This week’s posts will revisit the School of London, especially as it was so brilliantly curated in the exhibition at the Tate and Getty, London Calling, in 2016. Brexit made it all the more powerful.
For those of you who missed this--another group of post war artist outliers like the Bay Area Figuratives who didn't necessarily liked being lumped together with each other qua movement--it focused on six prominent painters whose work is characterized by the central role granted to the human figure. These, as partially pictured here, were Lucian Freud (2nd from left), Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews as well as R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff, not pictured.
Some were close friends, others admirers, and often were each others subjects. The war had affected Britain in a profound way, and these artists' work reflected the turmoil and re examination of what life meant after all. Mirrored by a film movement that also called into question everything that had come before, it gave me pause: in a way we are in such a moment now, a war of another kind which will inevitably give rise to a movement that characterizes what it all meant. (Black figurative art could be that movement. Isn't it interesting that we go back to the figure so ardently after a cataclysm as if to say this, in the end, is what really matters?)
Like the Bay Area artists, color and the quality of paint and impasto became very important (Kossoff). For Bacon, it was the flatness crossing over from abstraction. Freud broke down his subjects as if he were Vermeer. Some painted from life; others from photographs.
The recent Bacon and Freud biographies shed new light. But as a primer the Tate/Getty show revealed these artists also had been instrumental in refocusing artistic energies "on giving visual representation to the physical and emotional conditions that they inhabited."
Photo: John Deakin