How it looks to a native

A HISTORY OF BRITISH ART by Andrew Graham-Dixon BBC Books pounds 25

I hav lived long enough to know that there is no such thing as an accurate history of anything. To read all the accounts, you would think that the whole of English literature in the Twenties and Thirties was written by Auden, Isherwood, Spender and one or two others in that gifted but well-publicised clan, with Eliot dimly in the background as a sort of artistic uncle who'd gone into business. Of course, Eng-Lit of that period was far richer and more complex.

More recently and with rather different over-simplifications, art as a whole (and particularly its recent history) has been subject to many sorts and phases of revisionism: for example in the big and often enjoyable surveys of German, Italian, British and American painting seen at the Royal Academy. As I write, an exhibition entitled "A Century of British Sculpture" opens in Paris at the Musee Nationale du Jeu de Paume and in the Tuileries which will offer only a rigorously partial, conceptual and inevitably distorted view of the strongest suit in British art of this century. It won't be a bad show, but it will not support its title nor live up to the historic occasion.

On the other hand, the fresh focus and original insight into art offered by one or two of our younger critics and curators can be revelatory. Art isn't static, and neither are the ways in which it is perceived. You are not always aware of the true identity of an object or a place until the enveloping light changes, or the focus shifts, and this is exactly what Andrew Graham-Dixon has achieved for some aspects of British art in his recent BBC series, and now in this very decently produced book.

Ever since he began his thoughtful, carefully reasoned, beautifully written weekly page on visual art in the Independent, Andrew Graham-Dixon has been a great source of pleasure and enlightenment for a large and appreciative public, now vastly multiplied by TV. This man thinks along fresh and often original lines and he's also a first-class writer. Graham-Dixon selects and plants his words with edgy refinement. He is incapable of cliche.

Art critics who write for the daily or weekly press fall into three categories. The well-informed, up-to-the-minute art journalist provides a useful, reasonably thorough and objective survey of events in galleries and museums, describing and assessing strengths and weaknesses on a broad front. The more partisan critic is politically, socially or aesthetically committed to particular areas of interest or even a specific approach to art. The trouble here is that intellectual "commitment" can degenerate fast into promotion and become a real bore - and even a tissue of distortions or half-truths, in which everything that isn't a socially or politically correct swan is a duck to be shot on sight. There is also imposed fashion: we've gone through absurd phases in which figurative art was boring and irrelevant, and abstract art was hermetic nonsense, then vice versa; and more recently a considerably over-hyped phase in which only conceptual art and installation pieces represent the true path, and painting is dead, yet again. We first heard of "the death of painting" in 1949, I recall, but it seems to survive rather strongly.

As a critic, Andrew Graham-Dixon comes into the third category, exemplified in the US by Robert Hughes, whose astringent views on contemporary art and its attendant lunacies are so diverting to read in Time magazine and occasional books. This category consists of a small number of freely speculative, broadly cultivated, and independent thinkers who can write well-constructed essays on a variety of subjects involving some original thinking. Graham-Dixon's special attribute as a critic is that he is quite eccentric. I don't mean here that he's potty, but simply that he doesn't always proceed along orthodox lines; he is quite capable of going wildly overboard, against or on behalf of something or other.

In his essays on British art, Graham-Dixon uses original material and arguments to remove the notion that the English are not a visual people. He is wholly persuasive. We make art and we enjoy art. What we don't have is a decent number of collectors buying art. Graham-Dixon shows us some of the very beautiful things that survived, often in fragments, the icon- smashing zealots of the Reformation. He is conspicuously good on our great genius Stubbs, the social and political ramifications of English portraiture and architecture, and very fine on Blake and Turner. He is rather fashionably hard on William Morris, suitably caustic about the dire Bloomsbury artists and at his most personal and eccentric in assessing British art of our own time - orthodox on Bacon and Freud, then says that only Bridget Riley's black and white paintings of the Sixties are any good, which is like saying that only the bottom storey of the Eiffel Tower really works. Among other living painters, only Caulfield and Hodgkin get a look-in, which seems needlessly thin and restricted as a conclusion, however eccentric.

But with so much excellent re-definition to think about, who cares? These richly speculative and original essays are full of good things. They do not constitute a history, however, and Graham-Dixon is too lively in spirit and, I hope, still too open and flexible in his thinking to bother with that sort of academic embalming process. In my youth in the Forties, I learned a little jingle about the British attitude to art which amused me and seems to reflect our attitudes at the time:

The French have taste in all they do

Which we are quite without,

For Nature, which to them gave gout

To us gave only gout.

How long ago that seems and how irrelevent to British art, both as a whole and in its present formidable strength. It is good to find Andrew Graham-Dixon extending and refocusing our native points of contact in British art and their relationship within a wider culture.