Looking Out: Welsh painting, social class and international context

'Over the last twenty five years, almost single-handedly,

Peter Lord has transformed a collection of poorly

understood evidence of art created in Wales, and lazy

theoretical assumptions about it, into a discipline in its

own right, equipped with analytical frameworks and

supported by an accumulating body of knowledge.'

-Andrew Green, Wales Arts Review (on The Tradition)

The six sequential essays in this collection provide a

narrative of a century and a half of Welsh painting,

written with an emphasis on issues of social class

and national identity. Through his earlier writing,

Peter Lord has contributed to the establishment of an

historical tradition of Welsh painting, but because it

does not feature in the wider story of western art history

as presently told, the work revealed continues to be

perceived as marginal, existing in isolation from ideas

and movements in other countries. These essays break

new ground by discussing the concerns of Welsh painters

not only in domestic terms but also in the context of the

ways in which artists in other parts of Europe and in the

United States reacted to the common underlying causes

of those concerns. The author challenges the idea that the

work of Welsh painters is relevant only to the evolution

of their own communities and, through confident and

detailed analysis, validates their pictures also in terms of

the arts of other western cultures.