Migrations, Tate Britain - review

The exhibition opens by showing that the most distinguished art made in England and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries emerged from the hands of artists who came from modern day Holland and Belgium, either as religious exiles or in search of financial reward. As well as bringing a new sophistication to portraiture - especially after Van Dyck arrived at the behest of Charles I - artists from the Low Countries also introduced fresh artistic genres. That great cornerstone of British art, landscape painting, for instance, was brought over by Dutch painters.

Art institutions, too, were hugely influenced by incomers: among the 34 founding artists of the Royal Academy in 1768 were 10 artists born overseas, including a number of Italians who were in London to exploit an infatuation with their homeland and a thirst for neo-classicism triggered by the Grand Tour.

Rather than looking to antiquity, late 19th-century art focused on the contemporary. A strong section looks at artists who came to London from Paris at that time - the Frenchman James Tissot and two Americans, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. In distinct ways, they reflected modern sensibilities: Tissot's genre scenes were too fruitily morally ambiguous for many British observers, Sargent reflected new money through opulent images of the families of wealthy bankers, and Whistler's views of the Thames were near-abstract, privileging harmonic colour and light over specific description.

More direct abstraction follows in the show's best room, looking at Jewish artists working in London and at émigrés from a Europe tormented by the Nazis. There is a wonderful zing to the room's two standout works: David Bomberg's angular The Mud Bath (1914), and the cooler geometries of Piet Mondrian's Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red (1937-42).

Carefully paced until this point, the show reaches a more chaotic crescendo in the contemporary era. Immigration and race become a direct subject for Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce, and best of all in the Black Audio Film Collective's moving film Handsworth Songs (1986). But a closing suite of videos, however excellent, seems to meander away from the core theme. Appropriately, perhaps, Migrations ends in a state of flux.

Until August 12 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)

Migrations
Tate Britain
Millbank
SW1P 4RG