Explore the vast range of titles available.

Black artists have been making major contributions to the British art scene for decades, since at least the mid-twentieth century. Sometimes these artists were regarded and embraced as practitioners of note. At other times they faced challenges of visibility - and in response they collaborated and made their own exhibitions and gallery spaces. In this book, Eddie Chambers tells the story of these artists from the 1950s onwards, including recent developments and successes. Black Artists in British Art makes a major contribution to British art history. Beginning with discussions of the pioneering generation of artists such as Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, Chambers candidly discusses the problems and progression of several generations, including contemporary artists such as Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare. Meticulously researched, this important book tells the fascinating story of practitioners who have frequently been overlooked in the dominant history of twentieth-century British art.

In a market long dominated by Hollywood, French films are consistently the most widely distributed non-English language works. French cinema, however, appears to undergo a transformation as it reaches Britain, becoming something quite different to that experienced by audiences at home. Drawing on extensive archival research the authors examine in detail the discourses, debates and decisions which have determined the place accorded to French cinema in British film culture. In so doing they provide a fascinating account of this particular instance of transnational cinematic traffic while simultaneously shedding new light on British film history. From the early days of the Film Society, via the advent of the X certificate to the new possibilities of video and DVD, this book reveals the complex and detailed history of the distribution, exhibition, marketing and reception of French cinema in Britain.

Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester,Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.

The Festival of Jewish Arts in Glasgow was the first and largest Jewish festival in Britain, conceived as a response to, and timed to coincide with, the Festival of Britain in 1951. Held at Glasgow's McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street from February 4-25, 1951, the event showcased works from over fifty internationally renowned Jewish artists, antiquities dating back from the thirteenth century, musical performances, films, lectures, a book display, and a run of sell-out performances of S. An-sky's The Dybbuk. In this essay, I offer the first sustained account of the festival by bringing together available documentation and analyzing the “performance of display” and perspectives on Jewish culture the festival offered. As this essay argues, viewing the material and tangible elements of the festival alongside the social and cultural ideals of its organizers reveals a complex negotiation between the historical place and space of the festival, the concerns of the community, and the tensions between minority and mainstream Scottish and British culture. The Festival of Jewish Arts thus provides a rare window through which to view a Jewish community grappling with issues of loss and reconstructing identity in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities, while at the same time trying to transcend the perception of their Otherness and respond to British anxieties about Jewish refugees and the founding of the State of Israel.

Baseball in the United Kingdom has long been considered a contradiction in terms, especially during the nineteenth century, with both the 1874 National Association Tour and the 1888 Spalding Tour viewed as financial and cultural failures in a sophisticated consumer society already dominated by cricket. This article takes a fresh look at evidence from the 1870s and 1880s in order to challenge this perspective. It presents the 1874 Tour as a transnational success, articulating shared Anglo-American assumptions about modernity, science, and social progress. This discourse informed a broad process of technology transfer involving new sources of industrial power as well as the corporal techniques of modern sport. The article also places the tour in the context of a unique historical phenomenon: the transatlantic diffusion of an early modern English game to the United Kingdom as the New York Game, a modern American sport. Previous accounts of the tour focused on a few selected reports, confirming American views of its financial failings and British disinterest in its exhibitions. When considered in light of hundreds of British accounts from the 1870s, including unexamined evidence of the first British baseball clubs less than two years after the tour, this perspective becomes unsustainable.

This article examines the changing nature of public health services and their relationship with the public in post-war Britain by an analysis of the exhibitions mounted by Medical Officers of Health (MOsH) in London. Focusing on the period 1948–71, the article explores a time when public health practice, and the problems it faced, were in flux. A decline in infectious disease and an increase in chronic conditions linked to lifestyle required a new role for public health services. Exhibitions were one of several methods that MOsH used to inform the public about dangers to their health, but also to persuade them to change their behaviour. The exhibition, though, offers a unique insight into the relationship between public health authorities and the public, as exhibitions brought MOsH into direct contact with people. It is suggested that in the MOsH exhibitions we can find signs of a new relationship between public health practitioners and the public. Whilst elements of the pre-war, often moralistic ideology of public health services could still be detected, there is also evidence of a more nuanced, responsive dynamic between practitioners and the people. By the end of the 1960s, ‘the public’ was increasingly being thought of as a collection of ‘publics’, including individuals, target groups and vocal respondents.

Richards argues that it is the one subject of mass culture that has remained a focal point of all representation and the dead centre of the modern world.2 The use of advertising in prize books has not yet caught the attention of scholars. [...]this discussion highlights the benefits of investigating this domain and what it can reveal about gender ideologies in the Edwardian period. Furthermore, denominational magazines of the time admitted that most prize books were \"secondrate tales,\" \"innocent rubbish in the shape of wishy-washy stories\" with \"namby pamby elements.\" [...]both secular and religious publisher catalogues gave priority to the aesthetic properties of these books over their content, emphasising the fact that they are \"printed on art paper,\" \"tastefully bound\" with \"cover daintily printed\" and \"coloured frontispieces. [...]the audiences themselves became the products generated by the publishers' catalogues. Entwistle argues that Board schools, in particular, were expected to present domestic service as the most fitting and natural occupation for working-class girls.35 Publishers such as Andrew Crombie and Epworth Press, on the other hand, were aimed at evangelical institutions and used their prize catalogues to promote universal messages of women helping the urban poor rather than their lowliness and the need to stay in their place.36 Books by Silas Hocking, a Methodist preacher, and Pansy (pseudonym of Isabella Macdonald Alden), an American Presbyterian, heavily dominate the pages of their catalogues.

Strang talks about the progressive avant-garde art world of the 1930s in Edinburgh, Scotland which centered on three men and three institutions. Besides the efforts of Herbert Read, Hubert Wellington and Stanley Cursiter at the university, art college and national galleries, Edinburgh's avant-garde art world of the 1930s consisted of the activities of many other individuals and institutions, not least the progressive an which Scottish artists were making--and were able to see--in the capital during the decade. Throughout die decade, the Society of Scottish Artists' (SSA) annual exhibitions showcased the best of the country's contemporary art, hung alongside loans of significant European modern art.

Burstow discusses institutional patronage of central and eastern European emigre sculptors in the United Kingdom (UK) from 1945-1965. He examines the interests and motivations behind this patronage, and the extent to which, in the two decades after the Second World War, five of UK's best resourced and most influential institutional patrons of art supported these sculptors. He also looks at the differing responses of four governmental patrons including the Festival of Britain Office, the London County Council, the Arts Council and the Royal Academy of Arts.