 |
| Frank Auerbach Portrait of Leon Kossoff 1951 oil on panel Tate, London |
"Auerbach and Kossoff first met in the Antique Room at St. Martin's School of Art in London in 1948, and soon became close friends. They began to work alongside one another and would search London's streets and the National Gallery together for subject matter for their work. They began to model for each other in the 1950s, and in 1986, when Auerbach was asked to list the individuals who had inspired his practice, Kossoff was one of only three living artists that Auerbach named."
 |
| Francis Bacon Study for a Portrait 1952 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Study for a Portrait 1952 dates from a crucial point in Bacon's engagement with portraiture, and is likely to have been made in the studio of the artist Rodrigo Moynihan at the Royal College of Art in London. Bacon painted his first head in isolation in 1948, and Lucian Freud, a close friend, sat for Bacon's first identifiable portrait of an individual in 1951, with Bacon returning the favour in 1952. Yet, even when a model posed for him, Bacon found it, 'easier to work from existing images than from a person or the memory of a person'."
 |
| Roger Hilton February 1954 1954 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Hilton made a number of paintings like this which were said to have been influenced by the work of Piet Mondrian. In Amsterdam a little earlier, Hilton had seen Mondrian's abstract compositions of primary colours inserted into black and white grids. Hilton laid his paint on in thick areas which abut, avoiding any overlap or mixing of paint. In this way he stresses the physical presence of the painting as an object."
 |
| Asger Jorn The Timid Proud One 1957 oil on panel Tate, London |
"Jorn had been a prominent member of CoBrA, a group of northern European artists whose improvisatory approach to painting was intended as a way of liberating their work from repressive bourgeois conventions. Although this painting was made several years after the group disbanded, its child-like style reflects the same principles. The figure embodies some mysterious inner struggle, perhaps reflected in the title. Jorn was a great believer in these kinds of opposed dualities. 'Tension in a work of art is negative-positive, repulsive-attractive, ugly-beautiful. If one of these poles is removed, only boredom is left,' he said."
 |
| R.B. Kitaj Erasmus Variations 1958 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Kitaj, who was born in Cleveland, USA, produced this work early in his career, while he was at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. The work's title refers to the initial source for the image, a series of doodles the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) made in the margins of a manuscript he was annotating. Kitaj encountered Erasmus's scribbled faces in one of the first books he read while in Oxford, the biography of the scholar by the historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945). Kitaj's composition follows the grid-like arrangement imposed on Erasmus's doodles in the reproduction in Huizinga's book, and his faces have broadly the same exaggerated features as those drawn by Erasmus."
 |
| Robert Colquhoun Woman with Still-life 1958 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Painted in February 1958 in a room in Gibson Square, Islington, London, where the artist was living at the time."
 |
| Robert Colquhoun Head of Absalom 1960 lithograph Tate, London |
 |
| Rodrigo Moynihan Blue Drawing 1960 gouache Tate, London |
 |
| Richard Hamilton Interior II 1964 oil paint, cellulose paint, and printed paper on panel Tate, London |
"The painting Interior II was developed from a discarded photograph the artist discovered by chance. Hamilton was teaching art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne when he found a still from Shockproof (1949, director Douglas Sirk, screenplay by Samuel Fuller) lying on a classroom floor. The 1948 photograph became the generator for a series of works playing on the representation of an interior space. Hamilton was struck by the carefully arranged composition of the still, photographed on a specially constructed set. He explained: Everything in the photograph converged on a girl in a 'new look' coat who stared out slightly to the right of the camera. A very wide-angle lens must have been used because the perspective seemed distorted; but the disquiet of the scene was due to two other factors. It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces were not explicitly conjoined; and the lighting came from several different sources. Since the scale of the room had not become unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide-angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been introduced to counteract its effect – yet the foreground remained emphatically close and the recession extreme. All this contributed more to the foreboding atmosphere that the casually observed body lying on the floor, partially concealed by a desk. I made three collaged studies and two paintings based on this image of an interior – ominous, provocative, ambiguous; a confrontation with which the spectator is familiar yet not at ease."
 |
| Patrick George Hickbush 1961-65 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"George studied at Edinburgh College of Art and at Camberwell School of Art, London under William Coldstream, who introduced him to the Euston Road School tradition of accurate rendering of the chosen object or scene. George adopted this as his working practice and his landscapes were painted in the open air in front of the motif, usually over a long period of time. George has lived and worked on land forming part of the Grove farm at Hickbush in Suffolk since 1961 and this is one of the first paintings he made of the landscape there."
 |
| Francis Bacon Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"An interesting light is shed on Francis Bacon's methods by a debate he had with the Tate Gallery three years after Study for Portrait on Folding Ben had been completed and immediately acquired in the wake of his successful 1962 retrospective. In September 1966 he expressed a desire to paint in a green carpet; it was officially noted that 'it had always been his intention to do this but he had to release the picture before it was entirely finished for his exhibition at Marlborough New London Gallery'. The appearance of the painting makes this credible as the ground plane might accommodate the proposed detail even if the extent of unpainted canvas is comparable to other works. The evidence for pressure of time is less straightforward: Bacon's 1963 exhibition opened in July and the painting was reportedly shown as 'an almost wet canvas', but it had reached a point of resolution and was photographed on 24 April. The Director of the Tate, Norman Reid, reported the Trustees' response to the artist in October 1966. He wrote: 'You had twice mentioned to me that you would like to have the chance of painting the carpet in our picture Study for Portrait on Folding Bed and that you regretted having to let it go in its present state.' As a precautionary measure, the 'very sympathetic' Trustees suggested that he and Bacon discuss the changes, as they worried that 'you might be tempted to go on and make other changes and that they would finish up with a completely different picture'. It is not clear whether such a meeting took place, but Bacon would claim in 1974 that 'they [the Tate] refused' his request to 'take it back to lay down a carpet'. In the event, no changes were made to the painting."
 |
| John Lessore Paule and Rémi in the Dining Room 1964 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"The painting depicts Paule, the artist's wife, together with their first child Rémi. In common with Lessore's work in general, the atmosphere of a particular moment has been captured and revealed through the relation of the figures. The sense of calm and intimacy is enhanced further by Lessore's use of subtle differences in tone, and subdued colours. At the same time the brushwork has a freshness and immediacy which evokes the sense of an informal scene glimpsed momentarily."
 |
| Willem de Kooning Women Singing II 1966 oil on paper, mounted on canvas Tate, London |
"This is one of three paintings by De Kooning titled Women Singing. They were based on pop singers the artist saw on television. The energetic style and vibrant colours are typical of De Kooning's work of the 1960s."
 |
| Edward Ardizzone View from the window of my studio in Kent 1967 watercolor Tate, London |
"The artist wrote in 1969 that this work was 'painted from drawings made from the top floor of my cottage which overlooks an old orchard of mixed fruit trees'. The cottage is on Rodmersham Green near Sittingbourne, Kent."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London