When the Naughty Children

of Empire Come Home to

Roost
Author: Rasheed Araeen
DOI: 10.1080/09528820600590389
Published in: Third Text, Volume 20, Issue 2 March
2006 , pages 233 - 239
Publication Frequency: 6 issues per year
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To cite this Article: Araeen, Rasheed 'When the Naughty Children of Empire Come
Home to Roost', Third Text, 20:2, 233 - 239

Although the postwar immigration from the colonies began soon after the Second World
War, and the art scenes in cities like Paris and London were changed by the arrival in
Europe of artists from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, 1956 represents a
cultural watershed in Britain. Until then the British art world was exclusively that of its
indigenous - ie, white - artists, but with 1956 it not only became what was described by
some art critics as a multiracial art scene, it also created some highly successful and
celebrated Afro-Asian artists. My aim here is to look briefly at the historical background to
their presence in Britain, how they were received and why their success was so short lived;
and ultimately why they were excluded from the history they had been part of and to which
they had contributed enormously.
Europe after the war was in ruins, facing the anguish of unprecedented human death and
suffering. There were no fruits of the Empire to be reaped. There were no roads paved with
gold. Instead the cities of Europe had to be rebuilt, and this was the first stage in the
process of the demystification of imperial greatness and its humanism on which the whole
colonial apparatus had been built. When Francis Newton Souza, one of the pioneers of
postwar modernism in India, arrived in London in 1949, he was shocked:
I was astonished by the grimness of Britain. Here was the country that was
running, only a few years before, an empire encircling nearly three-quarters of
the globe. Yet there was no joy in it. The people were grim-faced after a
prolonged war. The empire had been lost; the Labour government was in
power; half-baked ideas of socialism floated around; the Marshall Plan with its
heavy dose of US aid to Europe was in operation.
1
In the colonies, both the stick and the carrot were used to run the colonial administration.
For this purpose schools were set up following Western education patterns, and out of
them emerged a middle class that served the Empire. But with this there also emerged a
consciousness that aspired to what modernity had promised - change, progress and
individual freedom - which then became a basis for the anti-colonial struggle. It was
therefore no surprise that many artists in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean who were
involved in the anti-colonial struggle adopted modernism, particularly its avant-garde ideas
of rebellion and revolt. If the attack of the avant-garde in the West was directed at the
affluent and dehumanised bourgeois society, the artists in the colonies struggled against
the lack of basic resources and modern progress. There were widespread revolts against
the status quo. Francis Souza was thrown out of the art school in Bombay because of his
involvement in the demonstrations against the British Raj in the early 1940s; after
independence in 1947 he went on to found the 'Artists' Progressive Group', which adopted
modernism as the basis for their art practice. In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), 43 Group was
formed in 1943 'to bring together a group of talented painters whose common meeting
ground was that their work stood in sharp contradiction to the existing colonial convention,
exemplified in the imported and orientalised academicism of the Ceylon Art Society'.
2
With the independence of India in 1947, Britain began to dismantle its Empire. What it left
behind was not what was promised in the name of progress and advancement, but a
plundered world without developed resources and modern institutions. And although artists
after the independence of their countries wanted to stay at home and help develop their
nations' modern identities, there were no modern institutions with enough resources to fulfil
their artistic ambitions, materially as well as intellectually. The only choice then left to them
was to follow their modern precursors - such as Picasso, Brancusi, Mondrian - and migrate
to the metropolitan centres.
In Britain the situation was not as favourable as expected. Britain was not only facing
socioeconomic problems caused by the war; it also had to struggle against its own
marginality in twentieth-century art. As all the important movements in art before the war
took place on the Continent, London had never been an international centre like Paris. It
was this consciousness of marginality and the hope that London might develop into an
international cultural centre within the independent Commonwealth that created a sort of
euphoria among a section of British society that welcomed the postwar arrival of artists
from abroad.
In the beginning, artists faced enormous difficulties no different from those faced by any
artist in a new place or country. These problems were compounded by the fact that they
faced a society within which racism was rampant and overt. In those days one could see
notices stating openly 'No Blacks or Coloureds'. One could do nothing except protest
individually or collectively. Of course, this was the unacceptable face of British society,
which was being confronted by its own liberal intelligentsia, and it would therefore be
wrong to attribute the difficulties of the artists to overt racism.
The breakthrough came in 1956. Several things happened in 1956 that had a great impact
on the British art scene. Beside the arrival of Avinash Chandra from India, and Ahmed
Pervez and A J Shemza from Pakistan, Abstract Expressionism also made its appearance
in London that year. This coincided with the opening of the New Vision Centre (NVC), a
