Yes, London’s calling, and you should answer – at the Getty

Hanging with the Boys

“London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, Kitaj” at the Getty

Referring to works in London’s National Gallery, in 1987 Lucian Freud wrote that “One quality these paintings share is that they all make me want to go back to work.” That’s the ultimate compliment, isn’t it? And I think that after visiting “London Calling” most viewers will be inspired in a similar manner. It’s an exciting show on many levels, like a first date that surprised you and went extremely well.

Buried somewhere in its mandate, real or imagined, the Getty has pretty much refrained from exhibitions of work created after the dawn of the 20th century. With “London Calling” the door has been unlatched and in the words of the museum’s director and co-curator Timothy Potts (curating with Julian Brooks and Elena Crippa) we can now glance in to find out “what happened next.”

“London Calling” clearly takes its title from the 1979 album by The Clash, thus referencing an era of hard-edged British rock led spectacularly by the Sex Pistols, which perhaps then brings to mind an earlier generation of Angry Young Men, specifically John Osborne and his 1956 play “Look Back in Anger.”

This is also the stuff that, by and large, is at the core of the Getty show. It was R.B. Kitaj, the sole American in this confraternity, who in 1976 coined the term “School of London,” which he later rescinded but, you know, sometimes things stick, like it or not.

In this instance, the School of London is comprised of six artists, all male, and each given a gallery or sectioned-off room with maybe a dozen-plus works that comprise a total of about 80 prints, drawings, and paintings. For the most part, these men came of age during or were heavily influenced by the Second World War. As critic Lawrence Gowing pointed out, “The later 1940s were no time for fantasy. Artists and writers alike felt compelled to dwell on the bitterness of actual experience.” And thus the war and postwar years placed a sobering note over the times in which these individuals found and developed their voice.

Sticking together

With generous borrowings from the Tate and other key sources, “London Calling” supplements what I think are the better-known artists (Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and R.B. Kitaj) with those with whom we may be less familiar (Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, and Frank Auerbach). Others could have made the cut, notably David Hockney and Euan Uglow.

The six artists on view knew each other and were friends and colleagues and presumably friendly as opposed to bitter rivals; the catalogue for the show doesn’t hint at feuds or resentment. Anyway, they had something important in common, and as Elena Crippa puts it: “All these artists seemed to share the view that painting is a daily activity anchored in a constantly renewed appraisal of the outside world as it is felt and shaped by one’s personal sensibility and historical time.”

Unlike some so-called schools of art, where the work seems interchangeable from artist to artist, the work in “London Calling” ranges widely in style and approach, although with Auerbach (b.1931) and Kossoff (b.1926) one could joke that they were in a contest to see who could squeeze the most paint onto a canvas. In their work, one can’t ignore or dismiss the materiality of the surface: Not only does Auerbach’s “E.O.W. Nude” (1953-54) seem like a bas-relief, it almost looks like the cast of a victim excavated from the ruins of Pompeii.

That’s to say you need to see in person Auerbach’s “Study after Titian II” (1965) and “Mornington Crescent with the Statue of Sickert’s Father-in-Law” (1966) in order to truly feel and experience them. He’s sort of the Giacometti of painters.

On the other hand, Auerbach’s charcoal and paper collage “Self-Portrait” (1958), erased and reworked to convey hard-fought, hard-won battles, shows the dexterity of the artist in another medium, which incidentally recalls Kossoff’s crayon, charcoal, and gouache “Building Site, Oxford Street” (1952), and together both works may remind us of the South African artist William Kentridge (b.1955). I don’t know if Kentridge has been influenced by Auerbach or Kossoff, but he’s taken a similar style and carried it a step further into animated film and opera.

Together, Kossoff and Auerbach pushed figurative painting to its limits, without crossing over into pure abstraction the way that such American contemporaries as Pollock and Kline did in the 1940s and ‘50s. Kossoff’s earlier work, like “Man in a Wheelchair” (1959-62), may resemble something that’s

melted on a hot day (and there’s a hint of Bacon in that), but the subject is discernable. Of Kossoff’s later work, “Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon” (1971) is reminiscent of James Ensor’s Ostend beach scenes, whereas “Christ Church, Spitalfields, Morning” (1990) has a whiff of Anselm Kiefer about it while somewhat resembling a fresco version of a 1920s German Expressionist painting that’s been left to the elements.

Not a bad thing, that. These latter works look like they’ve punched their way into existence, and like barnacles on a ship’s hull they reveal their strength and tenacity. After all, we not only want to see but to feel something emanating from a work of art–the tension and the challenge or struggle to manifest itself.

Wide-ranging emotions

A successful art show, from the viewer’s perspective at least, is one that sneaks in a few surprises, and I think that for many visitors to “London Calling” one such surprise will be the work of Michael Andrews (1928-1995). His pictures may appear the most “traditional,” but there’s something poignant and eye-catching in “Melanie and Me Swimming” (1978-79), and in the touching “Thames Painting, the Estuary” (1994-95) because it has our eyes wandering over the shoreline abstraction of the lower half until we chance upon the quasi-realistic figures towards the upper registers of the canvas. It’s also the very last work that Andrews completed and one may read into it many things about the end of life’s journey.

Kitaj (1932-2007) had a vitality and a versatility, and it ranged from the colorful “Cecil Court, London W.C.2. (The Refugees)” (1983-84) to the sublime and thoughtful “Two London Painters: Frank Auerbach and Sandra Fisher” (1979).

My vote for the most distinctive artist in “London Calling” would have to go to Francis Bacon (1909-1992), whose work with reference to Velázquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” (1650) seems to draw from the screaming nurse in Eisenstein’s 1925 film “Battleship Potemkin” as well as the meaty paintings (that seem to presage Kossoff and Auerbach) of Chaim Soutine. Bacon’s “Triptych August 1972” (1972) is one of those indescribable, compelling artworks that keeps one rooted to the spot.

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was the recipient of a major retrospective in 2003 at MOCA in Los Angeles, and he’s an artist in whom we can see a transition from Balthus-like imagery (1947’s “Girl with a Kitten”) to a style or technique much closer to Cézanne, or where a sort of bloodless realism morphed during the 1980s to portraits where the materiality of the flesh becomes prominent, bringing with it a sense of the visceral and perhaps a brutal frankness. Freud’s towering portrait of Leigh Bowery, “Leigh Under the Skylight” (1994) is a kind of modern day equivalent of Michelangelo’s statue of David.

Seen together as the singular thrust it’s meant to be, “London Calling” is an invigorating show. May it be a harbinger of more such exhibitions that take us into the 20th century and beyond.

London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach, Kitaj is on view through Nov. 13 in the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles. Hours, Tuesday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (extended hours until Sept. 4). Free; parking is $15 per car, reduced to $10 after 3 p.m. (310) 440-7300 or go to getty.edu. ER

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