The History of British Art, Volume 3: 1870–Now is the final volume of three in a series edited by David Bindman and co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Tate Britain. Given the age of the Oxford History of English Art series, which dates from the 1950s (with the exception of Dennis Farr’s contribution on art produced between 1870 and 1940, which was published in 1979 as volume 11), and the dearth of British material usually included in comprehensive survey texts, a methodologically up-to-date historical survey of British art is long overdue. Yet those seeking a chronologically and/or stylistically organized structure like the one suggested by the titles of this series may be disappointed by the thematic format, although not by the scholarly quality of the contents, which have been written by an array of museum and academic specialists in British art. Bindman helpfully suggests in his introduction to the series that it “is best seen not as a linear history of British art but as a number of separate though interconnected histories of its ever-changing relationships with the idea of Britain, and of Europe, and of the world beyond Europe” (13). Each of the three multi-authored volumes include lengthy topical essays encompassing the entire span of the period under scrutiny; interspersed throughout are short ruminations on individual works, movements, and cultural events. Printed on gray paper so as to stand apart from the “major” essays, these brief interludes can be read as a history unto themselves. In 1870–Now, for example, the short pieces have been arranged chronologically as a connective tissue between the longer ones, and cover issues unaddressed in the thematic essays. In addition, each volume includes standard reference materials, including notes, bibliography, and a timeline.

While 1870–Now adheres closely to the formula established for the series, its departures illuminate both the myriad challenges associated with assembling a broad art-historical survey of any kind and the current issues at play in this particular field of British art history. As with any survey text, it would be easy to write entirely about what has been left out rather than what is present in 1870–Now, but instead I will point to two idiosyncrasies that mar an otherwise estimable book. The choice to begin the final volume in 1870 is one that mirrors the Oxford series, but has larger implications for situating British art within the history of modernism. Chris Stephens, editor of 1870–Now, points out that “in comparison with the other two volumes in this series, this book covers a short period of time, the reason being that during the 137 years under scrutiny here, art changed more, and more rapidly, than ever before” (18), and goes on to invoke the emergence of “modernity” as the distinguishing feature of the period in question. Like many historians of British art, Stephens questions the standard narrative of modernism that privileges French art, asserting that “in recent decades the resurgence of a social history of art has allowed for a re-engagement with the idea of modernism being determined by subject matter as well as by innovative modes of production. In the context of British art this goes some way to reincorporate works that are clearly not traditional in approach or appearance and yet do not fit the dominant model or would be unfairly judged if set against Continental or American equivalents with no consideration for local issues” (19). Later on in his essay, Stephens provocatively tethers British modernity to the human body to account for its “difference” from other national schools: “So one may trace running through British art of the twentieth century a theme of the body as the expressive vehicle for the experience of modernity, understood as an amalgam of attitudes and behaviors as much as of material things” (26).

By beginning an investigation of modern and contemporary British art in the 1870s and foregrounding the body, Stephens chronologically realigns British and continental modernism, adjusting the contours of modernism to call attention to subjects, events, and artists often dismissed because of their Victorian pedigree and leading the reader to believe that gender, sexuality, and the body will be focal points of the study. However, Stephens’s admirable intentions are not realized in the text, which pays scant attention to works produced before 1900 (exceptions to this statement will be discussed below) and does not develop his notable thesis about the significance of the body in British art. To investigate the “local issues” and ideologies of the body characteristic of modern modes of making in Britain, Stephens (and Bindman as series editor) might have pushed the volume’s start date back to at least 1848, the year that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed, and devoted an essay to gender studies rather than scattering a few references to women artists and gender politics throughout the essays. With that said, readers who are primarily interested in material produced during that vexing (at least for this series) period between 1870 and 1900 should supplement their reading of 1870–Now with two essays in The History of British Art, Volume 2: 1600–1870, edited by Bindman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008): William Vaughan’s “Britain and Europe c. 1600–c. 1900” and Romita Ray and Angela Rosenthal’s “Britain and the World Beyond c. 1600–c.1900.”

These limitations, however, should not deter readers from engaging with the analyses provided by both the short and long essays in 1870–Now, which highlight subjects ranging from the “modernity” of British art (Charles Harrison, “Going Modern”), to issues of class (Julian Stallabrass, “Conservatism and Class Difference in Twentieth-Century British Art”), to the training of British artists (Paul Wood, “Between God and the Saucepan: Some Aspects of Art Education in England from the Mid-Nineteenth Century until Today”). Stephens’s “Mapping British Art” is the most chronologically and geographically inclusive of works created between 1870 and the present, as well as the most useful for readers either unfamiliar with British art or desirous of a synthetic interpretation of the period. Most of the “main” essays mentioned above are decidedly social-historical in approach and wide-ranging in their coverage, resulting in informative, polemical pieces that do not dwell on the material aspects of the objects under scrutiny, but provide a broad context for the work made during the period.

Some of the most powerful writing in the book occurs in its interstices, when individual works are closely read, such as David Peters Corbett’s verbal dissection of Walter Sickert’s La Hollandaise (ca. 1906) or Andrew Stephenson’s investigation of the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality in Edward Burra’s Harlem (1934). Both of these essays achieve a rapport with the longer essays in the text as well as stand alone as vivid art-historical queries. Stephens’s “The Art of Swinging London” is one of the only pieces in the book that makes a tantalizing nod toward the spicier social signifiers of the period. There are important historical instances here too, when iconic figures write about the topics they helped to define, such as Rasheed Araeen’s exegesis of “Art in Post-War Britain: A Multiracial View.” Other short essays, though, address topics that might have been allotted more space (Ann Gallagher’s “British Art in the 1990s” spans only two pages, for example) and seem cramped on their gray pages. To ameliorate this, each short essay is accompanied by a list of books and articles for further reading.

The History of British Art series results from a collaboration between the two most powerful institutions in the field, the Yale Center for British Art and the Tate. This admirable cooperative venture has yielded three beautiful volumes filled with color images, available to the public at a reasonable cost. The two earlier volumes in the series illustrate objects from a wide range of public and private collections, but the bulk of the 157 images in 1870–Now represent works in either the YCBA or the Tate’s collections (mostly the Tate’s). Although both collections are stunning, at times the final volume appears to be a thematically organized museum collection catalogue rather than a balanced overview of modern and contemporary British art culled from a variety of sources. The essays frequently ask the reader to move beyond traditional geographical borders when considering British art; this reader wonders what might have resulted if institutional boundaries also had been transgressed. Nonetheless, 1870–Now goes a long way toward locating the sprawling practice of “British” art and the writing of its histories.