Sixty years after he painted it, you can still catch the reek of cheap oil paint and linseed oil coming off Leon Kossoff’s 1962 Willesden Junction, Early Morning. With its glutinous and heaving sea of wrinkled paint, Kossoff’s city is the colour of sludge under a filthy sky, the view slewing away, a tower block lurching on the horizon. All that’s needed is the tang of the soot that caked the buildings, the smells of tobacco smoke, wet newsprint, coal gas and sulphurous yellow smog to bring us back to postwar Britain, a period that didn’t seem to end till some time in the 1970s, if it ever entirely did.
Angry young men, armchair existentialists and young male sculptors in hefty jumpers, demobbed dreamers and conscientious objectors, artists arriving from the colonies or who had escaped the Holocaust and the ruins of Europe, made the British art world of the postwar period much more cosmopolitan, and, incrementally, less class-bound, than it had been previously. But we keep being dragged back.
