School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe supremacy of decoration: the influence and legacy of the decorative practice of Frank Brangwyn in the Edwardian era( 2019)This study offers a new perspective on the practice of British artist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) by establishing the aesthetic and functional ‘supremacy of decoration’ across his work of the first decades of the twentieth century. The term decorative was widely used in contemporary art discourse throughout Great Britain and Europe; yet a definition is elusive and problematic. The label is not, and has never been static, indiscriminately applied to a range of media and across different time periods. Focusing upon Brangwyn’s practice during the Edwardian era and its legacy, this thesis considers this concept through the formal and theoretical tenets of the mural and decorative painting movements, establishing the existence of a decorative formalism in the artist’s work and linking this characteristic directly with his critical and popular appeal. Furthermore, it traces the manifestation of this aesthetic approach outside of site-specific and functional sites of decoration to more autonomous contexts through examination of the artist’s intaglio prints – so called ‘painters’ etchings’ that were widely produced in England and Europe by the late nineteenth century. Through analysing Brangwyn’s role as a teacher in London and the circulation and impact of his prints outside of Britain in Australia, this study also shows that his decorative formalism was observed, admired and to varying extents, adopted by his younger contemporaries seeking to reflect a more modern perspective. The threads of British art explored in this thesis have rarely been linked with subsequent developments made by modern artists. Indeed the appeal of the decorative as a progressive formal strategy was short-lived and soon surpassed by other activities of the avant-garde. As this study reveals however, while Brangwyn was not a driving force behind modernism, his ‘decorative’ work of the Edwardian era anticipated many of the aesthetic concerns of modernity and is representative of one of the many unacknowledged ways in which artists began to articulate formal approaches to the picture plane in the early twentieth century.