In The Shadow Of War

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Saturday 29 November 2014 - Sunday 22 February 2015

Djanogly Art Gallery Opening Hours
Monday - Saturday 11am - 5pm
Sundays 12noon - 4pm

In anticipation of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War 2, this exhibition features the work of a generation of artists who rose to prominence in post-war Britain.

A period of reconstruction and recovery, the 40s and early 50s were also marked by austerity and the newly drawn battle lines of Cold War politics. In the art world too positions became polarized between the claims of realism versus abstraction and between different forms of realism itself.

Focusing on broadly figurative trends in painting and sculpture, this exhibition explores realist art in its many different guises.

Francis Bacon quickly established himself as the greatest figurative artist of his time with work characterised by its atheistic stance and anguished subject matter. Although of a slightly older generation defined by their work in the 1930s, both Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore remained potent forces in the post-war era. Marxist art critic John Berger looked to art that he felt supported a collective social agenda and championed social realist art represented in the exhibition by works of the so-called "kitchen sink" school.

The figurative art of this time abounds with allusions to the trauma of war from Bacon's use of Nazi imagery to the Holocaust references in Sutherland's "Crucifixion" for St. Matthew's Church, Northampton. In 1952, Herbert Read dubbed the work of a group of young British sculptors - including Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage and Bernard Meadows - the 'geometry of fear' referring to its iconography of despair or defiance.

Throughout the 50s, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff dedicated themselves to a series of paintings of London building sites, many of which had been occasioned by the bombing raids during the Blitz. Others, such as Merlyn Evans, made direct references to their wartime experiences.

Other artists include: John Bratby, Reg Butler, Prunella Clough, Robert Colquhoun, Derrick Greaves, Lucian Freud, Elisabeth Frink, Josef Herman, Patrick Heron, L.S. Lowry, Robert MacBryde, Edward Middleditch, John Minton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ceri Richards,Jack Smith, William Turnbull, Keith Vaughan.