The Shame and Pride of Empire

Jenny Uglow | New York Review of Books | 26th December 2015

One critic fumed that this exhibition at Tate Britain is “just not good enough” but this reviewer’s description seems better – “brave”. Possessing an imperial empire had a huge cultural impact on the British – exactly as its art shows.  So is the art admirable or appalling? “How much can [one] appreciate an individual work of art, or indeed a genre, when the context is so dominant?”