Looking for a few artistic blokes

Let's say you're an artist. You're told to get inspired by London. If Tony Blair and the Labour Party had their way, you'd think "Cool Britannia": a splash of the Union Jack, the monumental spires of Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, the disappointing Millennium Dome, and maybe that ubiquitous Underground logo that forever bids us to "Mind the Gap."

COURTESY BRITISH ART CENTER Self-Portrait, by Tony Bevan (1992)

But if you're like any number of artists loosely grouped as the School of London (ever since the American-born painter R. B. Kitaj coined the name in 1976), you might draw ideas from the most everyday experiences in the world's most international city—everything from the grimy imagery of trains and undergrounds to the somber interior of your own studio and the thousands of venerable canvases on display at the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. If asked by an art historian, you might remark that you are fascinated most by the human figure in its immediate environment—not by the wild abstractions that dominated the art world on this side of the Atlantic during the mid-20th century. Describing what he felt united the members of the School, Kitaj remarked, "I was looking mostly for pictures of a single human form."

If these descriptions of the School of London strike you as a bit stilted, it's because this cadre of British painters is unified more by its diversity than anything else. As you enter the new exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art (BAC), The School of London and Their Friends: The Collection of Elaine and Melvin Merians, you are greeted by Kitaj's statement describing his search for the human form. But beyond a metaphorical search for the human figure and a common base in the urban landscape of London, these artists are as different from one another as Leonardo da Vinci is from Jackson Pollock.

A brief history: Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, at the cutting edge of British art in profoundly different ways, are regarded by most scholars as the founding fathers of the movement and emerged as independent figures in the '40s. In the following decade, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff came on the scene with bright, garish colors and thick, impassioned brushstrokes. The '60s saw the rise of three of the School's most gifted members—Peter Blake, Kitaj, and the expatriate David Hockney, whose crisp ren-derings of Los Angeles swimming pools during the last 20 years have overshadowed his early London work. Euan Uglow and John Wonnacott, who had both been painting for over a decade, joined as a part of fresh crop of painters in the '70s, and in the '80s Tony Bevan and Paulo Rego took the School's evolution further into the realm of probing the psychology of anxious, awkward, and often disturbing human figures. Even in the '90s, contemporary painters such as Peter Doig and Antony Williams have come to prominence.

COURTESY BRITISH ART CENTER Germania (The Tunnel), by R.B. Kitaj (1985)

To the BAC's credit, the exhbition contains multiple works by nearly all these artists. In fact, the eclectic mix of styles on display in the Center's second-floor gallery facing out on Chapel Street—Hockney's precise portrait drawings, Kossoff's distorted impasto depictions of human faces and decrepit Victorian schoolhouses, Freud's raw renderings of the often grim facts of the human body—is more than startling in its effect.

A few works definitely stand out in this collection. A relatively recent work by Kitaj, Germania (The Tunnel), from 1985, takes as its point of departure Vincent van Gogh's depiction of the desolate stone corridors in the insane asylum he inhabited at Saint-Remy. During the '60s, Kitaj increasingly identified himself and his art with the traumatic history of Judaism, and in Germania (The Tunnel) he leaves the limited world of studio subjects to transform van Gogh's tunnel into a passage heading straight toward death in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Kitaj's innocent son seems to lead the way toward his certain demise, and Kitaj's wife, painted in sinister, cool blues, turns away as if she has already entered a coffin-like darkness. The message becomes clear: only in an insane asylum could an event as incomprehensible as the Holocaust play out.

Tony Bevan's Self Portrait (1992) and Portrait Boy (1991) are equally as striking as Kitaj's massive canvas. In his self-portrait, Bevan displays a cool, almost chilling detachment, especially with his tense jaw-line and chiseled features, that belies his undeniable vulnerability. Portrait Boy is also gripping in its austere treatment of a young boy set against the abstraction of a red wall. Melvin Merians, the New York collector who loaned the BAC the works that comprise the exhibition, explained to a crowd in the gallery one afternoon that the boy in this painting, who is deaf, claps his hands in order to learn the unique vibrations this act produces so he can learn to recognize applause without hearing it. Among the School of London artists, Bevan seems especially interested in conveying the sense that his paintings are conversations the viewer has somehow interrupted.

COURTESY BRITISH ART CENTER Twins in Their Tea Garden (second version), by Peter Blake (1995-99)

Patrick McCaughey, the director of the BAC, notes that the works in the exhibition—and the School of London as a whole—hold a prominent place in the broad sweep of British painting. "As a school they are a patent reminder of the tradition of modern British realist painting that extends through the 20th century," he commented. "For many, their roots in London and London studio practice are strong and self-evident. For others removed from the London scene, such as David Hockney, there still persists a grip on the immediacy of place. The painters live and work off the environment. The relationship is strong and unbreakable."

If you decide to take a look at The School of London and Their Friends, you might find the inspiration to pursue your own place in the wide world of Yale. After you see the exhibit, London itself may still conjure up nothing more than the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, but you won't be able to deny the power a single place can hold over the imagination and the senses. Make sure you hear Leon Kossoff—he speaks of his London like only an artist can:

"London, like the paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream. It's always moving—the skies, the streets, the buildings. The people who walk past me when I draw have become part of my life."

Graphic by Elisabeth Marshall.

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