Transatlantic Feedback: Pop and Formalism in 1960’s British Abstract Art

Supervisor: Professor Roger Wilson

My research project focuses on the relationship between popular culture and formalist criticism in British abstract art of the 1960’s. It is concerned with defining the manner by which specific artworks, while not pictorially referencing the culture of this time, could still be demonstrated to embody it. It presents the argument that this abstraction was envisaged as a participatory structure, socially implicating the viewer through their engagement with it.

This research question is formed around one central problem: how to reconcile two seemingly insoluble methods of interpretation: firstly the hermetic logic of formalist criticism and secondly a sociological account of the period which celebrates events and individuals at the expense of any detailed discussion of the artworks produced. In much 1960’s British abstract art there is an unmistakable sense of play and a taste for the whimsical that marks it out as different from its international counterparts. The aim is to find the means by which these national characteristics can be accounted for on concrete, structural terms.

Although this project is primarily historically focused it findings are also intended to feed into a contemporary discourse on abstraction in the visual arts. It is hoped that this critically overlooked area would provide a powerful tool with which to read many of the pictorial strategies employed today, as they are strongly prefigured in the artworks this research addresses.