L'art contemporain britannique

There are many tendencies in contemporary art in Great Britain. The break-up of the Surrealist Movement as a direct consequence of the Second World War is an historical event which has to be explained. The leading personnalities of the movement has maintained a revolutionary attitude in the pre-war period, and this made it necessary for them to flee from the Nazi tyranny. The failure of the movement to reconstitute itself after the war contributed to make artist to be independant. Moreover, the post war years are an uncertain future all the more uncertain that future is always threaten by the risk of disaster.

People are already socked by the war wich meant the disparition of their world of conventional values and the beginning of the chaos. In Britain, horror was at the heart of two of the most important exhibitions of the past half-century. In 1949 the now defunct Hanover Gallery in London was filled with painting after painting of unremitting pain, in an exhibition that announced the arrival of Francis Bacon and heralded one of the most extraordinary success stories in 20th-century art. Bacon's paintings reveal his personal torment celebrated as an artistic revelation of the human condition.
"Reality is not the for walls of the room we are sitting in, ot the trees and len we see out of our window; it is a mental construction, a stablity of vision, and the next phase of human development may find such stability in an art that is anti-organic, absolute and ideal" (Herbert Read). This is linked with the soaring of abstract art.
In a world of prevailing insecurity and inhumanity a retreat into the realm (royaume) of pure form is not only a natural reaction but also a necessary revolution. This certain "revival" of an old art, the art of certain past phases of English art, reflects the stresses and conflicts in front of the modern society.