Exhibition Guide:
Postwar Modern

Introduction

The Second World War caused suffering and loss of life on an unimaginable scale, and dislocation, conflict and upheaval continued in the twenty years that followed. This was a period marked by a  nuclear dawn, the Cold War, the waning of the British Empire and the multiple convulsions that resulted from it. In Britain, there was relief at having endured and been victorious, but there was also exhaustion and the complex challenges of healing and reconciliation. Out of the fear and uncertainty came a desire to forge a better future, while the demands for equality, liberation and human rights would continue to be fought over. Artists had to make sense of an entirely altered world in which ideologies of every persuasion had been called into question, even the belief in humanity itself.

Focusing on 48 artists who experienced the war and its global aftershocks at a formative stage in their development, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–1965 demonstrates that it was these very conditions that gave rise to extraordinary and deeply moving art in these years – an art more vital and distinctive than has tended to be recognised. The exhibition moves beyond familiar groupings of artists by ‘school’, medium or geographic origin, instead paying close attention to shared experiences and preoccupations. In a period in which Britain was redefined by migration, ‘the new’ in art-making was profoundly enriched by refugees from Nazism as well as those arriving from a crumbling empire. At the same time, Postwar Modern celebrates the work of women artists whose practices were frequently marginalised then and since.

A kind of ‘rough poetry’ underpins much of the revelatory art on display. The phrase is borrowed from the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who used it as a way of describing the ethos of Brutalism they and others developed. Here, it resonates more broadly, capturing something of the unique sensibility of both abstract and figurative art made in Britain during these postwar years.

Post-Atomic Garden

The bombsite was an ever-present reminder of suffering and loss in the postwar era, but it also embodied the hopes of a society desperate for renewal. This landscape of dereliction was captured in the evocative black-and-white images created by the social documentary photographer Bert Hardy. The pits and craters he depicted not only served as playgrounds for children but were inspirational for an emergent generation of artists. The extraordinary relief sculptures of William Turnbull seem to mirror this shell-shocked terrain.

Romantic notions of pastoral beauty were replaced with urban wastelands that suggested life after a nuclear attack. This post-atomic garden is haunted by richly imagined mutant beasts and plants, often fashioned from found and industrial materials. Lynn Chadwick’s airborne iron predator, The Fisheater (1951), sets the tone: it is vulnerable yet threatening, monumental and delicate at the same time. Similarly, Elisabeth Frink’s menacing, humanoid Harbinger Birds (1961) appear as guardians of this unsettling domain. A now iconic trio of experimental installations, Growth and Form (1951), Parallel of Life and Art (1953) and Patio and Pavilion (1956), produced by artists associated with the so-called Independent Group, drew on scientific imagery and were inhabited by a hallucinogenic overload of creatural and vegetal forms. One of the group’s key figures, Nigel Henderson, had (like Turnbull) served as a fighter pilot in the war, an experience that had given him a disorienting new perspective on the world. His photographs and collages zoom in and out, leading the viewer on a helter-skelter ride. These jumps between the micro and the macro also resonate with Prunella Clough’s painted evocations of pulsating energy and cellular division.

In all these works, ambiguity abounds. Is Eduardo Paolozzi’s Contemplative Object (Sculpture and Relief) (1951) a grenade, a mutant seed or an asteroid from outer space?

Jean and John

With the future so uncertain, the home became a symbol of stability and social reconstruction in postwar Britain. There was an emphasis, too, on the traditional family and marriage, reinforcing gender stereotypes. The paintings of Jean Cooke and John Bratby demonstrate the troubling reality that could lie behind these ideals. The two artists met and married in 1953, marking the beginning of a turbulent relationship that spanned more than twenty years.

In 1954, the year food rationing finally ended, Bratby had his first solo show in London, showing several of his ‘tabletop’ still lifes: surfaces groaning with piles of packaged food, realised in vibrant oil paint. This new brand of British realism attracted attention and was nicknamed ‘Kitchen Sink’ painting, after an essay published by art critic David Sylvester. In Bratby’s canvases, the home is depicted as a psychosexual battleground, reflecting his own attempts at domestic domination. His fame far eclipsed that of his wife, but Bratby was jealous of her talent, often destroying Cooke’s works and allowing her only three hours a day to make her art. Although she later talked openly about the violence within their relationship, their paintings also chart a close artistic dialogue, their marriage and the home their shared subject.

