 |
| Reginald Brill Rest 1956 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
 |
| Stephen Greene The Return 1950 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
 |
| Edward Le Bas Interior 1951 oil paint on board Tate Gallery |
 |
| Michael Ayrton Portrait of Wyndham Lewis 1955 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The esthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of a sudden, in that famous turn of the century, a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an esthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art, and each demanding that you should obey them. Most of these theories have finally dwindled away into politics or strange forms of spiritualism. The question, as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have."
"The argument often used that science is really abstract, and that painting could be like music and, for this reason, that you cannot paint a man leaning against a lamp post, is utterly ridiculous. That space of science – the space of the physicists – I am truly bored with by now. Their lenses are so thick that seen through them, the space gets more and more melancholy. There seems to be no end to the misery of the scientists' space. All that it contains is billions and billions of hunks of matter, hot or cold, floating around in darkness according to a great design of aimlessness. The stars I think about, if I could fly, I could reach in a few old-fashioned days. But physicists' stars, I use as buttons, buttoning up curtains of emptiness. If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are – that is all the space I need as a painter."
– Willem de Kooning, from What Abstract Art Means to Me, published in the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Spring 1951
 |
| Josef Herman In the Miner's Arms 1954 watercolor on paper Tate Gallery |
 |
| John Minton Horseguards in their Dressing Rooms at Whitehall 1953 lithograph Tate Gallery |
 |
| Alix Mackenzie Cornish Fields 1951 screenprint Tate Gallery |
 |
| Albert Ruskin Houthuesen Park II 1959 chalk on paper Tate Gallery |
 |
| Edward Bawden The Church Wall 1954 watercolor on paper Tate Gallery |
"As I go about the world I see things (people; their looks and feelings and thoughts; the things their thoughts have made, and the things that neither they nor their thoughts had anything to do with making: the whole range of the world) that, I cannot help feeling, Piero della Francesca or Brueghel or Goya or Cézanne would paint if they were here now – could not resist painting. Then I say to my wife, sadly: "What a pity we didn't live in an age when painters were still interested in the world!" This is an exaggeration, of course; even in the recent past many painters have looked at the things of this world and seen them as marvelously as we could wish. But ordinarily, except for photographers and illustrators – and they aren't at all the same – the things of our world go unseen, unsung. All that the poet must do, Rilke said, is praise: to look at what is, and to see that it is good, and to make out of it what is at once the same and better, is to praise. Doesn't the world need the painter's praise any more?"
– Randall Jarrell, from Against Abstract Expressionism, published in ARTnews, Summer 1957
 |
| Patrick Heron Red Garden: 1956 1956 lithograph Tate Gallery |
 |
| John Wells Untitled Drawing 1952 coloured pencil, pastel and watercolor on paper Tate Gallery |
 |
| Jean Arp Danger of Death 1954 graphite on paper Tate Gallery |
 |
| Frank Auerbach Drawing from Veronese's The Magdalen Laying Down her Jewels (National Gallery) 1955 graphite on paper Tate Gallery |
 |
| Bob Law Landscape VIII 1959 crayon on paper Tate Gallery |