British Art

The Art of Being British is your hilariously insightful guide to mastering the quirks, customs, and glorious contradictions of British life. Whether you’re moving to England, visiting the UK, or marrying a Brit, this laugh-out-loud book is the perfect crash course in understanding what makes Britain so wonderfully peculiar.

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith on David Hockney's portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy's "82 Portraits and One Still-Life", and also "David Hockney and the Yorkshire Landscape" at RA in 2012.

Cosy is “the slacker’s guide to staying at home, an antidote to peak frazzle.” With trademark Anglo cheekiness, Laura Weir perfectly captures the British essence of cosy. She celebrates socks, warms to the joys of toasty open fires, and extols the virtues of a quiet walk, ultimately enticing us all to create the British magic of cosy in our everyday lives.

Survey documents three leading artists—Lubaina Himid, Yinka Shonibare CBE and Hew Locke—exploring their work and ideas in development, in reviews, and recorded conversations, drawn from the Cv/Visual Arts Research Archive.

When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than 20 years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory.

World War I, also known in its time as the “Great War” or the “War to End all Wars”, was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite.

'Black British Style', the current costume show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, raises a lot of complex issues for someone like myself. I am not black, but I am undoubtedly West Indian. My family have lived in different parts of the West Indies for more than 300 years and in Jamaica for more than a century.

Very seldom in London can a major show of modern and contemporary art at a highly respected national institution have received such universally negative reviews. As I write this, not all the verdicts on the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Modern British Sculpture have been delivered. However, it is already clear that the majority will be hostile. Paradoxically, it is this, more than any other factor, which makes it seem like an important event - a turning point if you like.