The post-war era and Pop Art
Francis Bacon painted screaming figures in dark rooms, Pop Art was born in London, and David Hockney and Bridget Riley made British art sought after internationally.
Britain emerged from the Second World War victorious but impoverished. The art that grew up at first was sombre and existential. Francis Bacon painted contorted bodies in cramped rooms, and Lucian Freud scrutinised people with merciless precision. At the same time Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth became world-famous and received major public commissions. The state began to support the arts in a new way, through the Arts Council and through initiatives such as the Festival of Britain in 1951. Art was now meant to reach the whole population, not just the wealthy.
As early as the 1950s a group of young artists and architects at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London began to take an interest in advertising, films, cars and comics. Richard Hamilton’s small collage of 1956 is usually counted among the first works of Pop Art. In the 1960s London became one of the most talked-about cities in the world, for its fashion, music and art. Peter Blake made the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, David Hockney moved to California and Bridget Riley created optical art that made the picture seem to move.
From the late 1960s artists looked for new paths away from painting and from sculpture on a plinth. Anthony Caro placed coloured steel sculptures directly on the floor, Richard Long made art by walking in the landscape and Gilbert & George declared themselves living sculptures. Architecture was marked by the raw concrete of Brutalism. In the 1980s a new generation of Black British artists made their presence felt and questioned whose history art was telling. Art became more diverse in its voices than ever before.