Thursday 16th January 2025 10.45am and 2.15pm at The Henley Rugby Club. Live transmission 10.45am only. For more information on all lectures please contact Sarah Barry on SarahBarry63@yahoo.co.uk or 07879 611782.
Jo Walton
Report on January 2025 TASH Lecture
The January 2025 Arts Society Henley lecture was held on 16th January, and was given by Jo Walton on post-war artists in London. There was a tight-knit group focussed around Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, and also lesser-known contemporaries such as John Craxton and John Minton. They were reacting to the grimy and bombed state of post-war London by developing stark new styles of representing people, taking their inspiration from Surrealism, Expressionism and Romanticism. Jo Walton showed their art, and also talked about their intertwined lives. They were all initially poor, though later Freud and Bacon became wealthy as their work was appreciated and started selling well. They all lived somewhat dissolute lives. It was interesting seeing how their work developed as they developed individual styles, and also how they sparked ideas off each other. The lecture was given twice, each time to a full house, with others watching the lecture online. The view was the lecture was excellent, even though the art was sometimes off-putting.
In the years after the Second World War, London was dark, grimy and gap-toothed by bomb damage.
Yet alongside austerity and the frantic race to rebuild and refurbish there was also enormous creativity and a longing for beauty and glamour. Young artists, such as Lucien Freud, John Craxton and John Minton were developing stark new styles of representing people, taking their inspiration from Surrealism, Expressionism and Romanticism.
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Francis Bacon was producing dramatic and shocking distortions of the human figure while tutors art the Royal Academy Schools were still forbidding their students to look at the work of such artists as Picasso. Documentary photographers created poignant essays showing the hardships of post-war life at the same time as Cecil Beaton conjured lavish tableaux of opulent pastel-shaded ball-gowns modelled by debutantes. In this talk we will look at the changing face of post-war London, seen through the eyes of artists beginning to make their names and featuring gambling, gangsters and glamour alongside compelling images and a journey that would lead (for some) to super-stardom.
Jo Walton has combined teaching and lecturing with a career in art bookselling and has been a volunteer guide at both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She is now a freelance lecturer for The Arts Society, The National Gallery, The Art Fund, and local art societies.
