Fear and Freedom 1940–1965

Peter Lanyon, St Just  1953

Lanyon named this painting for St Just-in- Penwith, the small, grey town that was the historic centre of the west Cornwall tin mining industry. Initially conceived as a crucifixion, Lanyon quickly associated this work with the tragic history of the mining district that runs west of St Ives towards St Just, as well as with mythological symbols of death and renewal. This painting was the culmination of a series of works made from late 1951 to 1954 in which Lanyon layered successive coats of thick paint in complex, tangled compositions that suggest landscapes with a symbolic meaning.

Gallery label, September 2016

Magda Cordell, Figure (Woman)  1956–7

Magda Cordell’s Figure (Woman) breaks away from traditional representations of women in western art. When it was first exhibited, critics thought it embodied anxieties about nuclear war. More recently, her paintings have been interpreted as images of heroic femininity. In this reading, the distortions and textured surface signify the resilience of the human body in the face of injury and change.

Gallery label, September 2023

Dame Elisabeth Frink, Bird  1952

This strong, alert bird is one of Elizabeth Frink’s earliest sculptures. She continued to explore the bird theme over the next two decades. ‘In their emphasis on beak, claws and wings… they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness,’ she said. But she resisted symbolic readings of these works. She cautioned: ‘They certainly were not surrogates for human beings or “states of being”.’

Gallery label, September 2023

Paul Nash, Totes Meer (Dead Sea)  1940–1

Paul Nash painted this during the Second World War. It was inspired by a wrecked Luftwaffe aircraft dump at Cowley in Oxfordshire. He described the sight: ‘The thing looked to me suddenly like a great inundating sea... the breakers rearing up and crashing on the plain… nothing moves, it is not water or even ice, it is something static and dead.’ Nash, a British artist, chose to title the work in German.

Gallery label, September 2023

Reg Butler, Woman  1949

'Woman', with its insect-like abdomen and its spiky, rather threatening presence, is typical of Butler's work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1958 Butler wrote that his earliest linear open-work iron sculptures, such as this figure, were made in response to the 'enigmatical man-made objects' which sprang up around the coast of Britain during World War II. These included the radio and towers of Bawdsley in Suffolk, which the artist referred to as the 'Bawdsley personages ... with little that was benign in their personalities, remote inscrutible custodians of a landscape hostile to man'. The Tate also has a smaller study for this sculpture.

Gallery label, September 2004

Lynn Chadwick, Conjunction  1953

Conjunction shows two abstracted figures in movement. Balanced on spindly insect-like legs and with beak like heads, they seem to suggest the underlying animal nature of humans. This is one of Lynn Chadwick’s first sculptures of a human couple. His main subject had previously been animals. After the Second World War, where he served as a pilot, Chadwick trained in welding. He then welded together iron rods with a material called Stolit, a mixture of plaster and powdered iron. The powdered iron on the surface has rusted, as Chadwick intended. This gives the sculpture its colour.

Gallery label, September 2023

Ronald Moody, The Onlooker  1958–62

The Onlooker is Ronald Moody’s image of the artist’s role in society. He often used found pieces of wood. He carved this work from teak wood from a ship’s fender. Moody used the grain of the wood to direct his carving. The grain provides the lines of force that complement the stillness of the posture. It gives a sense of the animation of the mind. Moody said his work reflected his experience and presence in Europe and the Caribbean – a perpetual state of friction.

Gallery label, September 2023

Lucian Freud, Girl with a Kitten  1947

This is one of eight portraits that Freud made of his first wife, the artist Kathleen (‘Kitty’) Garman (1926–2011). Freud sat very close to his subjects while painting them. Here he pays almost forensic attention to Garman, from the reflections in her pupils to the static energy of her wavy hair. In this psychologically charged composition, Garman holds a kitten by its neck in a tense grip, her white knuckles especially prominent.

