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The overall gentle irony of these artists
gives way to a fiercer satire in the work of Allen Jones (b.1937),
who has been obsessed by the use of the female figure in commercial art
and the sex industry. The obviously erotic purpose of these images is
satirized in his sharp-breasted, fishnet-legged but often significantly
faceless figures with their gaudy colour and slick outlines. There is
irony, too, in the social comment of Richard Hamilton (b.1922),
whose images, often based on press photographs and advertisements, distil
the ethos of the anti-Conservative satire that spread through the media
in the 1960s.
It is worth remembering that the British
painter and etcher Walter Sickert (1860-1942) had pioneered the
use of newspaper photographs as the basis for pictures back in the 1930s.
The identification of a recognizable 'London' quality in painting owes
much to the presiding genius of Sickert, though the so-called 'School
of London' that flourished in the 1970s couldn't be said to have a
single style or approach. Under its umbrella have been grouped many of
the artists discussed in different places here according to their preoccupations.
Perhaps the coarsely handled swimming-bath or tube-station scenes of Leon
Kossoff (b. 1926), with their very heavy impasto
and urgent spontaneity, continue to see London through Sickertian eyes.
We encounter similarly dense paint in the work of Frank Auerbach
(b. 1931), whose technique, like Kossoff's, derives from the later style
of Bomberg, who taught them both at the Borough Polytechnic. Like Kossoff
too, he chooses London subjects - its people and its landscapes. It is
a rewarding experience to penetrate the apparent confusion of Auerbach's
contorted surfaces to discover the firm, tautly disciplined structures
beneath, whether of a face or of a tree on Hampstead Heath. Michael
Andrews (1928-90) by contrast uses paint with great delicacy, specializing
in the traditional subject matter of urban daily life, group portraiture
and topographical landscape, albeit working on canvases that are sometimes
very large.
Most of these developments had their parallels in abstract
art. The careful scrutiny and measurement of Coldstream's studies
of the everyday world are matched in the work of Kenneth Martin
(1905-84) and his wife Mary Martin (1907-69), whose paintings and
reliefs are a development from Piet Mondrian and Russian Constructivism.
They built up their compositions by means of mathematical calculations,
placing minimal marks - lines, blocks or spaces - on the canvas not as
a consequence of aesthetic decisions but following a carefully planned
sequence of 'sums'. The resulting patterns are cool and dry but, in Kenneth
Martin's case, surprising and sometimes highly expressive in their understated
way. They extend themselves naturally into three dimensions in the form
of delicately balanced mobile sculptures. The paintings of Mary Martin,
equally coolly calculated, possess a rare stillness and equilibrium.
In the same way, the bold commentaries of Pop Art on the imagery of commerce
and the media found a counterpart in the abstractions of Bridget Riley
(b.1931). Riley has been a single-minded exponent of the international
Op Art movement that enjoyed its heyday in the
1960s and 1970s. This was an approach to abstraction that concentrated
on rigid but subtle geometry and optically startling colour combinations.
Riley began painting in black and white alone, titillating the eye with
finely modulated stripes or dots that seem to flicker, fade or fold out
of view as one looks. Her cool, hard objectivity took her so far as to
employ assistants in the actual application of paint: the artist's personality,
and all representational reference, are deliberately eliminated to an
extent that has been unusual in British abstraction - compare Pasmore's
anxiety to retain his personal imprint. Mondrian's grids lie at the root
of Riley's approach, but it is interesting that when she attempted to
make a copy of his Broadway Boogie Woogie she abandoned it, unable
to feel her way into Mondrian's creative processes. Her own abstract language
is, then, essentially different, and it is one of the most original of
the post-war period.
At the opposite end of the artistic spectrum from Riley and the Martins
is the lushly sensuous painting of Howard Hodgkin (b.1932), who
has sustained the native tradition of abstraction founded on representation:
the nudes and still lifes of Sir Matthew Smith (1879-1959) and
the watery landscapes of Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) all seem to
have influenced him. He has painted portraits, interiors, landscapes,
all transformed into glowing cauldrons of colour, variegated with polka
dots and molten rainbows, in which the very glossiness of the paint contributes
to the luxuriant effect. He has spent much time in India, and the brilliant
patterns of Indian fabrics play an important part in his work. Even his
frames are painted, extending the opulent breadth of his brushwork beyond
the picture space and into the room. A younger exponent of the values
of lusciously applied colour
pigment is Therese Oulton (b.1953), whose often large canvases
are inundated by tides of rippling paint, floods of rich, sombre colour
illuminated by intermittent flashes of fitful light.
Another abstract painter of Oulton's generation, Christopher Le Brun
(b.1951), reflected some of the preoccupations of the New York school
in his large, brooding, loosely painted canvases; though his shadowy spaces
usually evoke the transcendental in more concrete ways. Recently, especially,
he has introduced strong representational elements, often taken from those
Symbolist favourites Wagner and Dante. The abstract merges effortlessly
into the musical expressionist. Le Brun's move away from the wholly abstract
to a representational account of the more ineffable aspects of human longing,
nostalgia or pain is symptomatic of an increasing plurality of approach
in the last years of the century. Perhaps it is no accident that the presiding
genius of painting in Britain at the end of the century is an older artist
who has insisted repeatedly on the virtues of the art school- an institution
that had seemed seriously threatened in the iconoclastic 1960s and 1970s.
Lucian Freud (b.1922) came from Vienna with his family in the 1930s,
and his early work breathes Surrealism and
themes of German Expressionism,
shot through with the tense anxiety of the early post-war years. But already
in his portraits of the 1950s there is an uncompromising fascination -
obsession is not too strong a word - with the minute details of the human
body. Over the years the scrutiny has become more microscopic, drawing
remorseless attention to every vein and pore. We are sometimes reminded
of Spencer's earthy nudes, and of his explicit comparison of human with
dead animal meat - not perhaps as far from the preoccupations of Francis
Bacon (1909-92) as might at first appear. In the long run it has never
been necessary for Freud to leave the art school: all his materials are
there. The willing model, candidly exposing him- or herself to the artist's
intense observation, the significantly unimportant surroundings - a sofa,
a roughly draped bed, bare boards. All of this is of ancient lineage,
and Freud makes no attempt to dress his subject matter up as modern. Yet
it is modern by the very nature of his gaze - uncensoring, unshockable,
compassionate. These are the qualities on which we pride ourselves in
the aftermath of a liberation that we are still trying fully to understand.
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