The Role of International Exhibitions in the Aftermath of Empire: The 1948 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

For the 1948 iteration of the Venice Biennale, the first after the Second World War, a painter and a sculptor were chosen to represent Britain: J. M. W. Turner (1775 – 1851), founding figure of the English Romantic landscape genre, and Henry Moore (1898 – 1986), the Yorkshire-born sculptor who had worked as a War Artist for the British Government during the conflict. While the role of early post-war British Pavilions within the context of Western Europe’s politics has already been extensively discussed, this paper will aim instead to position the 1948 British Pavilion against the backdrop of the initial phases of the dismantling of the British Empire. In particular, I will examine the narrative built around Moore’s participation and argue that the insistence on the inherent humanism of his works is linked to the humanitarian rhetoric of the post-war period. Taking as a cue Joel Robinson’s statement that national pavilions at the Venice Biennale represent a “moral dilemma” founded on the alleged economic, cultural and political superiority of some countries over others, I will argue that the 1948 British Pavilion needs to be read within the context of the renewed cultural imperialism that Britain tried to promote at home and abroad as an indirect way of claiming superiority while the independence movements in the former colonised countries were succeeding in dissolving the British Empire.