John Bratby, The Toilet, 1956.
Martin Harrison’s survey of art made and shown in London in the 1950s provides some nice surprises. Bits of the story have been much told—the rise of Francis Bacon, the Beaux-Arts Gallery painters such as Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, the proto-Pop of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, and the first anarchic stirrings of David Hockney and his Royal College mates. But to see all this seamlessly connected against the background of postwar austerity and city reconstruction, to find again once-well-known names—Ceri Richards, Joan Eardley, Victor Willing, Robyn Denny, John Bratby—on a footing with the still-famous survivors, is bracing, especially for those who think every ’90s Britpack artist will last forever.
