Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945-1965, review: aren’t we all feeling quite glum enough already?
And we thought we had it tough, first slogging through a pandemic, and now with the war in Ukraine. Postwar Modern, a new exhibition at the Barbican, reminds us what the generation that survived the Second World War had to endure.
If the show’s documentary photography is anything to go by, Britain, even as late as the supposedly Swinging Sixties, remained a scarred and stricken place: a benighted, foetid land of streaky brickwork, broken windows, and bomb-struck plots of rubble across which children romped, momentarily transforming wastelands into playgrounds. Their youthful optimism aside, life was, seemingly, a depressing daily grind of mouldy poverty, stale cigarette smoke – and the aftershocks of trauma.
Much of the art produced during the two decades following 1945 covered by the exhibition reflected the difficulty of the times, via shattered, misshapen forms, a monochrome or dingy palette, and a generally downbeat air. At the Barbican, for instance, in a portrait of the artist Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach imagines his friend’s head as a semi-flayed skull; Jean Cooke, staring intensely into a mirror, paints herself with a black eye; and Lucian Freud depicts his first wife, Kitty Garman, as stiff and haunted as a psychiatric patient suffering from PTSD, throttling a rose. The marriage didn’t last.
Elsewhere, strange bronze figures from the Fifties by Eduardo Paolozzi – patched-together, hobbling, quasi-robotic bipeds, with nicked and broken surfaces, their carapaces torn to shreds – encapsulate the exhibition’s overall tone of dejection. A couple evoke the arrow-riddled Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, recalling Francis Newton Souza’s 1955 painting “Mr Sebastian” in the first room, his face and neck savagely pierced by six shafts. Anyone seeking diversion from the gravity of our own moment should give the Barbican a wide berth.
Apart from the obvious fit of presenting the “rough poetry”, as an introductory label puts it, of Brutalist art in a Brutalist building, to coincide with the Barbican’s 40th anniversary, why did the gallery decide to look afresh at such a despairing and gloomy chapter in British art? In the catalogue, the curator, Jane Alison, “debunk[s]” any notion that the art of this period was “simply a prelude to Pop” – but, as arguments go, this strikes me as a straw man. A wall-text suggests that we don’t sufficiently recognise post-war British art as “vital” or “distinctive”. Really?
Still, arranged thematically, the show begins with great assurance in the gallery’s large, open-plan spaces downstairs. Spewing forth imaginary monsters, a dramatic section entitled “Post-Atomic Garden” demonstrates how the pastoral romanticism that infused British art before the war had, by the end of the conflict, been blown to smithereens.
Here, we find Elisabeth Frink’s malevolent bronzes of long-legged, stubby birds, essentially beaks on sticks seemingly scavenging furiously for carrion; and disturbing sculptures of predatory scuttling creatures by Lynn Chadwick, one featuring a sail-like form with the contours of a pterodactyl’s wing.
Yet, as the exhibition unfolds, odd, misguided curatorial decisions distract. None of the “old guard” who forged a reputation before the war makes the cut – deliberately so. But why? It’s folly to relate the history of post-war British art without mentioning, say, Henry Moore’s tense, screaming Reclining Figure, created for the Festival of Britain.
This is compounded by the patchiness of what is included: too much work feels modest or muted, the indifferent, trend-following efforts of the artistically timid and second-rate. If anything needs “debunking”, it’s John Bratby’s horrible, ham-fisted “kitchen-sink” realism, which gets an entire room. Upstairs, pictures of despondent young women by Eva Frankfurther, a Jewish refugee, appear awkward and insipid. On this evidence, post-war British art, before David Hockney turned up, tended to plod, not soar.
With around 200 works by almost 50 artists, this is, then, a substantial “reassessment” that fails properly to reassess its subject. Infected, perhaps, by the temper of what was on display, I left disappointed, feeling glum.
From March 3 until June 26; info: barbican.org.uk