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The Resurging Relevance of The School of London Painters
This group of artists including Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were connected as much by their aura of club-going cool as the subjects they chose to portray. Here’s what you should know.
O nce tied to postwar austerity and provincial inwardness, the so-called School of London painters are now rightly regarded, internationally, as among the most powerful and influential artists of the past century.
Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, along with Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, R. B. Kitaj and David Hockney, are artists of proven staying power. Arriving independently at their own distinct idiom, these painters produced some of the most indelible images of the 20th and 21st centuries. Their works can be found in the collections of the greatest museums while their colorful, interconnected lives are the subject of an endless stream of films, articles and books.
The American-born R.B. Kitaj first coined the term “School of London” in the catalogue of a 1974 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. As Kitaj well knew, this loosely affiliated group of painters was not in fact a “school” or any other kind of organized entity. But their preference for painting the figure set them apart from New York’s art world, which was, in those post-war decades, under the spell of abstraction, pop art, minimalism and conceptual art.
But art is cyclical, and today, with figurative art once again ascendant, the School of London painters feel fresher and more compelling than ever. Contemporary artists as diverse as Elizabeth Peyton, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Jenny Saville, John Currin, Cecily Brown, George Condo, Glenn Brown, Adrian Ghenie and Dana Schutz have all to some extent been inspired by them.
The School of London painters were self-consciously modern (only the brutal 20th century could have produced Bacon, Auerbach and Freud) but they regarded the very notion of “advanced” or “avant-garde” art - as defined by New York critics - with a certain skepticism. What bound them was a desire to paint the people and places they knew. Each believed oil paint was a medium with an almost miraculous capacity to capture and deepen experience. The act of painting was part of an ongoing attempt to connect their inner lives with the world around them. They were motivated by a desire to keep intimacy, emotion and a feeling of aliveness in play.
The School of London painters were, to varying degrees and in shifting configurations, close friends. An aura of legend has coalesced around their night-time habits, their love lives and their favored haunts – especially in the cases of Bacon and Freud. These included the French Pub and Wheelers restaurant in London’s Soho, as well as various gambling dens, racetracks, stately houses and nightclubs, where they got to know colorful, high-and-low denizens, from the gangster Kray twins to Princess Margaret.
The authenticity of the work they produced was such that it changed forever the way we see the corners of London they worked in and often depicted: Paddington, Holland Park and Notting Hill in Freud’s case; Camden Town and Mornington Crescent for Auerbach; Willesden and Kilburn for Kossoff. But if some associate the School of London painters with the city’s gray light and grim studio interiors, it may be more accurate to connect it with a sense of excitement about the possibilities of pushing paint around on canvas and with hours of endless discovery in the studio.
When he baptized them, Kitaj was giving structure to a group of ambitious, idiosyncratic artists who stood at an oblique angle to prevailing fashions. This outsider status, arising partly from trauma, was a defining characteristic. Four of the group (Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach and Kitaj) were Jewish; Bacon and Hockney were homosexual. Freud and Auerbach had escaped Nazi Europe in the 1930s. Auerbach never saw his parents again. They were murdered during the Holocaust.
Friendship played a key role in all their relationships, as did the complicated dynamics of influence and rivalry. Freud and Auerbach were lifelong friends. Each painted portraits of the other. To the end of his life, Freud would show just-completed works to Auerbach, trusting his judgment above anyone else’s.
Freud and Bacon, who both had magnetic social personalities, were also very close friends for many years, although they eventually fell out. Bacon’s influence was a crucial factor in Freud’s decision to move away from the light, linear style of his early career (which had earned him the moniker “the Ingres of existentialism” from the critic Herbert Read) towards a riskier manner of painting that relied on the textures and viscosity of oil paint and broader brushwork. But Freud always maintained that it was Bacon’s personality – convivial, risk-taking, charming and brutally honest – that affected him as much as his way of painting.
