The pale flesh of Lucian Freud’s women. The red stars and barbs of William Coldstream’s nudes. The viscerally disturbing figures of Francis Bacon. This hour-long talk explores the special talent of British painters in the twentieth century for representing the human form in a particularly expressive manner. As disturbing as it is sometimes cathartic, the changing attitudes to depicting the human body reflected artists’ changing relationship to society and and to the events of the long and troubled twentieth century.

To find out which The Arts Society chapter I will be presenting this talk at next, please email me.

ONLINE RESOURCES

Tate’s Collections of Digitised Archive Items

Room by room guide of Tate Britain’s exhibition ‘All Too Human’ (28 Febr – 27 Aug 2018)

Tate Papers, an online research journal with scholarly articles on British and modern international art

British Art Studies, an online research journal with scholarly articles on all aspects of British art, architecture, and visual culture

READING LIST

Tim Wilcox, ed. The Pursuit of the Real: British Figurative Painting from Sickert to Bacon. London: Lund Humphries in association with Manchester City Art Gallery, 1990.

Hermann Arnhold [LWL- Museum für Kunst und Kultur], ed. Bare Life: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and others: London Artists Working from life 1950-80, exh. cat. Munich: Hirmer, 2014.

Frances Spalding. British Art Since 1900. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society. New Haven; London: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1998.

James Hyman. The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945-1960. London: Yale University Press, 2001.

Catherine Jolivette, ed. British Art in the Nuclear Age. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014.

Martin Gayford. Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

Elena Crippa, ed. All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, exh. cat. London: Tate Publishing, 2018.

David Sylvester. Interviews with Francis Bacon: the Brutality of Fact. London: Thames & Hudson, 2016.

Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland. New Haven; London: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2005.

Martin Gayford. Lucian Freud. Phaidon Press, 2018.

William Feaver. Lucian Freud. London: Tate Publishing, 2003.

Bruce Laughton. William Coldstream. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2004.

Peter T.J. Rumley. William Coldstream: Catalogue Raisonné. Bristol: Sansom & Company, 2018.

Catherine Lampert, ed. Euan Uglow: the Complete Paintings. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007.