Postwar Modern: New Art In Britain 1945-1965

Exhibition at the Barbican, London, 3 March - 26 Juin 2022

This exhibition catalogue offers a major reassessment of the art that emerged in Britain in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War: a period of anxiety, profound social change and explosive creativity. It draws together the work of fifty artists, exploring a period straddled precariously between the horror of the past and the promise of the future.

Spanning painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and photography, the volume looks afresh at celebrated artists such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Eduardo Paolozzi, shown alongside lesser-known figures, like Francis Newton Souza, Avinash Chandra and Robert Adams, who were acclaimed by contemporaries but neglected in subsequent history-making, or Kim Lim, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Franciszka Themerson, who are only now attracting the attention they deserve.

Throughout the work of these artists, vital shared preoccupations become visible: gender, class, race and nationhood; the body, the bombsite, and the home.