Street Scene - Hulme, Manchester, by Shirley Baker
(Picture: Estate of Shirley Baker / Mary Evans Picture Library)Just a week ago, an exhibition featuring bomb sites, mass displacement of people and traumatised refugees would have seemed remote from our time. But now, quite a lot of the content and much of the tone of Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65, the Barbican’s exhibition of the art of the twenty years following the Second World War, seem very much of the moment.
This is a large scale exhibition timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Barbican arts centre – the Barbican estate itself being a product of the bombardment of Cripplegate. Yep, it’s forty years of the most alienating space in London. But this exhibition makes a merit of the unique character of the place; as the catalogue puts it, it’s “an opportunity to see Brutalist works in a Brutalist space and, more broadly, extraordinary postwar art perfectly sited in an iconic postwar edifice”.
