British Art

The British abstract artist Robyn Denny was a student at the Royal College of Art in 1957 when he and some friends had a confrontation with their tutor John Minton. Other artists associated with 'pop art' emerged in Britain during the 1960s. The development of pop art during the late 1950s and 1960s seemed to endorse Alloway's assertion that it represented a new form of realism. The Royal Academy exhibition and A Paradise Lost, another show of 1987 held at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, which re-appraised British neo-Romantic art between 1935 and 1955, both took a backward look at the century and retrospectively asserted a canon of 'great modern British art'. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm has assessed the period: The history of die twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.