Postwar Modern review: That rare thing in a contemporary art gallery – a genuinely polemical exhibition
In focusing on more neglected aspects of its period, this show gives us a rich sense of the radicalism of a time just before our own, which has remained for most of us substantially unknown
The immediate post-war period is generally seen as the grimmest of times for British art: when artists scrabbled about producing angst-ridden “existentialist” daubs in ill-heated, austerity-bound studios where the milk was always off and there was never a shilling for the electric meter. Francis Bacon, the artist who exemplifies this alienated mood, is of course considered unassailably great. But everything else about the period appears mired in provincial irrelevance, with art students looking to the genteel illustration of John Minton (“Who?” Exactly...), barely aware of the great Abstract Expressionist upsurge on the other side of the Atlantic.
Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965 – which marks the 40th anniversary of the Barbican Art Gallery – wants to tell a very different story about this supposedly benighted period. Spanning the era between the last days of the Second World War and the earliest manifestations of Swinging London, it argues that this period – “marked by nuclear dawn, the Cold War, the waning of the British empire” – gave rise to “extraordinary and deeply moving art” that was “more vital and distinctive than has tended to be recognised”.
It makes its case, not through a chronological survey or conventional analysis of movements, but via a series of room-scale snapshots centred on particular preoccupations or nodes of activity. This allows for some surprising and highly revealing connections and juxtapositions between artists and movements that are generally seen as antithetical, even mutually hostile. The result is a view that is far more diverse in its details, and much more coherent in its bigger picture, than anything else we’ve seen on this period to date.
The opening section is dominated by Full Stop (1961), simply a large airgunned black circle in the centre of an unprimed canvas, by proto-conceptualist John Latham. While the work was produced towards the end of the show’s time frame, and the artist probably intended a theoretical play on art and language, it’s impossible in this context not to read it as a smouldering black sun rising on a troubled new world.
It certainly feels completely of a piece with the surrounding works: Eduardo Paolozzi’s brutalised, semi-abstract watercolours of human heads, and the Indian painter FN Souza’s ravaged crucifixions – the whole lot almost entirely in monochrome – which feel like just the sort of art you’d expect in the aftermath of a war characterised by “suffering and loss of life on an unimaginable scale”.
The bombastic romanticism of the so-called Geometry of Fear sculptors, typified by Lynn Chadwick’s spikey skeletal forms, might seem an uneasy bedfellow for the proto-Pop Art experiments of the Independent Group, led by Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. Yet a looming, vaguely dinosaur-like “mobile” sculpture by Chadwick, with dangling discs a la Alexander Calder, seems perfectly in sympathy with some extraordinary collages by the Independent Group’s Nigel Henderson, in a room called Post-Atomic Garden, which focuses on the bomb site as a place of creative inspiration.
Crammed with animal and plant imagery, Henderson’s collages look as though they’ve been torn from the walls of the bombed-out buildings in which children play in Bert Hardy’s poignant documentary photography, shown alongside.
The gallery’s distressed concrete surfaces make a perfect evocative setting for this imagery, and come into their own beside Paolozzi’s life-size humanoid stacks of welded-together metal components, which are ranged through the enormous space like mutant alien visitors. The sense, felt in much of the work here, of the futuristic loaded with the blasted hangover of war – and many of these artists had served in the armed forces – is very present in the Scottish painter Alan Davie’s monumental canvases. His apparently abstract gestural forms seem to writhe out of the walls with an energy that feels simultaneously animal and atomic.
While much smaller in scale, the works of the Guyana-born painter Aubrey Williams – one of a number of artists from Britain’s former colonies showcased in the exhibition – have a similar sense of the bodily and the mythic, with rich colour offset by a sense of unease rooted in the historical trauma of his home region.
There’s a feeling of massive bathos, then, in passing from this epic walk through art that was as groundbreaking as anything being produced anywhere in the world at the time, into a small room crammed with the “kitchen sink” paintings of Jean Cooke and John Bratby. This husband and wife pair sought to elevate the mundane in a sort of grassroots post-impressionist spirit, painting each other in dressing gowns with cereal packets and stacks of washing up. If this feels like a painful reversion to quirky parochial Englishness, these works were seen and appreciated by a far wider public than those of Paolozzi, Davie and Williams ever were.
