dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Ruth Artmonsky, Elizabeth Cohen, Ann Compton, David Fraser Jenkins, Libby Horner, Andrew Lambirth, Paul Liss, Sacha Llewellyn, David Maes, Alan Powers, Peyton Skipwith, Sam Smiles, Robert Upstone
titel: British Murals & Decorative Painting 1920–1960. Rediscoveries and New Interpretations
+: Bristol, 2013
«It is never easy to declare the end of one phase and the beginning of another. Murals experienced a revival of interest in the 1980s, but there was by then a break in continuity. For the first time, outdoor paintings, usually with political themes, on gable ends and other neglected walls, became popular in London and other cities where funding was available, and were linked to a revival of interest in the Mexican muralists of the 1930s, with their bold legible subjects and crowded political compositions. This trend did not last into the 1990s, however, and the impulse to create public art murals during the past 20 years has taken other forms. Should any artist wish to work with colour an a flat surface today on a large scale, they would find that digital printing saved the labour of paints and brushes, as when a painting by Howard Hodgkin was enlarged to fill the exterior glazing around the Imax cinema at Waterloo from its opening in 1999 until 2006. This has since been replaced by a series of advertisements to raise revenue for the British Film Institute, and one may ponder whether the value ascribed to an artists's own handwork on a mural, had it been produced in the traditional way, might have maintained this space as a giant art gallery instead of it being converted to commerce.
Perhaps it is not surprising that art history has difficulty with murals, given the diversity of style and intention that they represent, as well as the difficulty of gathering visual and documentary information about them. Their relative neglect is regrettable, if only because it has allowed so much destruction of work, especially that in the public realm, which was produced by artists at some cost to themselves in order to provide future generations with windows out of the everyday into some form of imaginative vision. The gradual and overdue recognition that single narratives in the selection of history are a weakness of scholarship and criticism rather than a strength should give support to a more inclusive view of twentieth-century British art generally, and with it a more developed understanding of the role of murals in the lives of artists and in society during this period.
As with so many other things in recent years, murals are special because people aren't making them any more. While this is not an absolute truth, the painstaking building up of skills in design and execution that supported the mural and decorative painters between 1920 and 1960 now represents a lost world. It leaves us with much to enjoy, to wonder at and to cherish.» (p. 111)