Pragmatism in post-war Britain: Anthony Hill's Constructionist Art

In an unpublished archival document the British Constructionist artist Anthony Hill described his theoretical progression from Alfred Korzybski’s 'Science and Sanity', to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 'Tractatus' and finally to Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘whose influence came to supplant that of Wittgenstein’ (Tate Archive). This short bibliography is revealing not only of Peirce’s importance for Hill’s post-war Constructionist art practice but of the context in which he accessed and understood Peirce’s ideas. Focusing on Peirce’s philosophy of Pragmatism and his work on diagramming, both of which Hill discussed in his own writing, this paper explores Hill’s reliance on Peirce to construct a concrete art rooted in experimentation and contingent meaning construction. It considers how and to what extent Hill adopted Peirce’s ideas in his artwork and writing from the 1950s and 1960s, and reflects on the problematics, as well as the use value, of interpreting artworks through an isolated theoretical lens? The paper argues that Peirce’s formulations of truth and meaning as products of practice contributed to the challenge Hill made to Herbert Read’s modernist assumptions about the relationship between form and meaning, by repositioning concrete art as a faculty of the perceiving body-mind. The paper also seeks to understand how theory was translated to practice by contextualizing Hill’s interest in Peirce against his concurrent engagement with Korzybski and Wittgenstein, and asks why this set of theorists became of especial interest to artists like Hill who sought to reconceptualize the visual language of abstraction in post-war Britain?