Through her work, and her self-portraits above all, Cooke found a means of reasserting herself; as she recalled, ‘I started painting myself the way I wanted to be seen.’ Her paintings can be uncomfortable to view, but they are revealing examples of a woman artist harnessing the power of self-expression.

Lush Life

An estimated two million British homes were damaged in the Second World War, and in the austerity years that followed, household luxuries were scarce. It was not until 1954 that rationing ended in Britain, and in 1956–57 petrol restrictions had to be reimposed as a result of the Suez Crisis. The affluence seemingly enjoyed in the United States stood in alluring contrast to British life. Americans seemed to have it all: seductive cars, wall-to-wall fitted kitchens, appliances that did all the work, ice creams in different flavours, exotic breakfast cereals. All things lush and all things American – consumer objects of desire – were the focus of several artists at this time, and many explored consumerism’s relationship to femininity and domestic living. Richard Hamilton’s painting Hers is a Lush Situation (1958) is a fantasia of floating parts that scrutinises the erotic presentation of the car in marketing imagery. Eduardo Paolozzi’s ‘Bunk’ collages, which borrowed and recontextualised images from American magazines, are similarly laced with irony and humour.

In 1956, architects Alison and Peter Smithson staged a radical proposal for a new kind of living with their House of the Future, created as part of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. Plaster, plywood and paint masqueraded as moulded plastic: undoubtedly glamourous yet decidedly strange, it was intended as a vision of the year 1981 but speaks more powerfully to its own uneasy Cold War moment. Cocooned from the outside world, the house was a space of protection, saturated with sexualised references to the female body.

Concrete

Previously a celebrated figurative painter, Victor Pasmore underwent a radical conversion to abstract art in the late 1940s that sent ripples of controversy through the British art community. Highly charismatic, Pasmore had by 1951 established a circle of younger artists who were equally committed to the cause of geometric abstraction, which they referred to variously as ‘Concrete’, ‘Constructionist’ or ‘Constructivist’ art. These artists – Mary Martin, Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Robert Adams and Denis Williams, among others – became closely associated with one another for much of the 1950s, organising group exhibitions and publications.

Rather than abstracting from the visible world, they sought to ‘construct’ from first principles, understanding and replicating the essence of beauty through the study of science and mathematics. These artists pursued geometric harmonies in the search for a democratic, universal language that could transcend human differences. Critic and curator Herbert Read argued that, faced with devastation in Britain and abroad, ‘The Constructivists turned away from the ruins to create new values, to create the images of a civilisation not yet born.’

The group felt that art was for the benefit of society and that it was important to integrate it as much as possible into daily life. This desire to disrupt the exalted status of the work of art and bring it into the ‘real’ world informed the shift of Pasmore, Hill, Martin and others from painting to three-dimensional relief panels, and their choice of humble, industrial materials such as sheet metal, Perspex and household paint.

While several of the group emphasised the rationalism in their work, in reality their faithfulness to pure, ‘objective’ geometry was overstated. In fact, the poetic instinct continued to play out in works that embody the off-kilter, ever so slightly wonky sensibility found across British art of the time.

Two Women

Fleeing Nazi Germany aged nine, Eva Frankfurther experienced the sense of displacement that defined the lives of so many migrants at this time, and she developed a profound compassion for those living on the social margins. Although she trained at Saint Martin’s School of Art, Frankfurther became disillusioned with the London art scene and chose to support herself as a painter by non-artistic means. She sought places that fostered a sense of community, and in 1951 began working at the Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly. Lyons was a hive of activity, employing workers from all over the world; while the work was laborious, the bustling tea shop environment provided Frankfurther with ‘boundless material in the way of human beings’.

Shirley Baker grew up in Manchester, where the urban fabric was drastically changing in the 1950s and 1960s. With the development of the welfare state came a drive to improve poor and working-class housing conditions and repair bomb damage: as a result, entire streets and neighbourhoods disappeared and families were uprooted due to slum-clearance schemes. Baker recalled, ‘nobody seemed to be interested in recording the face of the people or anything about their lives’, so she began documenting this vanishing urban landscape, always carrying a camera in her bag ‘just in case’. The summer of 1965 saw her experiment with colour photography, making a series of around 60 prints using Kodachrome 64 film. With their vibrant colour, they offer a rare view of the vitality of Hulme, Manchester during this pivotal moment.

Frankfurther and Baker shared a commitment to capturing marginalised lives with warmth and humour: their works celebrated their local communities, recording individuals who would otherwise have been lost to history. At a time when women were discouraged from becoming photographers or artists, they blazed a trail.