gallery founded by Denis Bowen but run jointly with Kenneth Coutts-Smith. The NVC not
only declared its commitment to the internationalism of art - a unique occurrence in the
parochial British art scene - but also openly welcomed artists from all over the world. It was
at the NVC that Aubrey Williams (Guyana), A J Shemza and Ahmed Parvez (Pakistan) and
Belraj Khanna (India), among others, showed their work. Denis Bowen in fact called the
presence of these artists in London 'a breath of fresh air'.
Francis Souza also began to show in 1956, at Gallery One, with tremendous acclaim and
success. A monograph on him by Edwin Mullins appeared in 1962. The achievement of
both Francis Souza and Avinash Chandra was so phenomenal by the early 1960s that
there must have been many English artists envious of their position. In fact Souza
declared: 'I make more money by my painting than the Prime Minister by his politics.'
Other artists, such as Parvez and Shemza, also showed regularly and were acclaimed.
Among the artists from Pakistan, Iqbal Geoffrey was the most successful - winning a prize
in the Paris Biennale in 1965. Aubrey Williams came to Britain in 1952, but following his
encounter with Abstract Expressionism in 1956 his work changed. He successfully showed
at the NVC and was awarded first prize at the First Commonwealth Biennial of Abstract
Art, which was selected by Denis Bowen and Kenneth Coutts-Smith and held at the
Commonwealth Institute in 1963. The significance of this Biennial was that it included
artists from all Commonwealth countries, including Britain's white artists.
However, despite the fact that white and non-white artists showed together in the same
galleries, they were set apart in the way they were received and written about. There was
no reason for this difference as they were all pushing for the same thing within the same
context of modernism and its postwar tendencies. What attracted the critics was not the
work but the cultures from which Afro-Asian artists had come with their racial differences.
Headlines such as 'Oriental Week', 'Indian Vision' or 'An Indian Painter', with implications
of the artists' otherness, were common. Souza's work was picked up for its explicit
sexuality, attributing this sexuality not to his own personality, desire or fantasy, but to an
Indian tradition. Avinash Chandra's work was particularly turned into an expression of his
Indian background:
All the work is very strongly related by consistent qualities of sensitive lines,
form and rhythm, born of an Indian normality which in this anaemic country
would be termed as verging on erotomania. The soft flowing, sensual forms
pregnant with phallic symbolism dissolve and interpenetrate each other in
searching fluxions of almost liquid shapes. His main debt is to the
magnificent erotic sculptural decoration of Indian temples where sex plays an
important part and is expressed beautifully by union of subject and form of the
highest order. Chandra's work lacks to a degree this perfection of unity.
3
(emphasis added)
Chandra has consistently denied that his work has anything to do with erotic Indian
sculpture. If the idea of the 'erotic' did play a role in his success, it was not an idea
reducible to his 'Indianness' but what it became while penetrating modernism. What we
find in Chandra's work is not rhythm and harmony united in the human body, as expressed
by Indian sculpture, but its fragmentation. His work was the product of his experiences of
British society of the time and its modernity, resulting in the kind of experimentation and
innovation that is fundamental to modernism. What Chandra wanted was not to represent
his Indian background, but to achieve a unique style within the historical framework of
modernism. This he did - but it was ignored and his work was turned into Indian exotica.
Aubrey Williams is another example of an artist whose work was constantly subjected to
the colonial gaze. Williams was one among a number of artists such as Patrick Heron,
Gillian Ayres and John Hoyland who were influenced by Abstract Expressionism and
became pioneers of the abstract art that resulted from this influence. But as Williams's
contribution to British modernism was ignored, displaced and transported to a mythical
space of the colonial imagination:
These paintings of Aubrey Williams, instinct with power, and informed with a
passion that at times border on terror they express an essence of being
which differs from that of a European in the same way that the music of a spinet
differs from the rhythm of a drum. Williams comes out of a society where
forms range from the organic to the urbane. This painter has used the
calligraphy of the South American Indian, the physical image of the Guyana
earth, the dreams of a people who live in a womb of forest, the colours and
confusion of his land to feed and enrich a new and original art. His art reflects
the instinctive sense of rhythm of the Negro fused with the mytho-poetic
imagination of the Indian-Voodoo and the image of gods and men, the dreams
born in cradles of a forest and brought to the city where twentieth-century man
paces the pavements of destruction.
4
Williams's 'primitivisation' continues in almost every review, even when no signs of it can
be attributed to his work:
His paintings were full of hints of tangled forests and African rituals. England
has tamed him, which reduces the strength of his impact, and refined him,
which gives him more subtlety and more clarity than he had five years ago. On
balance, he has become more acceptable to European eyes but less powerful,
though some of the original primitive urgency remains Not many of his
contemporaries in this country can produce an abstract painting that 'carries' so
effectively across the width of a room without the over-emphasis of form or the
crudity of colour which is too often used as a substitute for genuine urgency.
5

