Andrew Stephenson

Round Table: Queer Lifestyles, Politics and Curating Now

These three thought-provoking pieces were originally conceived of as a tripartite round table discussion at the end of our conference ‘Exploring Queer Cultures and Lifestyles in the Creative Arts in Britain c.1885–1967’ held at the LondonCollege of Fashion inMay2016.DeliveredbyMichaelHatt, Elizabeth Wilson andClare Barlow, they formed semi-scripted responses to the searching papers, lively questions and animated discussions that occurred on that day. Our aim in including them within this special issue of Visual Culture in Britain as three short texts is to retain the freshness and flavour of the plenary as a provocation and reflection at the culmination of a lively conference. We see, in the pages that follow, the perspectives of differentgeneration authors from varied disciplinary backgrounds who had spent the day engaging with the contemporary problematic of framing the insights of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory in relation to the examination of the historical past approached from the contemporarymoment. ForHatt, it is the shifting and complex realignment of lived experience and biographywith contemporary gay lifestyle and the ill-fitting intersection of earlier fluid historical identities with today’s non-normative sexualities that is challenging. For Wilson, it is the bold claims made about the transgressive nature of queer studies that is open to reviewas the contradictions of the assimilation of earlier Lesbian and Gay radical politics becomes increasingly commonplace and itsmainstreamappropriationmore troublesome.And for curatorBarlow, it is the potentialities that experimental exhibition-making has for publicly engagingwider audienceswith queer artists (LGBTQ+or not), their artworks and its queer complexities through their encounters in the gallery spaces of thenationalmuseum that is exciting at the timeof Tate Britain’s ‘QueerBritish Art, 1861–1967’ show. We thank them for allowing us to publish them here.

Introduction: Edwardian Art and its Legacies

Like many artists, writers and cultural commentators at the time of the death of King Edward VII in 1910, recent revisionist accounts have established contradictory positions on the art and visual culture of the period of his reign (1901–1910) rendering conclusive assessment problematic. One approach argues that the death of Queen Victoria was a major turning point in British art, marking the funeral of the England of the late nineteenth century and launching a period of energetic transformation and cultural change that would culminate in the radical developments of 1910 to 1914. By contrast, a second one has highlighted the periodization as a problem in and of itself, seeing ‘Edwardian’ only as a term of reassuring historical convenience, delineating a rather ill-defined transitional moment between the grand narratives of 1880s Victorianism and 1920s modernism and offering little justification for its distinctiveness. This approach sees the Edwardian era as an extension of the Victorian reign with ‘Edwardian’ becoming a kind of shorthand for an extended late-late Victorianism, a flash Edwardian epilogue to the long nineteenth-century. In summary, the Edwardian era has been sidelined as lacking in importance because of its position between the significant developments of the Victorian era, many of whose artists were active well into the twentieth century, and the artistic developments after 1910: notably with the repercussions of Roger Fry’s path-breaking ‘Manet and the Post-impressionists’ exhibition (1910) and the Second Post-Impressionist’ show (1912); the formation of the Bloomsbury Group and the radical, formal innovations of Vorticism, Futurism and Cubism in the immediate pre-war years. If Virginia Woolf’s later famous dictum that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ was accurate, such a proposal left Edwardian art, design and visual culture largely remaindered and marginalized from modernism. This special issue of Visual Culture in Britain investigates these characterizations of the period and its legacies, and offers in their place new perspectives on and interpretations of Edwardian visual culture and Edwardianism following the increased attention to the visual arts of these years in exhibitions and publications since 2000. Approached from a different angle, the Edwardian era might be more productively located as producing the generation of writers, artists, designers and intellectuals who came to the fore in the decade after 1910, but were formed in and by the culture and events of that earlier decade with its world of urban and imperial expansion. It is revealing that, when Woolf and her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, moved to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in 1904, they removed much of the Victorian interior clutter and painted the walls

From Khaki to ‘Day-Glo’: British art in Cold War culture

Book reviewed in this article: Margaret Garlake, New Art New World. British Art in Postwar Society