The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is best known for its collection of art ranging from ancient times to 1900. But it recently presented an exhibit (in conjunction with the Tate in London) of 20th-century artists who radically rethought figurative and landscape painting for the modern era. Mostly rejecting the dictates of Abstract Expressionism and Conceptualism, the “School of London,” as it became known, refused to give up on representational art, preferring to twist and distort its subjects in unique ways. The 80 paintings at the Getty show, “London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, and Kitaj,” were by six major artists of that London movement: Irish-born Francis Bacon, whose distortions of the figure leaned toward the grotesque; German-born Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund), whose haunting “autobiographical” portraits were mostly of friends, lovers and family; Leon Kossoff, the British son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who was fascinated by the bombed-out London landscape of the postwar era; Michael Andrews, whose narrative paintings were of people and places real and imagined; German-born Frank Auerbach (the only one still alive and working), who, like his friend Leon Kossoff, was inspired by war-damaged London, his adopted home; and the American-born R.B. Kitaj, who experimented with media such as collage, photography and cinema, and ultimately honed in on a brilliantly colorful style of figure painting. Here, for PROVOKR members, is an extensive gallery of work by all six.
