Migrations

de Lizzie Carey-Thomas, John Akomfrah

For the past 500 years Britain, and British art, have been shaped by successive waves of migration. Elements thought of as most typically British - landscape painting, for instance - were introduced by foreign artists, attracted by the promise of lucrative commissions. European academic painters and British artists who travelled to study in Italy helped introduce a neoclassical vocabulary to British painting. In the second half of the nineteenth century American artists like James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent trained and exhibited in Paris before settling in London, while French artists such as Henri Fantin-Latour made regular visits to England. The east London Jewish diaspora produced a number of significant artists in the early twentieth century, including David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein and Mark Gertler. In the 1970s the rise of conceptual art saw a generation of artists like Gustav Metzger who were international in their attitude to their work and their own identity. Exhibition: Tate Britain, London, UK (31.1.-12.8.2012).