Immediately after the Second World War, London – like the other European capitals – was living through a dark time. The artists working in the post-war period had to face a difficult question: is it possible to create a work of art after the fall of reason and of modern ideals of progress?
The years that followed saw the rise of a generation of painters who reflected on the horrors of the conflict and invented a new way of representing the human condition. Among them you can find Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Frank Auerbach – born in Germany but naturalised British – and Francis Bacon.
On stage at the Oxfam Moot, the art critic Martin Gayford projects images of artworks by these painting geniuses. Gayford is the author of Modernists and Mavericks, a book that attempts to produce a portrait of this generation. In his talk, he explains the genesis of several of these works which transformed the British art scene in the second half of the twentieth century and tells stories from the lives of its authors. It isn’t easy to maintain an audience’s attention for an hour at a stretch, but Gayford manages it masterfully. At the end, he explains that these painters broke with tradition and dared to explore other sources: Pop Art and abstract expressionism.
A few minutes after this talk, a conversation begins on the Wales Stage between writer Nicola Barker and journalist Georgina Godwin. The conversation revolves around Barker’s novel H(A)PPY, the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize. In it, the author imagines a post-post-apocalyptic society in which problems do not exist. Humanity is living through a period in which everything is known, there are no illnesses, there is no violence or conflict. It’s a world without fears or anxieties. Yet it’s far from being perfect.
“I heard you didn’t accept an advance for this novel – why was that?” asks Godwin.
“I write because I really enjoy it, not in order to get rich. Besides, if they’d paid me an advance I’d have stopped wanting to do it. I would probably have run away with the money and never delivered anything to my publisher.”
(Barker’s publisher is sitting next to me, and he smiles nervously.)
“My favourite subject is paradoxes,” Barker goes on, “the enormous contradictions we have within us. It’s a very western thing to judge somebody who says something and then does the opposite. They call him a hypocrite. I think that’s just a manifestation of all our dimensions.”
“How do you write about that?”
“Precisely: I don’t understand it. I write about things I don’t know and can’t understand. Maybe it’s a way of facing up to the anxiety they cause in me.”