Between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, the presence of Afro-Asian artists in London was
greatly admired, their work promoted and some of the artists celebrated. But by 1966, they
suddenly disappeared from the British art scene. Both the NVS gallery and Signal - an
avant-garde gallery run by the Filipino David Medalla - were closed in 1966. Some artists -
Francis Souza, Avinash Chandra, Iqbal Geoffrey, Frank Bowling (originally from Guyana
but in the group of artists from the Royal College of Art who became part of what was then
to constitute British Pop, but without Bowling) - realised that even their success did not
guarantee a future in Britain, and they left for New York. Following this, the doors to the
British art institution were completely shut to Afro-Asian artists. This was what Williams
had to say in 1987:
But then, after two years all my shows were ignored I began to ask myself
what was wrong with me, what was wrong with my work. For the next five years
I was in a terrible confusion. You know, I thought I had hit the level which would
see me through both economically and respectably as a recognised artist in the
British community.
6
Mel Gooding, the eminent English art critic who has written monographs on Patrick Heron,
Gillian Ayres and others, gives the reason for Williams's predicament:
Aubrey Williams, a black Caribbean, is not in the mainstream, he is not part of
the same discussion as Heron and Hoyland. A sort of racism and prejudice
seems, unconsciously, to frame his work. Yet his work is as powerful as any
American painting since the War.
7
Other art critics and historians were aware of the problem but unable to do anything except
to highlight it. The most important statement in this respect was made by W G Archer, a
great supporter of artists from the Indian subcontinent, when he said: 'Is modern art a
closed ring, a private club, a preserve for Europe and the United States? Can artists from
other countries break in?' He continues:
Such questions are posed by the Cuban Wifredo Lam, and the Mexican Rufino
Tamayo. And they are raised with greater acuteness by the paintings and
drawings of Indian Avinash Chandra [which] with their life-enhancing
symbols, brilliant burning colours and gay vitality are nothing if not Indian -
Indian to the same degree and [in] the same way as the art of Picasso and
Miro is vividly Spanish. Yet just [as] these pioneers of modern painting are part
of one world, a world which far transcends national frontiers, Chandra, it could
be claimed, is more than Indian. In his painting, modern art has received an
Indian injection and just as Nehru has made an Indian impact on world ideas,
we must expect more and more artists from India, South America and the East
to [join] the 'private club'.
8
The art historian Norbert Lynton also stated:
A few years ago there appeared a handsome, internationally published book
entitled Art Since 1945. It is significant that this book, purporting to present the
international art scene of our time, ranged geographically from Poland and
Yugoslavia westwards to the United States and simply omitted east of
Belgrade and West of Seattle. To ignore the oriental contribution to modern art
is such an act of ingratitude to a group of civilizations from which many of the
concerns and attitudes of modern art derive, that one is justified in interpreting
it also as defensive act against developments that, if seen, would tend to
diminish the glory of sections of western artistic achievement.
9
This concern of Archer and Lynton, among some others, was not unfounded. By the end of
the 1960s, no artist from Asia, Africa or the Caribbean was seen among the official
exhibitions or included in publications. This institutional transformation of the British art
scene into an exclusively white art scene was to persist up to the early 1980s when things
at last began to change. But this change did not recognise what had been historically
contributed by the Afro-Asians artists to mainstream modernism in postwar Britain. The
emerging interest focused instead on the younger generation of non-white artists who
trained in the British art schools and were following their own cultural roots - a basis in the
1990s for the Turner Prize success of some of these Afro-Asian artists.
It was in the late 1970s when I became aware of this disturbing situation, and at the
beginning of the 1980s set up a research project to deal with it. As a result of this research
work, an exhibition, 'The Other Story', was held at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. The aim
of this exhibition was to reclaim the knowledge that had been suppressed, in the hope that
it would be allowed to enter the history of art in postwar Britain where it belonged. But
instead of welcoming this effort, the British art media went berserk. Almost every critic
dismissed this exhibition, not through rational argument or by applying the criteria
demanded by the work, but with an attitude that brought to the surface the racism that lay
hidden behind the liberal mask. It is not possible to deal with these critics here,
10
but their
attitude was summed up by Brian Sewell. He begins by asking a question: 'why have Afro-
Asian artists failed to achieve a critical notice and establish a London market for their
work?' He then answers it himself: 'they are not good enough. They borrow all and
contribute nothing.' He continues:
The dilemma for the Afro-Asian artist is whether to cling to a native tradition
that is either imaginary, long moribund, or from which he is parted by
generations and geography, or to throw in his lot with an ancient tradition of
white western art, from which he borrows but with which he has scant
intellectual or emotional sympathy. Whichever he chooses, he must not require
praise, nor demand a prime place in the history of art, simply because he is not
white. For the moment, the work of Afro-Asian artists in the West is no more
than a curiosity, not yet worth even a footnote in any history of 20th-century
western art.
11
Historically, the postwar presence of Afro-Asian artists in Britain was such that it not only
redefined modernism beyond its Eurocentric colonial discourse but also produced a
framework for Britain to redefine itself as a postcolonial, multiracial society. But this was
not to be, as Britain has remained trapped by the legacies of its colonial past. Its
benevolence towards the present generation of Afro-Asian artists, which leads to the
promotion of either exotica or mediocrity legitimised by its muddle-headed notion of
'cultural diversity', is nothing but a mask hiding its inability or unwillingness to come to
terms with institutional racism. Brian Sewell is not alone in his refusal to recognise what
the first generation of Afro-Asian artists achieved in confronting the racism of the
institutional discourse that continues to privilege the white artist as the only agent of
modern history. There is still not a single institutionally supported publication that
recognises historically the Afro-Asian contribution to mainstream art in postwar Britain. Art
schools and universities continue to base their teaching on the exclusive centrality of the
white/European subject in modern art history.
Notes

