Refiguring the 50s

This exhibition and publication bring together for the first time the work of five powerful, individual, figurative painters working in Britain in the 1950s: Joan Eardley (1921-1963), Sheila Fell (1931 - 1979), Eva Frankfurther (1930 - 1959), Josef Herman (1911 - 2000) and L S Lowry (1887 - 1976). Spanning 1945-64, it showcases their range, inventiveness and often widely differing approaches to figuration and practice in the pivotal postwar period. The publication includes 100 illustrations from both public and private collections.

Each artists strongly identified with a particular place (and its people), where they chose to live and work. Each place formed, for a significant part of their careers, the primary focus of their practice: Eardley, the Townhead area of Glasgow; Fell, the mining community and landscape of her native Aspatria, Cumbria; Frankfruther, London’s East End, as well as the multicultural working- class community in South Wales; and Lowry, the people of his industrial hometown of Manchester. Each produced a concentrated and coherent body of work imbued with this strong sense of place and the largely working-class people associated with it.

A network of relationships, both personal and professional, links all five: Herman and Lowry twice exhibited together in 1943 and 1955; Eardley met and was briefly mentored by Herman in London in the early 50s; Lowry attended Fell’s first exhibition and became a lifelong friend; Fell and Frankfurther overlapped at St Martin’s School of Art; and Herman and Frankfurther were exhibited together in a group show at the Ben Uri in 1956. In bringing together these five painters working with the realist tradition, this exhibition and publications aims to present a compelling alternative vision of postwar Britain in all its complexity.