Surface / Vessel

In contrast to the angst that dominated art-making in the early postwar years, works of the later 1950s and early 1960s often conveyed a dreamlike sensuality and tactility, their serenity offering refuge and comfort in a world still at sea.

In paintings by William Scott and ceramic vessels by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, colour recedes and textured surfaces and irregular forms take centre stage. ‘I find beauty in plainness’, commented Scott in 1947, and his works – which take the domestic still life as a starting point – celebrate this enduring belief. Despite their apparent simplicity, Scott creates luminous surfaces with a profound relationship to the handmade and to natural materials.

Having trained as a potter in her native Vienna, Lucie Rie fled Austria in 1938 and settled in London, where she set up a studio in a small mews house in Bayswater. Rie expressed her sophisticated, modernist sensibility in fragile stoneware and porcelain vessels, always thrown at the wheel. Highly refined, with elongated gently asymmetrical lines, her quivering, thinly potted forms embody a rare elegance. In contrast to the delicacy of Rie’s work, Coper’s has a more emphatic sculptural presence, sometimes articulated on a monumental scale. Another refugee from Nazism, Coper joined Rie’s studio as an assistant in 1946, his artistic talents becoming quickly apparent. He worked frequently with grainy white stoneware clay, throwing pots on the wheel and often fusing them together as powerful composites. By the 1950s he had developed a mature language of boldly simplified forms with sensuously weathered, earth-toned surfaces.

Horizon

A decade often characterised by hedonism, psychedelia and brilliant technicolour, the 1960s saw rapid social and political changes and an explosion of artistic experimentation. The work of David Medalla and Gustav Metzger developed postwar preoccupations in new directions, demonstrating the transformative vitality of the period.

In the early 1960s, Medalla and Metzger were among the co-founders of London’s Signals gallery. A groundbreaking space devoted to radical interdisciplinary practice, Signals was dedicated to ‘adventures of the modern spirit’. Disciplines ranging from politics, engineering and literature were being woven into an entirely new artistic language that resonated with the shifting social landscape and technological advances of the 1960s. The potential of moving sculpture fascinated Medalla, who created artworks using fluid, organic materials like sand, bubbles, mud and smoke. In 1963 he made his first Sand Machine sculptures: rotating structures that choreograph fragile forms in space, only to instantly unmake them. Medalla was interested in material transformation, both in a poetic and scientific sense.

A similar emphasis on raw and ephemeral materials defines Gustav Metzger’s sculpture, which had political activism at its heart. Metzger fled Nazi Germany as a child and later became deeply involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. By the early 1960s, he was moving away from what he called ‘auto-destructive art’, which held up a mirror to a violent world, towards ‘auto-creation’, in which the work of art takes on its own life. Liquid Crystal Environment (1965) was created using heat-sensitive chemicals sandwiched between rotating glass slides in a projector. A landmark work of immersive installation, its undulating chromatic patterns perhaps evoke the mushroom clouds of nuclear war but also a seductive future of limitless change and possibility.

Associate Artitst:
Abbas Zahedi

Age of Many Posts
3 Mar – 26 Jun

Age of Many Posts is an expanded public programme curated by Associate Artist Abbas Zahedi. Commissioned to work in parallel to Postwar Modern, Zahedi will explore the resonances between our current moment and the reality faced by artists working in the twenty years following the Second World War. Encompassing an open studio, public tours, talks and events, cinema screenings, performances and a Young Barbican Weekender, Zahedi will respond directly to artists, artworks and themes presented in the exhibition.

While Postwar Modern explores art produced between 1945 and ’65, its context resonates keenly with now. As the UK emerges from more than a decade of austerity, the socio-cultural reverberations of Brexit, and ongoing struggles and upheavals in the campaign for racial and gender equality, while facing the challenges of a global pandemic and the climate emergency, we are asking similarly probing questions about what kind of society we want and need to be.

Collaborating with teams across the Barbican including Creative Learning, Cinema, Music and communities local to the Centre, Zahedi seeks to explore these contemporary similarities through ongoing conversations with multiple individuals, illuminating the exhibition, artists and artworks in new and exciting ways.

Shop the exhibition

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by Prestel and designed by The Bon Ton. It includes new essays by Jane Alison, Hilary Floe, Ben Highmore, Hammad Nasar and Gregory Salter alongside a newly commissioned illustrated chronology documenting the period.

Prints from the exhibition are also available to purchase in the Art Gallery Shop or online.