Bacon was a great painter of other people’s heads and bodies (including Freud’s). The mythology around him has only thickened since his death in 1992, but to everyone who knew him during his life he was brilliant, complex, electrifying, and tragic. Bacon was preternaturally responsive to the dynamics and atmospherics of modern media (propaganda, photography and cinema) and he loved the grand figurative tradition of Western art, from Cimabue, Velázquez and Rembrandt to Degas, Van Gogh and Picasso. But he was most concerned with inventing a new kind of portraiture, and the self-portraits he painted in 1972 are characteristic of his best work. The painting from The Lewis Collection, marked by looping concavities and convexities and by the incursion of velvety blacks into the rainbow colors of his raddled, pear-shaped face, is the finest of the 1972 series.
Bacon loved masks and make-up. The Picasso scholar John Richardson, a friend of both Bacon and Freud, described once seeing him “ensconced in front of a mirror, seemingly making up his face. In fact, he was rehearsing those heavily loaded brushstrokes that would give his portraits… their sumptuous gyroscopic spin … It was as if the surface of his face were the page of a sketchbook.”
In interviews with me in the early 2000s, Freud was open about Bacon’s enormous impact on him. But Freud was not the kind of artist to remain in thrall to anyone else. He remained a realist, but after meeting Bacon, he realized he wanted to use paint – rather than drawing – to capture what it felt like to occupy a body, not just to illustrate one.
Unlike Bacon, who preferred working from photographs and alone in his studio, Freud always painted in the presence of live models. In the 1950s, under Bacon’s influence, focusing on the shifting planes and volumes of the human face, he began to make portraits like The Lewis Collection’s A Young Painter (1958). This remarkable head portrait depicts fellow artist Ken Brazier. The wild intensity of Brazier’s expression and the unruliness of his hair are full of motion, as is the brushwork, suggesting a new level of ambition for Freud during this crucial stage of transition in his work.
Freud told his biographer William Feaver that Brazier painted as if he were working “with shovels and drills to discover something that had been discovered before. It had graffiti-like urgency.” This, from Freud, was a very high compliment: Urgency – with its implication of an unmediated connection to truth – was the keystone of his own art and he worked constantly to increase it.
Freud’s brushstrokes soon began to register more than just likeness. The thick, textured paint, the mobile, faceted planes and the unusual perspectives all produce a heightened awareness of physical sensation.
His series of “naked portraits” revolutionized the tradition of the female nude and the Lewis Collection’s Blond Girl on a Bed (1987) is undoubtedly one of his greatest. These paintings “bypass decorum,” as the critic Robert Hughes put it, “while fiercely preserving respect.”
In Blond Girl on a Bed, the model Sophie de Stempel (who featured in multiple paintings and etchings) is shown from an elevated vantage point. She lies on a bed, her pose natural but dynamic, the tight patterns of the bedcover serving visually to bind in place a body that otherwise threatens to deliquesce. The grainy, lead white paint and the shifting hues convey De Stempel’s skin and the complex volumes of her body. Up close, the effect of paint embodying flesh is nothing short of extraordinary.
Often overshadowed by the other School of London painters, Leon Kossoff was an authentic painter of enormous range and deep feeling. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and his reputation has grown steadily in the three decades since.
Kossoff – like Auerbach, Bacon and Freud – was interested above all in how paint could amplify experience. He loved multiplicity. “Every time you look, you see something different,” he once said. “You experience something different [and] in the end, all the differences amount to a sort of presence.”
In the 1960s, Kossoff took a studio in Willesden, in North London. A swimming pool opened nearby and Kossoff started taking his son there for lessons. Between 1969 and 1972, Kossoff made four large paintings of the pool. He was attracted to its hubbub and enjoyed observing the sheer variety of bodies against the water’s blue tumult.
Kossoff liked to work rapidly. In Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 o’clock Saturday Morning, August (1969) we get a sense of a natural, original painter willing to grapple with sensory complexity – noise, light, chlorine, clammy indoor air – in a rush to get it all down. His energy and excitement recall John Constable, who used rapidly brushed oil paint to unite sky and trees and fields, thickly populating his pictures with cherished particularity.
“He makes the paint work,” said Andrea Rose, the author of Kossoff’s catalogue raisonné, in an interview about the painter. “It doesn’t illustrate something. The paint enacts his experience.”
The same can be said for the other School of London painters, and it’s why they are so inspiring to the most audacious young figurative painters – and collectors – of today.
