherland

Bonfire Night, Hay Bluff I - David Inshaw

(Except that it didn't: Peter Blake, Paula Rego, John Bellany, Stephen Conroy and Stephen Cambell all carried on the painterly tradition that Dr. Fox celebrates, but apparently they don't count cos they're a. women b. Scottish or c. some other reason.)

The Forest - Graham Sutherland

I love the art of most of these artists; I definitely respond to their 'Britishness'. And they deserve more international recognition. In some ways I like Dr. Fox's ludicrousness. I like the fact he flies in the face of received opinion. But his loose way with facts is quite shocking for an Oxbridge professor (e.g. on Keith Vaughan: he didn't kill himself out of despair because the conceptual artists had edged him out, as the program strongly intimates; in fact he had cancer and was at the end of a long and successful career.) Still, nice to see some of my favourite painters on the telly.