Gallery label, September 2023

Lancelot Ribeiro, Cityscape (Night)  1963

Born in Mumbai (Bombay), India in 1933, Ribeiro moved to London in 1950. The night sky dominates much of this painting, appearing as an expansive black field scattered with twinkling white and yellow stars. Beneath the sky, stacked geometric shapes form oddly-angled towers. Landscapes are a major theme throughout Ribeiro’s work, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ribeiro said, ‘None of these landscapes are of actual places but a sort of collective experience... my first influences... were the churches and statuary of the Catholic church in Goa along with the symbolic ritual that went with it’.

Gallery label, October 2022

John Latham, Man Caught Up with a Yellow Object  1954

Latham used a spray gun to sweep diluted black paint across a base layer of grey. The Shape of a body developed out of this haze. It remains fragmentary and truncated, partly overtaken by the accompanying yellow object. This loss of bodily form suggests more profound anxieties, which were widespread in the 1950s, about alienation and the futility of individual action. However, Latham himself sees the yellow object as a symbol of enlightenment, and he associates the tiny dots of spray painting with the units of time that constitute reality.

Gallery label, September 2004

Shirley Baker, Near Ackers Street, Manchester  1964

This is one of a number of photographs in Tate’s collection by the pioneering British photographer Shirley Baker, who is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era (see Tate P82515–24). Her pictures of the working-class near her home in Manchester, taken between 1960 and 1981, were recognised late in her career but would come to be her most critically acclaimed works. Throughout her career, she continually photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her curiosity in human behaviour and a compassion for social injustice.

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Cyclops  1957

In classical mythology, the Cyclops was an immensely strong giant with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The skin of this lumbering bronze figure is imprinted with broken machine-parts and other found debris. Paolozzi made it by pressing pieces of metal into a bed of moist clay, and then pouring molten wax into the clay mould. He constructed the model from these sheets of wax forms and finally cast it in bronze. Its pierced armour and dilapidated state has been seen as an ironic comment on the condition of man in the nuclear age.

Gallery label, September 2016

Alan Davie, Black Mirror  1952

Black had a special meaning for the artist following a brief illness in 1946 during which he was temporarily blind. He described this traumatic visual experience as 'whiteness'. In contrast black came to signify life and 'the depth of life'. Davie's usual practice at this time was to produce each painting swiftly and violently through a 'flash of inspiration'. If he was subsequently unhappy with the result he would begin again, obliterating the image with a completely new painting. Davie resisted the notion of pure abstraction and his title emphasises this. According to Davie 'here is a picture which you would call abstract but is a mirror in itself'.

Gallery label, September 2004

Kim Lim, Sphinx  1959

The title of this work speaks of Kim Lim’s love of ancient artefacts. It evokes a mythical hybrid creature, with the head of a human and the body of a lion. While still a student, Lim began to salvage, carve and assemble off-cuts she found in wood yards. This allowed her to create art from building blocks which already had forms and histories. She then combined them into bold and playful configurations. Here, Lim scorched the surface of the wood so different sections would have distinctive textures and reflect the light differently

Gallery label, September 2023

Shirley Baker, Salford  1962

This is one of a number of photographs in Tate’s collection by the pioneering British photographer Shirley Baker, who is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era (see Tate P82515–24). Her pictures of the working-class near her home in Manchester, taken between 1960 and 1981, were recognised late in her career but would come to be her most critically acclaimed works. Throughout her career, she continually photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her curiosity in human behaviour and a compassion for social injustice.

Dame Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos  1946

Pelagos (‘sea’ in Greek) was inspired by a view of the bay at St Ives in Cornwall, where two stretches of land surround the sea on either side. The hollowed-out sculpture has a spiral form resembling a shell, a wave or the roll of a hill. Hepworth wanted the taut strings to express ‘the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills’. She moved to Cornwall with her husband, painter Ben Nicholson in 1939 and produced some of her best-known sculpture inspired by its wild landscape.

Gallery label, April 2019

Gillian Ayres CBE RA, Distillation  1957

Distillation was painted partly in household enamel and partly in artist’s oil paint. Ayres applied the paint with rags and brushes, and by pouring from the can and squirting from the tube. Influenced by photographs of the North American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his drip paintings, she worked on this painting while it was flat on the floor. Ayres kept the paint fluid by dissolving it with a solvent, allowing her to manipulate it rapidly and spontaneously. Her main concerns at this time were space, materials and colour, and balancing these ‘so that nothing is more important than anything else. One was into the idea of no composition...’

