Visual Culture and Class: Britain in the 1930's: Laing Art Gallery

A talk on culture and class in Britain in the 1930s by Ysanne Holt, Professor of Art History at Northumbria University. Issues of social class and the responsibilities of artists were widely debated in the 1930s, against a background of political upheaval and economic slump. As the painter William Coldstream commented, It was no longer the thing to be an artist delighting in isolation.  Artists engagements resulted in the radical Artists International Association, the upsurge in Realist forms of documentary, and the utopian ambitions of certain forms of Modernism. As this talk reveals, surrounding critical debate helped shape the response of artists in Britain to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and to developing forms of visual culture throughout the 1930s.