POSTWAR MODERN: NEW ART IN BRITAIN 1945-65

How did the horrors of WW2 change the shape of British art? Postwar Modern, entering its last week at the Barbican, examines a period when ‘certainties were gone, and the aftershocks continued, but there was also hope for a better tomorrow’.

Much of it is grim, glum, brittle, frightened, angry. Paolozzi’s vaporised heads; Souza’s agonised Christ; Frink’s deranged Harbinger Birds; Freud’s Hotel Bedroom. Is any 1950s painting as bleak as Freud’s Hotel Bedroom?

Out of this period develop some of the greatest talents of the twentieth century, their style darkened and twisted by the effects of the cataclysmic conflict, and the dawn of the Cold War: Auerbach, Chadwick, Kossoff, Scott, Bacon. 

Eva Frankfurther, West Indian Waitresses, c1955. © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther

But wait! Is there a glint of hope and camaraderie in the glance of one of the figures in Eva Frankenfurther’s 1955 West Indian Waitresses (pictured above)? Maybe not: within a year of completing the painting Frankenfurther, a German refugee, one of the many female artists to be featured in this important exhibition, had committed suicide.

Then, gradually, as you make your way through the show, the art starts to become about art, and a lightness shines through the grimy haze. Patrick Heron experiments with abstracted shape and colour. Hamilton and Hockney go pop. The sixties emerge, blinking and rebellious, from the wreckage.

The big irony was that the show opened as Russian bombs rained down on Kyiv, and Europe was once again at war. Postwar Modern closes on June 26, so this is your last chance to see it, if you can negotiate your way there through a London paralysed by rail strikes.