Thursday 16th January 2025
Jo Walton
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. 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.
