Elena Crippa and Catherine Lampert's London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj is a well-designed and informative catalog documenting the J. Paul Getty Museum's 2016 exhibition of the same name. Detailing the importance of contributions by the “School of London”—a name coined by R. B. Kitaj in 1976 to recognize shared aims in the work of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and Kitaj himself—to postwar aesthetics, London Calling makes significant inroads not only into historicizing the relationship between these British (or practicing in Britain) artists, but also exposing their efforts to negotiate postwar paradigms of modernism. More broadly, through Crippa and Lampert's emphasis on how sense of place, social context, and creative output overlap and mingle, London Calling sets the School of London in a milieu that highlights its significance beyond narrow art historical parameters.
Timothy Potts, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, states in one of two forewords to the catalog that “two generations of scholarship” have provided a foundational history for these artists (ix). This is quite correct; however, these histories tend to define the artists as individuals rather than focus on their relationships to one another, aesthetic and otherwise. Additionally, despite this extant literature, there are substantial gaps in our understanding of the significance of these artists' roles per the global scope of postwar art. Indeed, as Nicholas Serota, Tate's director, argues in the second foreword, “several of these artists still await the broader international recognition they deserve” (xi). London Calling, particularly for non-British audiences, seeks to rectify this imbalance.
The first essay, written by Elena Crippa, the Tate's curator of modern and contemporary British Art, focuses on how concepts of figure, place, and narrative establish a set of common tropes or characteristics uniting the School of London painters. In particular, Crippa highlights their attraction to representing the body and, by association, “the human condition in the intimacy of everyday life and encounters” (1). As such, these artists gave “visibility to the continuity and strength of a figurative tradition” (1). Yet this ostensibly put them at odds with art informel in Europe, American abstract expressionism, and other manifestations of what Crippa identifies as “high modernism” (1). What she ultimately suggests, however, is that this dedication to the figure was not so far removed from the assumed exclusivity of avant-garde activities across the Channel in one direction or the Atlantic in the other. Indeed, Bacon's, Auerbach's, and Kossoff's dramatically textured applications of color, for example, reveal a undeniable attraction to the medium itself as opposed to an acceptance of its role as a mere helpmate in storytelling.
Catherine Lampert's essay extends many of these themes. Lampert, an independent scholar and curator, frames her discussion around, among other topics, the “riskiness” and “immediacy” of the School of London's paint handling, thus defying historical accounts that position this group merely as producers of a “reactionary art grounded in the human figure and thus out of touch with what was happening elsewhere” (13). Lampert, in fact, deftly places these painters within a history of experimental British and American painting. She aligns Bacon, Kitaj, and Andrews, for example, with pop art because of their fascination with source material “gleaned from the print media and news footage” (16). She contextualizes Kossoff's and Auerbach's paintings in light of David Bomberg's influence, as well as that of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. She then goes on to tie them, as well as Andrews, to Willem de Kooning because of their shared appreciation of space, light, and texture. Lampert ends her discussion by noting the import of the School of London's present-day influence, including Jasper John's recent fascination with Bacon's Study for a Self Portrait (1964), Peter Doig's esteem of Andrews and Auerbach, and Georg Baselitz's appreciation for the entire group's autobiographical leanings.
Because the number of scholarly works that link Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj are relatively few, London Calling should prove itself worthy because of need alone. Yet it also delivers a well-formed framework for discussing the School of London in relation to international developments. This is particularly critical because of the generally meager attention paid to British art from the period. Historically, canonical approaches downplay or altogether ignore the contributions made by these artists in favor of painterly abstraction, pop, minimalism, and later, conceptual art. Yet this denies the cultural plurality characteristic of postwar society at home and abroad—that is, the increasingly globalized world in which painters associated with the School of London established themselves and ultimately worked. Moreover, to assume these painters' lack of importance gives unwarranted currency to an already powerful historical trope: that which views much of twentieth-century British painting as retrograde if not entirely marginal to the development of art's history. Charles Harrison's essay, “‘Englishness' and ‘Modernism’ Revisited” (Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 1 [January 1999]: 75–90)—which stresses the failures of British modernists—is exemplary in this regard. As such, Crippa's and Lampert's volume, while it engages a more contemporary period, nonetheless contributes to an increasingly persuasive number of voices (including David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt, Lisa Tickner, Janet Wolff, among others) calling for the recognition of such work as, in fact, integral to understanding the complex aesthetic landscape of the twentieth century.
