Contemporary British art

Résumé du document

There are many tendencies in contemporary art in Great Britain. The break-up of the Surrealist Movement as a direct consequence of the Second World War is a historical event which needs to be explained. The leading personalities of the movement maintained a revolutionary attitude in the pre-war period, and this made it necessary for them to flee from the Nazi tyranny. The failure of the movement to reconstitute itself after the war contributed to make artists independent. Moreover, the post war years presented an uncertain future, and an uncertain future always threatens the risk of disaster. People were already socked by the war un-settled their world of conventional values, and gave rise to chaos. In Britain, horror was at the heart of two of the most important exhibitions of the past half-century. In 1949 the now defunct Hanover Gallery in London was filled with painting after painting of unremitting pain, in an exhibition that announced the arrival of Francis Bacon and heralded one of the most extraordinary success stories in 20th-century art. Bacon's paintings reveal his personal torment celebrated as an artistic revelation of the human condition.

Extraits

[...] It was fuelled by existentialism and inspired by Giacometti. The artist was a loner, a solitary genius revealing important truths - and from this side of the battle emerged the victors, from Bacon and Freud to Kossoff and Auerbach. Half a century later it is difficult to capture the heat of this battle, its importance as a riposte to American abstract expressionism, and its role in intellectualising postwar British culture. It is difficult, too, to grasp the passionate conviction with which it was fought, a conviction fuelled by the belief that art really mattered. [...]

[...] aim of a sculptor like Henry Moore is to represent his conceptions in forms natural to the material he in working In order to express or represent a concept, he has to endow (doter) his creation with life, with his own vitality. The sculptor's problem is to give this dynamic quality to objects which do not move or grow. It is done by establishing certain relations between a solid mass ands its surroundings space, and by dividing the mass into contrasted areas, convexities and concavities which are rythmically related and seem to move into one another. [...]

[...] Concurrent with his teaching at the Slade in the fifties, Vaughan's own work became grander in conception. He began to produce a formality reminiscent of Easter Island figures or the abstracted shapes from the Cycladics. The changes in his style and technique can only be appreciated when his work is displayed in chronological order, as it will be at Olympia. It is easy to associate his name with one of his periods, and not see that in each phase he took his technical expertise and aesthetic sensibility to a new and different plain. [...]

[...] It was an idea that Bacon found in the cinema; more specifically in the curved panoramic screen used for Cinemascope projection, which seemed almost to enclose the audience on three sides. "I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me that belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. There've been extraordinary photographs which have been done of animals just being taken up before they were slaughtered; and the smell of death. We don't know, of course, but it appears by these photographs that they're so aware of what is going to happen to them, they do everything to attempt to escape. [...]

[...] He also illuminates the impact of foreign and émigré artists on British culture, addressing artists such as Giacometti, Guttuso and Picasso, and examining the claims made for London as an art centre to rival the Ecole de Paris and the New York School. Hyman draws on contemporary critical writing to give fresh insights into the art debates of the period and gives new prominence to the central roles of the critics John Berger and David Sylvester. This all but forgotten struggle was one of the key moments in the history of British art. At first glance, the situations then and now could hardly be more different. [...]