There is no more appropriate venue in which to stage a survey of post-second world war art in Britain than the Barbican in London. Like much of the painting, sculpture and photography on display, the arts centre itself emerged out of the devastation of the second world war. Literally built on a City of London bomb site, it was also an ambitious attempt to come to terms with the destruction of the past and imagine a new future.
The mid-40s to the mid-60s are well known as the years when painters such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach came to maturity; when vividly realised photojournalism documented a battered and broken Britain, and brutalist architecture – of which the Barbican remains a storied example – went on to define the modern cityscape. But for curator Jane Alison, the period is due for a reassessment. The “rough poetry” – in a phrase coined by brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson – to be found in the art that emerged in these decades came, she says, from a much wider base that has usually been acknowledged.
