School of London

Ronald B. Kitaj first referred to the School of London in his catalogue introduction to the exhibition titled "The Human Clay" at the Hayward Gallery in 1976. Kitaj noted that while Abstraction and transformations were triumphant, there was a special trend towards figurative painting as well as a kind of fixation for the human figure among most London painters. These artists included Kitaj himself and his colleagues Michael Andrews, Leon Kossof, Francis Bacon, Euan Uglow, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Although, like the École de Paris, the School of London remains an elastic notion, there is a well-defined group of figurative painters at its core who were drawn together by shared respect and aspirations from the late 1950’s onwards, as Abstraction became the dominant mode. They followed each other’s work closely and exhibited in the same West End gallery.

If this virtual School can be said to have a leader, it would have been Francis Bacon, who served as a model of creativity and autonomy to all the artists and not least to his close friend and colleague, the masterful exponent on canvas of human flesh, Lucian Freud. Kossoff and Auerbach studied together and were both deeply influenced by Expressionism, while their friend Michael Andrews developed an intensely personal vision in which reality is made memorable by subtle distortions. By his commitment to the figure and his championing of the group’s existence, Kitaj was automatically connected to the School of London, which also includes the Paris-based sculptor Raymond Mason, who frequented the other artists and showed with them before leaving London.