Postwar Modern review: That rare thing in a contemporary art gallery – a genuinely polemical exhibition

The immediate post-war period is generally seen as the grimmest of times for British art: when artists scrabbled about producing angst-ridden “existentialist” daubs in ill-heated, austerity-bound studios where the milk was always off and there was never a shilling for the electric meter. It certainly feels completely of a piece with the surrounding works: Eduardo Paolozzi’s brutalised, semi-abstract watercolours of human heads, and the Indian painter FN Souza’s ravaged crucifixions – the whole lot almost entirely in monochrome – which feel like just the sort of art you’d expect in the aftermath of a war characterised by “suffering and loss of life on an unimaginable scale”. While much smaller in scale, the works of the Guyana-born painter Aubrey Williams – one of a number of artists from Britain’s former colonies showcased in the exhibition – have a similar sense of the bodily and the mythic, with rich colour offset by a sense of unease rooted in the historical trauma of his home region. open image in gallery Lucian Freud, ‘Girl with Roses’, 1947-48 There’s a feeling of massive bathos, then, in passing from this epic walk through art that was as groundbreaking as anything being produced anywhere in the world at the time, into a small room crammed with the “kitchen sink” paintings of Jean Cooke and John Bratby. I was less persuaded by German emigre painter Eva Frankfurther’s wan portraits of waiters and washer uppers – which some are hailing as the great discovery of the exhibition – but the Polish Jewish refugee artist Franciszka Themerson’s Here Is a Man, a Product of the State seems to span the mood of the exhibition, with its scratchy, graffiti-like marks, redolent of the Forties, thrown around the canvas in a spirit of reckless Sixties hedonism.