It would be hard to imagine a more devastating coincidence of art and life than the opening of Postwar Modern in the same week that Ukrainian citizens are murdered by Russian troops. There is no image in the first half of this exceptional exhibition that does not to speak directly from the past into our present.
Helmet heads and shattered faces; scarred canvases that resemble wounded bodies; etiolated bronze figures, fragile and on the verge of collapse: British art of the immediate postwar decade fills the lower galleries at the Barbican. Lynn Chadwick’s metal sculpture swoops down from on high, exoskeletal, somewhere between arrow, fish and ruthless missile. Elisabeth Frink’s harbinger birds, headless and sinister, perch along the walls.
