I think we thought our responses to people and circumstances and life were more important than nursing some systematic idea of what painting was all about. —Michael Andrews and Victor Willing, “Morality and the Model,” Art and Literature, no. 2 (1964)

London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj, currently on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is a comprehensive group exhibition tracing the careers and legacies of the world renowned painters and draughtsmen collectively labeled “The School of London.” They were all producing figurative and landscape art in postwar London when abstraction and conceptual art were at their peaks. L.A. Louver has had a long history of supporting this school and exposing them to an American audience. This is the first of a four-part blog series that aims to chronologically examine these influential artists within the context of L.A. Louver’s 40 year history.

This post focuses on the 1970s and early 1980s, when the school began exhibiting together. Prior to this point, some of these artists had experienced individual success in the UK and internationally. In 1965, R.B.Kitaj was the subject of a solo exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art followed by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1967. Bacon earned his own Tate Gallery retrospective in 1962. During this time, they all became acquainted while living and working in London, with the common aim to give visibility and credence to the figurative tradition. Kitaj coined the term “The School of London” in 1976, the same year he curated the groundbreaking group exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery titled The Human Clay. The show’s name came from a W.H. Auden poem “Letter to Lord Byron” that David Hockney, a frequent collaborator and friend of the group liked to quote, “To me, art’s subject is the human clay.” L.A. Louver Director Peter Goulds attended the show and was inspired to bring this group together for an exhibition in Los Angeles.

In 1979, L.A. Louver presented a two part exhibition of British artists titled This Knot of Life (images pictured here). The first exhibition featured William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin and Euan Uglow; while the second included Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff. These artists were virtually unknown on the West Coast at the time. While there were some progressive galleries and art spaces in the area, like the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) in Century City, Riko Mizuno’s gallery on La Cienega, The Fred Wight Gallery, The Dickson Art Center at UCLA, it was a more limited art scene then it is today. Conceptual art and Pop art were extremely popular, and artists like Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, and Ed Ruscha were ubiquitous. There were also those who thought that no good art could come out of London at the time because it was not a cultural capital like New York or Paris. This Knot of Life and The Human Clay were antidotes to that line of thinking and the catalyst for a series of group exhibitions in the United States and around the globe.

Just two years later, The Yale Center for British Art exhibited the School of London in a well-received show titled Eight Figurative Painters (Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach, Andrews, Coldstream, and Euan Uglow). It later traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and was reviewed by Christopher Knight in the Herald Examiner where he applauded Kossoff’s work as the “manifestation of visual desire.” He declared, “Surprisingly, Southern California is turning out to be the best place in this country to see Kossoff’s work. Aside from his inclusion in the Santa Barbara show (which traveled there from Yale) and a survey of recent British painting called This Knot of Life two and a half years ago at L.A. Louver gallery, Kossoff’s paintings have been largely unseen in this country.”

Stay tuned for our next blog post, which will explore the late 1980s and 1990s, a period of exponential growth and landmark exhibitions for these artists.

London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj is currently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum and runs until November 13. For more information, please go to www.getty.edu

IMAGES: (left to right / top to bottom) Lucien Freud, Ill in Paris, c.1948; This Knot of Life: Part 1 installation view; Part 1 exhibition announcement; Part 1 installation view, David Hockney; Frank Auerbach, Head of JYM, 1978; Part 2 exhibition announcement; R.B. Kitaj, Two London Painters, Frank Auerbach and Sandra Fisher, 1979; Part 2 installation view; Leon Kossoff, Nude on a Red Bed, 1972; Eight Figurative Painters exhibition catalogue