This thesis addresses British art of the late 1950s and 1960s, and specifically
traces how formalist aesthetics and broader cultural factors influenced abstract art
being made at this time. As such it is concerned with defining how particular artworks,
while not depicting the environment in which they were produced, can still be
demonstrated to embody it through other means. Opposing a binary separation of pop
figuration and formalist abstraction prevalent in other scholarship dealing with the
period, this text instead outlines a scenario where formalist strategies of art-making
were themselves ideologically predicated on a number of other societal factors. These
factors include the semantic economy underpinning the field of branded advertisement,
the increasingly afunctional appearance of industrially styled commodities, and an
image of ‘classless’ professionalism cultivated to combat an existing political
Establishment.

Additionally, this study includes an examination of the influence exerted on
British abstraction by American sources, and revisits the critic Norbert Lynton’s
observation regarding the ‘Mid-Atlantic’ position many practitioners found
themselves occupying stylistically. At the heart of such an enquiry is an attempt to
account in concrete terms for characteristics differentiating British artwork from that
being produced elsewhere. It is structured as three chapters, looking at the work of
Richard Smith at a time during which he was resident in both London and New York,
that of a number of sculptors who participated in the Whitechapel Art Gallery
exhibition New Generation 1965, and the development of Jeremy Moon’s painting
practice. Brought together these three case studies combine to suggest an autonomous
and vital sensibility, one quite distinct from developments being made either in
Continental Europe or the United States.