There is, I would guess, a sizable group of people who, despite their routine sympathy with internationally recognized (read Franco-American) achievements in twentieth-century art, find the thought of a large British retrospective something less than exciting. As with the Whitney Biennials, a vaguely purgatorial aura might be said to surround the prospect. Both types of exhibitions provide “opportunities” not to be missed, yet they do this without promising the stuff of deep aesthetic challenge. In fact, they almost guarantee the very opposite, which is to say a deployment of trends and some insignificant degree of titillation, the latter felt most keenly in contexts having nothing to do with art.
The current British twentieth-century retrospective at the Royal Academy in London—which is supplemented by a rather meek show entitled “Salon de refusés” at the nearby Albemarle Gallery—does comparatively little to improve the image of modern British painting and sculpture.[1] Rather than undertake much in the way of revision, the retrospective prefers instead to provide a comprehensive overview of artists and movements that are recognized by nonspecialists but not normally available for examination in depth.
To be sure, there are some biases of omission and some rather weird internal emphases in the show, expressed in what appear to be overt acts of over- or under-representation. For example, the two periods of internationalism (read abstraction), in the 19 30s and 1960s, are deliberately neglected, which marks the nearest thing in the exhibition to a modified perspective on modern British
