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#Fashion design futuristic mens dreamer modern art windows#

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain at the Barbican takes us from 1945 to 1965, and it’s worth saying from the start that the task is impossible. Shirley Baker’s photographs of working-class women in Manchester during the mid-60s slum clearances, and Eva Frankfurther’s paintings of exhausted mothers, female workers and West Indian waitresses have an awful tenderness.

#Fashion design futuristic mens dreamer modern art windows#

Roger Mayne’s photographs of children in a bombed-out building in Bermondsey, looking out through the empty spaces where the windows once were, continue the theme. Photograph: © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther, photograph by Justin Piperger, courtesy Barbican Centre But we keep being dragged back.Īn awful tenderness … Eva Frankfurther, West Indian Waitresses, c 1955. All that’s needed is the tang of the soot that caked the buildings, the smells of tobacco smoke, wet newsprint, coal gas and sulphurous yellow smog to bring us back to postwar Britain, a period that didn’t seem to end till some time in the 1970s, if it ever entirely did.Īngry young men, armchair existentialists and young male sculptors in hefty jumpers, demobbed dreamers and conscientious objectors, artists arriving from the colonies or who had escaped the Holocaust and the ruins of Europe, made the British art world of the postwar period much more cosmopolitan, and, incrementally, less class-bound, than it had been previously.

With its glutinous and heaving sea of wrinkled paint, Kossoff’s city is the colour of sludge under a filthy sky, the view slewing away, a tower block lurching on the horizon.

Sixty years after he painted it, you can still catch the reek of cheap oil paint and linseed oil coming off Leon Kossoff’s 1962 Willesden Junction, Early Morning.