School of London

School of London

Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points

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School of London

• School of London is the name given to the group of artists working in London (many of whom were not English) after the Second World War (from the late 1940s), and who were dedicated to figurative painting rather than abstraction, which was the trend at the time. The figurative painting of these artists is considered to be perhaps the most important figurative painting in all of modern art.
• The artists of this “school” were in fact independent. Although they knew each other, some of them were friends and they supported each other, they were not necessarily consolidated as a group with a manifest or shared a similar style. For that matter: the name for these artists came up towards the 70’s, and not everybody agreed with that “tag.”
• It was the postwar period and Existentialism prevailed in philosophy. Existentialism speaks about an absurd world, man’s despair and anguish. (It is postulated that every man is condemned to be free and creates himself with each of his actions.) Within that existentialist atmosphere, something in common that we will find in the work of these figurative artists is their expressionist spirit: they did not show reality as it should have be seen, but as it was felt. The surface revealed the restlessness and anguish that dominated everything underneath it.
• One of the crucial themes that these painters explored and developed is the human figure. Bodies and faces that expose their “humanity” with crudeness and exaggeration: they are not necessarily beautiful or pleasant, they look real, fragile, isolated (suffering from loneliness) and in their faces the marks of existential anguish can be observed.
• The other important theme was the London cityscape. As we can imagine, it was an expressionist landscape: distorted according to the way each artist felt it. That is why we find landscapes that generally depict difficult times and despair.

Image: Figure with Meat (1954). Francis Bacon.

Representative Artists: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Ronald Kitaj, Michael Andrews, David Hockney.

Recommended links:

Francis Bacon: “My painting is not violent; it is life that is violent.”

Timeline: Moments of Francis Bacon.

Timeline: Moments of Lucian Freud.

Timeline: Moments of David Hockney.

A Bigger Splash (1967), David Hockney.

David Hockney, 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life.

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