Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
Art History
Advisor
Romy Golan
Committee Members
Michael Lobel
Antonella Pelizzari
Tim Barringer
Subject Categories
Modern Art and Architecture
Keywords
Britain, Mining, Abstraction, Modernism, Environment, Waste
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the confluence of British modernism and mineral extraction, an intersection of formal experimentation and the urgent environmental, political, economic, and social issues posed by the history of twentieth-century mining, drilling, and quarrying. I show that mid-twentieth-century British artists placed extractive themes—miners, colliery infrastructure, and mined material—at the center of formal experiments in abstraction and conceptual art. Five chapters are each centered around an extracted substance: coal dust, fossils, oil, slate and tin, and waste. This organizational approach, which traces a chronological arc of British mining from vital industry to obsolescence,acknowledges the mine as both urgent political subject matter and as source of artistic material. Each chapter uncovers the extractive frameworks of several important British modernists working across media, including photographer Bill Brandt, sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, painters Prunella Clough and Peter Lanyon, and conceptual artist John Latham. I take a broad view of modernist and abstract practice, one that incorporates distinctive approaches: surrealistic innovations in documentary photography, neo-Romantic landscapes, the Constructivist-inspired painting and sculpture of the St. Ives School, and land art. Across media, artists noted the extreme difficulty that extraction posed to sight, a sensory limitation that aligned with modernist inquiries into the disintegration of form. Instead of preventing artistic imagination, geological substances such as coal, petroleum, stone, and ore offered a haptic expression of Britain’s extractive landscape that transcended the necessity of resemblance.
Recommended Citation
Aukland-Peck, Tobah, "Mineral Landscapes: British Art and Extraction, 1937–1975" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6100
