Transition

London in the Fifties was a Mecca for artists: the painter Jack Smith, for instance, decreed that 'the wilderness starts ten miles from the centre of London in any direction'. The Bohemian underworlds of Fitzrovia and Soho attracted painters of the calibre of Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, R. B. Kitaj and Lucian Freud. Kossoff was in no doubt as to what his subject should be: 'I hate leaving my studio', he said, 'I hate leaving London', and he painted the city from the age of twelve. Bacon became the most famous member of the circle centred on the legendary Colony Room in Soho, run by Muriel Belcher: a drinking den frequented by artists, critics and assorted hangers-on, eager to take advantage of the sexual freedom to be found in London, as nowhere else in the country, at a time when homosexuality was still against the law. The city was brimming over with ideas and movements: Neo-Romanticism, Social Realism, Pop Art, the Kitchen Sink School, Abstract Expressionism - all flourished in the Fifties and jostled for dominance.
John Berger, then in his twenties and the enfant terrible of the art establishment, was one of the most influential critics of the time: passionately Marxist, his championing of Social Realism and the political responsibilities of art led him to clash with those painters he saw as failing in their duties to record 'the everyday and the ordinary'. The other great debate involved the relationship between high and low culture. To Lawrence Alloway, another important critic of the day, also in his twenties, popular culture had a vital role to play in 'high' art: he enthusiastically embraced American movies, music, magazines, all the paraphernalia of the newly invented 'teenager', and urged their incorporation into works of art. Bad press photographs, he held, were of more value to the artist than those striving self-consciously to be 'artistic'. The debates that raged around these issues made such institutions as the Royal College of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art power-houses of creativity and new ideas.