Art of darkness in a postwar world

If you’re the sort of person who goes to an exhibition for a bit of escapism and to look at pretty pictures, this show really isn’t for you. It features 200 art works made in Britain in the years immediately after the Second World War.

This was a time of hardship and rationing, in a land whose big cities had just been blitzed by enemy bombs, in a conflict where millions lost their lives. The art created in this context, quite understandably, was bleak.

Lynn Chadwick’s tall metal sculpture, The Fisheater (1951), is typical. It hovers ominously above our heads, with a form that might best be described as part bird and part missile.

Also on view are works by good friends Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who liked to paint the bomb sites of postwar London together – as well as the sites where reconstruction was taking place. Auerbach’s Rebuilding The Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (1962) could easily be mistaken for an abstract work.

One can just about make out some scaffolding (in red). Otherwise, pretty much all we see is a close-up of London’s primeval clay: represented not just by the earthy-brown colour all over, but by the clumpy build-up of paint on the canvas.

The exhibition features work by 49 artists. Many of them, such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud (Girl With Roses, left), are well known. The stars of the show, however, are arguably the less famous figures, such as Magda Cordell, a Hungarian refugee from Nazi persecution who liked to portray women’s bodies without heads and limbs.

All in all, this show comes recommended. Dark times made for some devastatingly good art.