Artists Making Landscapes in Post–war Britain

Margaret Garlake

Hardcover | 21.59 x 3.81 x 27.31 cm | 320 pp

Modern Art Press | 2021 | 9781916347403

In 1945, Britain's landscape was on the cusp of transformation: in the post-war period, countryside reverted to civilian use, cities were reconstructed and new towns conceived. Artists reacted to this changing world - their own sense of place, space and history informing their work in individual ways - but also helped to shape it. Carefully researched and subtly argued, this book deepens our understanding of a fascinating period in British art history.

In this trailblazing study, Margaret Garlake complicates traditional histories of British landscape art in the post-war period. Drawing together work from painters and photographers―many of them women―Garlake expands the conventional view of the genre to include both rural and urban subjects as well as that often-overlooked territory known as the edgelands, and complicates traditional histories of British art of the period. In doing so, she brilliantly places the work within the context of physical changes wrought by postwar society, as the British countryside reverted to civilian use, cities were built, and artists adjusted to the landscape as a site of both tradition and modernity. 

Margaret Garlake is an independent art historian and former visiting lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has written widely on post-war British art.