Humankind

Ruskin Spear: Class, culture and art in 20th-century Britain

Tanya Harrod

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English

Thames & Hudson
14 April 2022

History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Painting & paintings; Individual artists, art monographs; Arts & Architecture - Australian

Humankind: Ruskin Spear is the first book on the painter Ruskin Spear RA (1911-1990) since a brief monograph in 1985. It uses Spear's career to unlock the coded standards of the 20th-century art world and to look at class and culture in Britain and at notions of 'vulgarity'.

The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the changing preferences of the institutionalized avant-garde from the Second World War onwards; the battles fought within colleges of art as a generation of post-war students challenged the skills and commitment of their tutors; and the changing status of figurative art in the post-war period. Spear was committed to a form of social realism but the art he produced for left-wing and pacifist exhibitions and causes had a sophistication, authenticity and humour that flowed from his responses to bravura painting across a broad historical swathe of European art, and from the fact that he was painting what he knew. Spear's geography revolved around the working class culture of Hammersmith in West London and the spectacle of pub and street life. This was a metropolitan life little known to, and largely unrecorded by, his contemporaries.

Tracking Spear also illuminates the networks of friendship and power at the Royal College of Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts and within the post-war peace movement. As the tutor of the generation of Kitchen Sink and of future Pop artists at the Royal College of Art, and with friendships with figures as diverse as Sir Alfred Munnings and Francis Bacon, Spear's interest in non-elite culture and marginal groups is of particular interest. Spear's biting satirical pictures took as their subject matter political figures as diverse as Khrushchev and Enoch Powell, the art of Henry Moore and Reg Butler and, more generally, the structures of leisure and pleasure in 20th-century Britain.

Humankind: Ruskin Spear has an obvious interest for art historians, but it also functions as a social history that brings alive aspects of British popular culture from tabloid journalism to the social mores of the public house and the snooker hall as well as the unexpected functions of official and unofficial portraiture. Written with general reader in mind, it has a powerful narrative that presents a remarkable rumbustious character and a diverse series of art and non-art worlds.

By: Tanya Harrod
Imprint: Thames & Hudson
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 245mm, Width: 185mm,
Weight: 1.340kg
ISBN: 9780500971192
ISBN 10: 0500971196
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 14 April 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Prologue: Why Spear? 1. Hammersmith: boy & man 2. At the College and after 3. A Pacifist’s War 4. Hammersmith in Darkness and Light: Making Life more complicated 5. A teacher among friends 6. An Academician entertains his Public: An Annunciation 7. Ruskin as peacenik: The Pleasures of Peace 8. Painting for money 9. Retrospective

Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian, living in London, who writes widely on craft, art and design. Her major study, The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century, was published in 1999. The Last Sane Man, her biography of the potter Michael Cardew, was published in 2012; for this book she was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for biography. She is co-editor of the The Journal of Modern Craft.

Reviews for Humankind: Ruskin Spear: Class, culture and art in 20th-century Britain

'Engaging and impressively researched … There is much to praise in this book, owing to Harrod’s firm grasp of historical, political and artistic detail, and the intelligence and insight with which she writes' - Literary Review 'A meticulous piece of art historical rescue … an important study of a neglected artist' - Apollo