1 Quoted in Jag Mohen, Souza in the Forties, Dhoomi Mal Gallery, New Delhi, 1983, p 13

2 Senake Bandaranayake, 'Ivan Peries (Painting 1939-69): The Predicament of the
Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World', Third Text, no 2, 1987-1988, p 90

3 Cecil McCartney, 'Chandra at the Whitla', Crown, Belfast, 18 October 1963

4 Jan Carew, 'Portrait of the artist: Aubrey Williams', Art News & Review, London 1959

5 Eric Newton, Guardian, 3 January 1963

6 Rasheed Araeen, 'Conversation with Aubrey Williams', Third Text, no 2, 1987-1988

7 Mel Gooding, Lecture at the Whitechapel Gallery during Williams's show there in June-
August 1998, quoted by Rasheed Araeen in the introduction to Guy Brett, 'A Tragic
Excitement: The Work of Aubrey Williams', Third Text, no 48, Autumn 1999

8 W G Archer, 'Pictures from a Wider World', Sunday Telegraph, 15 April 1962

9 Norbert Lynton, catalogue essay for an exhibition of Iqbal Geoffrey, Alfred Brod Galleries,
London, August 1962

10 See Rasheed Araeen, 'The Other Immigrant: Experiences & Achievements of Afro-
Asian Artists in the Metropolis', Third Text, no 15, Summer 1991

11 Brian Sewell, 'Pride or Prejudice', The Sunday Times Magazine, 26 November 1989
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