The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the
1970s has never before been told before as a single narrative. R. B.
Kitaj's proposal, made in 1976, that there was a "substantial School of
London" was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it
implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in
reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also
Bridget Riley.
Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an
exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with
such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank
Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry
Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon
Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also
teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and
demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead,
painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the
influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching
passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from
Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were
bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and
marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities
of paint.
