Book Description
London in the 1950s was a city in transition. From its postwar bombsites and rolling smogballs at the beginning of the decade through to the packed movie theaters and Soho coffee shops at the end, London experienced a huge change in its attitudes. During this transitional period, a disparate group of artists formed, characterized by a sense of fun, brio, and a dash of genius. The socalled Independent Group of artists and designers living in London at this time-including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney-had in common a fascination with the American experience of the 1950s. American artists' response to the new 50s American consumerism found fertile ground in London, and helped to shape modernist expression all over Britain. Transition: The London Art Scene in the 1950s is a lively and entertaining account of how London artists, designers and architects of the time responded to the changing world around them with new forms based on mass media, collage, and new technology. With illustrations of the most important works of this period, and a multidisciplinary approach that sets the art scene in its wider social and cultural context, this is a book that evocatively captures the heterogeneity of London's working artists, and the innovations they brought.

About the Author
Martin Harrison is a freelance art historian, exhibitions curator and designer. His publications include Young Meteors: British Photojournalism 1957-1965 (1998), and he designed the catalogue Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (2001). He also lectures internationally.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

London in the Fifties was a Mecca for artists: the painter Jack Smith, for instance, decreed that 'the wilderness starts ten miles from the centre of London in any direction'. The Bohemian underworlds of Fitzrovia and Soho attracted painters of the calibre of Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj and Lucian Freud. Kossoff was in no doubt as to what his subject should be: 'I hate leaving my studio', he said, 'I hate leaving London', and he painted the city from the age of twelve. Bacon became the most famous member of the circle centred on the legendary Colony Room in Soho, run by Muriel Belcher: a drinking den frequented by artists, critics and assorted hangers-on, eager to take advantage of the sexual freedom to be found in London, as nowhere else in the country, at a time when homosexuality was still against the law. The city was brimming over with ideas and movements: Neo-Romanticism, Social Realism, Pop Art, the Kitchen Sink School, Abstract Expressionism -- all flourished in the Fifties and jostled for dominance.

John Berger, then in his twenties and the enfant terrible of the art establishment, was one of the most influential critics of the time: passionately Marxist, his championing of Social Realism and the political responsibilities of art led him to clash with those painters he saw as failing in their duties to record 'the everyday and the ordinary'. The other great debate involved the relationship between high and low culture. To Lawrence Alloway, another important critic of the day, also in his twenties, popular culture had a vital role to play in 'high' art: he enthusiastically embraced American movies, music, magazines, all the paraphernalia of the newly invented 'teenager', and urged their incorporation into works of art. Bad press photographs, he held, were of more value to the artist than those striving self-consciously to be 'artistic'. The debates that raged around these issues made such institutions as the Royal College of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art power-houses of creativity and new ideas.