Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters

Martin Gayford has provided us with an intriguing snap shot of British art from 1945 to the end of the 1960s, making use of many personal testimonies and yet retaining the discipline of a historian. He rightly centres on Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and David Hockney without neglecting the 'scene'.

This book is not just about those three dominant artists. There is scarcely a significant artist from this era who is not introduced and positioned in his or her milieu by Gayford. His story of these 25 years flows so that you get a sense of a fairly closed world that only sometimes spills out into ours.

The core point here is the sheer variety of artistic endeavours so that at no time can we speak of some dominant school or fashion as we might show more with, say, Abstract Expressionism in New York. Even such Schools as do emerge (such as Pop Art) prove to be more fluid than we might expect.

The creative attraction of America is important, however. It is arguable that Hockney has always been a Californian as much as an English artist. The pioneering work of the British Pop artists depended on the pull of American popular culture whilst remaining wholly distinctive.

It was also perhaps a culture that was perhaps more tolerant of difference than others. Abstraction never crushed figurative art (unlike in the US). The figurative and abstract could merge creatively as they appeared to do in the work of Bacon and Hockney. Freud never ceased being figurative.

Gayford is also good at letting artists speak for themselves on occasions if only to demonstrate that speaking is not really very helpful when it comes to art. Artists will talk amongst themselves in what becomes a private language that hides as much as it shows. Their bias is towards 'doing' - action.

One is struck by Bridget Riley's comments about her creative process which was highly individualistic and 'unscientific', its fashionable 'zeitgeist' aspect accidental and even irritating in its commercial exploitation without the artist's consent.

Artists simply 'do' Art. Bacon, Freud and Hockney are all extremely different from each other but what they had in common (only Hockney is still alive) was an intense creative obsession to 'act' and then, having acted, to move on and act something else out, to express, to develop.

I found myself by chance in a room full of film directors a few weeks ago and found the same attitude. It was for critics to analyse their work and that was another profession entirely. They were interested in making their peculiar sausages and, once the sausages were made, they were sent off to be eaten.

The educational system, the galleries, commissions, social change, private ambition, networks and Soho (and Camberwell) are all covered but the emphasis is always on the artist and what they actually did - their work - and how relationships between artists affected that work.

These are (mostly) sociable people in their way and yet the act of artistic creation seems to be one of existential isolation, a working out of 'being in the world' using physical materials where language simply has minimal place except sometimes as just another raw material in its own right.

I ended up with the rather uncharitable thought that perhaps 95% of the artistically fascinated middle classes who troop along to retrospectives and blockbusters are likely to emerge no wiser as to the apparent meaning of the work they have just viewed.

This is not to be a snob but a realist. The artist's world is intensely private and belongs to a club of artists where it is not. Little can be communicated when much art actually has no meaning (in linguistic terms) despite the best interpretative efforts of critics.

The famous and apparently Philistine comment that 'I don't know much about art but I know what I like' may, in fact, be as far as most of us can go in practice. Few 'art lovers' can go further. Even the critics (it becomes clear from the book) are likely to be guessing much of the time.

But we could say this about any of the great zones of human thought - Art, Religion, Science, Music, Politics, the list goes on. We bathe in their glow, accept or reject them, pretend to knowledge as opposed to pleasure or aversion, trust in others for our views yet not know their inner secrets.

An excellent book with excellent and appropriate illustrations, it is highly recommended to anyone interested in post war British Art and in the rather unique individualism of a culture that was still able to emphasise learned basic skills like drawing until quite late in the day. show less

This is not an easy book to read and therefore difficult to review. The topic is interesting and informative and Martin Gayford has written a thoroughly commendable book with a bibliography, endnotes and an index. The latter is invaluable.

I guess the topic is always overshadowed by the big three of the title and the reader is possibly expecting more about them. To his credit Martin Gayford sticks to his guns and puts them in context.

The writer, perhaps to his credit, uses a wide variety of sentence types which makes reading easier. But it is his longer ones with the use of em-dashes (long ones) which are challenging. They occasionally have one reading a sentence several times to get the meaning. An example:

p.6 Nonetheless, that such a show more record could be set at all makes a point: painting done in London in the decades after the Second World War has come to seem hugely more significant - internationally - than it did, for the most part, when it was being created.

The reader is called on to observe what happened - he or she can only truly see what happened in this period by looking at the works of these painters. Perhaps Gayford's book is required reading before looking again. show less