School of London
The School of London was a loose group of postwar painters who kept faith with the human figure when abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art dominated the London scene. The name was coined by R. B. Kitaj for his 1976 Hayward Gallery exhibition The Human Clay, whose catalogue celebrated painters as various as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Michael Andrews. They shared no single style - Bacon's screaming figuration, Freud's forensic scrutiny, and Auerbach's rebuilt impasto could hardly look less alike - but shared a conviction that painting worked from the living subject, thick with paint, still mattered. Their example reshaped British figurative painting and, through Freud and Bacon especially, proved the figure could carry the ambitions of modern art into the twenty-first century.
Defining characteristics
- Figurative subjects treated with modernist intensity rather than academic finish
- Thick, worked impasto: paint built up, scraped back, and rebuilt over long sittings
- Relentless scrutiny of a single sitter or place across repeated sessions
- Bodies and faces rendered raw and psychologically charged
- Paint as physical substance, with palette-knife and brush marks left visible
- Urban subjects: studio figures, cityscapes, and ordinary London life
Key figures
- R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007) — American-born painter who named the group in his 1976 exhibition The Human Clay
- Francis Bacon (1909-1992) — Painter of violently distorted figures in shallow, stage-like spaces
- Lucian Freud (1922-2011) — Painter of unflinching, densely worked nudes and portraits
- Frank Auerbach (1931-2024) — Builder of thick, reworked impasto portraits and London cityscapes
- Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) — Impasto painter of London scenes and life drawings
Example works
- Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion — Francis Bacon (1944)
- Benefits Supervisor Sleeping — Lucian Freud (1995)
Sources
- School of London - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- R. B. Kitaj - Wikipedia encyclopedia