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| Graham Sutherland The Origins of the Land 1950-51 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Graham Sutherland Standing Forms II 1952 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) was one of the neo-romantic painters who dominated British art during the Second World War and its aftermath. Sutherland's style, thorny, charred, tinged with wintry colours, is visibly influenced by Picasso and Matisse – yet unmistakably British, harking back to the great landscape painters of the early 19th century. Sutherland brought together his passionate sense of landscape and modern awareness of violence in paintings of bomb damage during the Blitz. However, Sutherland's star never quite rose as high as his supporters hoped. In the 1950s and 1960s he was outshone by the younger, harsher Francis Bacon; then, by the time of pop art, was left looking old. Sutherland was championed notably by the 1980s critic Peter Fuller, who saw his romanticism as a viable, moral option for artists now. But he seems destined to remain an also-ran of 20th century art history."
– from a profile in The Guardian (London), November 2001
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| Claude Rogers The Blow Lamp 1953-54 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Claude Rogers The Patient Opposite 1952 oil on board Tate Gallery |
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| Mary Potter East Coast Window 1959 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The artist wrote that the picture was not exactly painted from the window of Crag House, her then home at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, but that 'my studio is right on the sea, and I sort of half paint what I see and half make it up'."
– from curator's notes at the Tate Gallery
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| Mary Potter Still-life 1959 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Peter Kinley Walking Figure 1957 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Anthony Hill Orthogonal/Diagonal Composition 1954 blackboard paint and enamel paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Composition February I 1954 oil on board Tate Gallery |
"Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's work of the 1950s was dominated by abstract compositions, generated with the aid of geometrical formulae and derived from forms and phenomena found in the natural environment. Among her preferred sources were seaside rocks, and the artist said that Composition February I was one of a number of works based on the rocks at Porthgwarra, a small sandy cove on the south-western tip of Cornwall which is approached by a tunnel through the cliff. . . . The use of geometry as a starting point for a painting associated, in some way, with nature or natural form was an aspect of much art made in St Ives and particularly the work of those artists influenced by Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. It was favoured by John Wells – a close colleague of Barns-Graham – who preferred especially compositions based on the Golden Section and divisions into sevenths, both of which Barns-Graham used in this painting. The use of the Golden Section, a proportional formula used since ancient times, associated the geometry with both tradition and nature, for its recurrence in natural forms has caused it to be called 'the ratio of growth'."
– from curator's notes at the Tate Gallery
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| Peter Coker The Gorse Bush 1957 oil on board Tate Gallery |
"The realist painter Peter Coker (1926-2004) had his first solo show in London in 1958, which was the year that Modern Art in the United States, a touring show from New York's Museum of Modern Art reached the Tate Gallery. [NB: Tate Gallery records indicate that the MoMA show actually went on display in London in 1956.] The flood of enthusiasm for all things American and abstract submerged the green shoot of a national reputation for Coker. As it happens. the MoMA show (which, it was later shown, was part of the US Central Intelligence Agency's programme to use American art as Cold War propaganda) had only one room containing Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, Rothko and their contemporaries in the New York School. Almost every one of the British critics ignored it, but British artists didn't, and suddenly all the agonising – which now seems so absurd – about whether abstraction could take root here was forgotten."
"Coker vanished from the newspapers and arts reviews almost without trace, along with the members of the "Kitchen Sink School" and older painters who had responded to Second World War calls for an art of patriotic English romanticism founded in Samuel Palmer. If Coker was cast down by this turn of events, he didn't allow it to deflect him from a way of painting that had been inspired by his first sight, in Paris in 1949, of the work of Gustave Courbet. Like the Kitchen Sink painters, Coker was praised by Marxist critic John Berger as a revolutionary making a stand against fashionable Modernism. This meant as little to Coker as it did to the other realists: as far as he was concerned, he painted the motifs closest to hand and in a style best suited to rendering the subject realistically."
– excerpted from Peter Coker's obituary in The Guardian (London), December 2004
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| Frederick Brill Quarry Face, Worth Matravers 1956 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Anthony Fry Dancing Figures 1957 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Jack Smith Bottles in Light and Shadow 1959 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Ceri Richards Cold Light, Deep Shadow 1950 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The artist wrote that the motif of musicians and musical instruments has appeared consistently in his work since 1930, and is significant perhaps only because of his upbringing in a musical family and of his own keen interest in music."
– from curator's notes at the Tate Gallery