Early works by Lucian Freud, in a room on “Intimacy and Aura”, feel even more retrogressive. In contrast with the rest of the show’s bracing engagement with its times, Freud’s minutely worked Girl with Roses, and Hotel Bedroom, in which the clothed artist watches his troubled female lover lying awake in bed, feel stuck in their own self-regarding and fundamentally conservative groove.
Works by Freud’s close friends and associates in the so-called School of London, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, look fantastic, however, in a room on post-war reconstruction, dominated by their thickly encrusted views of building sites, which feel as earthy and intensely physical as the process of building itself.
You could hardly have a more startling contrast than with the clean-lined constructions and modern materials – plastics, perspex and polished metal – in the works of the Constructivist group centred around Victor Pasmore. Both tendencies, however, are marked by a sense of purpose and deep conviction that today’s artists, raised amid postmodern atomisation, can only envy.
The Constructivists’ idea of a rational, technologically based art was rooted in early modernism, yet Pasmore’s severely abstract reliefs have a timeless balance and serenity, while his painting Red Abstract No 5 (1960), with its large asymmetrical earth-red form, stands up beside anything produced by American minimal and hard-edge painting, and predates most of it.
A more conventional and predictable exhibition would have bookended itself with its best-known artists, starting with Francis Bacon and ending with David Hockney. Instead, these two box office biggies are shoehorned into a small display called Cruise, on artists’ responses to the repressive (but soon to be repealed) laws on homosexuality. Bacon is represented by just three paintings of a mysterious blue-suited man, who, the show speculates, may be the artist’s lover Peter Lacy, with whom he enjoyed a violent sado-masochistic relationship, or an anonymous businessman he encountered at the Imperial Hotel, a popular gay trysting place in, of all places, Henley-on-Thames.
Hockney’s raw and scratchy I’m in the Mood for Love (1961) and My Brother is only Seventeen (1962) were inspired by graffiti seen in the toilets at Earl’s Court station. There’s an appealing audacity in limiting these mega-artists’ contribution to this handful of relatively little known and, in Bacon’s case, decidedly sinister works, which genuinely say something about the time.
Putting William Scott’s elegantly abstracted kitchenscapes beside Lucie Rie’s and Hans Coper’s elemental pottery is such a neat idea, it’s amazing no one’s done it before. I was less persuaded by German emigre painter Eva Frankfurther’s wan portraits of waiters and washer uppers – which some are hailing as the great discovery of the exhibition – but the Polish Jewish refugee artist Franciszka Themerson’s Here Is a Man, a Product of the State (1960) seems to span the mood of the exhibition, with its scratchy, graffiti-like marks, redolent of the Forties, thrown around the canvas in a spirit of reckless Sixties hedonism.
The show ends with Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1965), with its room-filling panels of shimmering, continually shifting colour, created by projecting heat-sensitive chemicals through glass slides, a technique that went on to be employed in rock “light shows”. Having started in the days of rationing, the show deposits us, it feels, at the frontiers of Acid House.
Long regarded as the Cinderella of the big London art galleries, the Barbican has been on a roll, with superb shows on major but neglected post-war figures Jean Dubuffet and Isamu Noguchi, which it follows up with this survey of the British art of the period. It is that rare thing in a contemporary public art gallery – a genuinely polemical exhibition. Much that we’ve come to see as intrinsic to this era is undersold or willfully ignored: Bacon, the Festival of Britain, the St Ives artists, and British Pop Art, the heyday of which falls within the latter part of the show’s timeframe. Yet all these things have been amply explored in exhibition after exhibition. In focusing on more neglected aspects of its period, this show gives us a rich sense of the radicalism of a time just before our own, which has remained for most of us substantially unknown. If you have any feeling, not just for the art, but for the whole mood and texture of Britain’s recent past, you’ll find this a moving experience.
Postwar Modern is at the Barbican until 26 June
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