Picturing Whiteness in the National Collection of British Art, 1897 - 2024

This thesis draws from established methodologies locating whiteness within visual arts contexts, to inform how whiteness surfaces at Tate, as the National Collection of British Art. Together, the three main chapters, ‘Portrait’, ‘Landscape’ and ‘Institutional Whiteness’, focus on artworks within Tate’s collection, and on staff perceptions of whiteness and the gallery’s institutional practices and working environment. The thesis finds that whiteness is shaped by a combination of economic, political, social and epistemological factors: Tate’s reliance on its funding sources and public remit; institutionally embedded investment into canonical aesthetic conventions, and staff participation in unconscious affective norms that reinforce racialised difference. As such, existing theories of whiteness, which tend to centre on artworks without regard to their contexts, cannot fully explain the nature of its presence at Tate. The thesis argues accordingly that Tate’s efforts to understand whiteness as a matter of representation within artworks can overlook how canonical aesthetic preferences intersect both with epistemologies of racialisation and racially unequal distribution of economic and normative social capital. The chapters ‘Portrait’ and ‘Landscape’ offer visual analyses of whiteness in relation to two artworks, positioning collectors’ whitened racial status and wealth, and projections of racialised desire onto the artworks as both formative and unacknowledged in their continuing canonical status within the gallery. ‘Institutional Whiteness’, the final case study, explores the broader discourses relating to whiteness at Tate, which provide a methodologically necessary contemporary context to ‘Portrait’ and ‘Landscape’. Ultimately, this thesis finds that it is through consistent dismissal or misrecognition of the concept that whiteness gains its continuing power. This thesis strives to contribute to knowledge both empirically, through locating contemporary expressions of whiteness at Tate, and methodologically, through combining visual and contextual analysis in order to identify the strengths and gaps of existing theories for this specific context.