Postwar Modern review: That rare thing in a contemporary art gallery – a genuinely polemical exhibition

In focusing on more neglected aspects of its period, this show gives us a rich sense of the radicalism of a time just before our own, which has remained for most of us substantially unknown

Franciszka Themerson, Eleven Persons and One Donkey Moving Forwards, 1947 (Themerson Estate 2021)

The immediate post-war period is generally seen as the grimmest of times for British art: when artists scrabbled about producing angst-ridden “existentialist” daubs in ill-heated, austerity-bound studios where the milk was always off and there was never a shilling for the electric meter. Francis Bacon, the artist who exemplifies this alienated mood, is of course considered unassailably great. But everything else about the period appears mired in provincial irrelevance, with art students looking to the genteel illustration of John Minton (“Who?” Exactly...), barely aware of the great Abstract Expressionist upsurge on the other side of the Atlantic.

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965 – which marks the 40th anniversary of the Barbican Art Gallery – wants to tell a very different story about this supposedly benighted period. Spanning the era between the last days of the Second World War and the earliest manifestations of Swinging London, it argues that this period – “marked by nuclear dawn, the Cold War, the waning of the British empire” – gave rise to “extraordinary and deeply moving art” that was “more vital and distinctive than has tended to be recognised”.

It makes its case, not through a chronological survey or conventional analysis of movements, but via a series of room-scale snapshots centred on particular preoccupations or nodes of activity. This allows for some surprising and highly revealing connections and juxtapositions between artists and movements that are generally seen as antithetical, even mutually hostile. The result is a view that is far more diverse in its details, and much more coherent in its bigger picture, than anything else we’ve seen on this period to date.