School of London

About

While abstraction, Pop and Conceptual art held critics' attention, a handful of London painters kept working from the figure and their surroundings, often from life over many sittings. Several were friends who drank in the same Soho clubs and painted one another. Francis Bacon distorted heads and bodies with smeared, twisting brushwork; Lucian Freud built dense, unsparing portraits and nudes through months of close looking; Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, both taught by David Bomberg, scraped back and repainted heavy impasto portraits and London building sites. Michael Andrews painted his friends at the Colony Room club in the early 1960s.

The name came from R. B. Kitaj, an American painter living in London, who used it loosely in his catalogue for The Human Clay (1976), an Arts Council exhibition he selected. It never described a shared style, only a shared commitment to paint and the human presence.