England and the 1966 World Cup by John Hughson

Author:John Hughson [Hughson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Sports & Recreation, Soccer, Social History
ISBN: 9781526100184
Google: 1Wy5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-10-21T00:23:23+00:00

In the summer of 2014, Mondrian was the subject of two related exhibitions, in the galleries of Tate Liverpool and the Turner Contemporary, in Margate, respectively. What can be made of his general popularity in contemporary Britain may be reflected by the amount of visitors drawn to these exhibitions. Whatever these particular numbers may have been, the very holding of these exhibitions at two major galleries reflects a belated historical shift in Britain towards the institutional acknowledgement of abstract art. Around the time of the Second World War, Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, is reported to have shown a slide of one of Mondrian’s paintings during a public lecture as ‘an object of amusement’.70 As a key patron of art Clark had a significant say in, and impact on, what became successful. In regard to English artists, Clark’s treatment of Victor Pasmore was most telling. As a leading member of the Euston Road School, Pasmore was only able to become an artist on a full-time basis once he secured financial support from Clark in 1938.71 In the latter 1940s, when Pasmore switched to a totally abstract style of artwork, Clark withdrew his patronage. Pasmore suffered not only from the immediate retraction of funds, but, also, a subsequent difficulty in being able to sell his works. Pasmore had not anticipated that the British public, as well as critics, would not be won over to his belief in the ‘beauty of geometric forms’.72 However, he pushed on regardless and in the 1950s led a movement which became known as the Constructionists, a second wave movement drawing some inspiration from an earlier ‘constructivist’ episode in which Mondrian was involved during his brief period of stay in England.73

At this point in time Alf Ramsey was a few seasons into his managerial career and had taken Ipswich Town into the Second Division of the Football League. There need be no suggestion that Ramsey had any awareness of developments going on in British art to propose the view that his innovations in playing formation bore some parallel to these developments. Ramsey’s relationship to artists occurs within what Raymond Williams called the ‘structure of feeling’ of a given period, if we take this to mean an emergent commonality occurring across different cultural forms.74 Furthermore, there is little point in trying to reproduce an argument for the connection between Ramsey’s playing system and understandings of space within the history of English art in the way Winner does for ‘total football’ and Dutch art. Indeed, given the brief account in the paragraph above, the relevant connection for Ramsey is to artists who developed their art against the continuing pull of tradition in England, which opposed a presumed capitulation to ‘modern’ influences from Europe. In this regard, Pasmore’s Constructionist associate Kenneth Martin warrants consideration. Martin put the idea of movement at the centre of his work, his spirally structured hanging mobiles being categorised as ‘kinetic art’.75 His painting was similarly inspired, and

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