Gallery label, April 2019

Shirley Baker, Manchester  1962

This is one of a number of photographs in Tate’s collection by the pioneering British photographer Shirley Baker, who is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era (see Tate P82515–24). Her pictures of the working-class near her home in Manchester, taken between 1960 and 1981, were recognised late in her career but would come to be her most critically acclaimed works. Throughout her career, she continually photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her curiosity in human behaviour and a compassion for social injustice.

Shirley Baker, Manchester  1965

This is one of a number of photographs in Tate’s collection by the pioneering British photographer Shirley Baker, who is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era (see Tate P82515–24). Her pictures of the working-class near her home in Manchester, taken between 1960 and 1981, were recognised late in her career but would come to be her most critically acclaimed works. Throughout her career, she continually photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her curiosity in human behaviour and a compassion for social injustice.

Shirley Baker, Manchester  1967

This is one of a number of photographs in Tate’s collection by the pioneering British photographer Shirley Baker, who is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era (see Tate P82515–24). Her pictures of the working-class near her home in Manchester, taken between 1960 and 1981, were recognised late in her career but would come to be her most critically acclaimed works. Throughout her career, she continually photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her curiosity in human behaviour and a compassion for social injustice.

Frank Auerbach, E.O.W. Nude  1953–4

Frank Auerbach and Estella Olive West (E.O.W.) started a long relationship in 1948 when they were acting in the same play. She posed for him for over 20 years. This painting was executed over ten months of regular sittings. By applying oil paint over previous still-wet layers, Auerbach achieved a textured, almost sculptural rendering of the figure. Auerbach’s way of working creates a strong feeling of physical presence combined with a lively sense of process.

Gallery label, September 2023

F.N. Souza, Crucifixion  1959

Brought up as a Roman Catholic, FN Souza’s faith became strained as he developed his secular understanding of life and suffering. Crucifixion presents Christ as a masked skeletal figure in dense black and dark blue pigments. His limbs are pinned to the outer edges of the frame to become the cross itself. The image relates to the artist’s personal religious struggle. Art historians have also discussed the painting in relation to the post-colonial condition, the contradiction of inherited faith and the deconstructed form of Modern European painting.

Gallery label, September 2023

Aubrey Williams, Tribal Mark II  1961

Williams was born in 1926 in what was then British Guiana, to middle class parents of African and Carib heritage. He studied art from a young age but made a living as a government agricultural field officer. Regarded as too supportive of independent sugar growers, he was moved to a remote station in the north-west, living amongst the Warrau people. Their art and cosmology, especially their ancestral petroglyphs – rock carvings providing instructions such as how to live sustainably within the forest – would later have a profound impact on his painting. ‘I have to thank the Warrau people now for my work as an artist’, he said.

Gallery label, January 2022

R.B. Kitaj, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg  1960

Rosa Luxemburg was a Jewish activist and founder of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She was killed in 1919 by troops opposed to the revolutionary movement that swept Germany in the wake of the First World War. In the centre of the painting a figure holds Luxemburg’s corpse, while at top right is a collaged transcription of an account of the murder. Kitaj associated Luxemburg with his grandmother Helene, who was forced to flee Vienna in the 1930s. The veiled figure at top left represents his maternal grandmother, who fled Russia as a result of earlier pogroms of the Jewish people.

Gallery label, September 2018

Shirley Baker, Salford  1964

This is one of a number of photographs in Tate’s collection by the pioneering British photographer Shirley Baker, who is thought to have been the only woman practising street photography in Britain during the post-war era (see Tate P82515–24). Her pictures of the working-class near her home in Manchester, taken between 1960 and 1981, were recognised late in her career but would come to be her most critically acclaimed works. Throughout her career, she continually photographed a range of humanist subjects, sparked by her curiosity in human behaviour and a compassion for social injustice.

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion  1944

Francis Bacon titled this work after the figures often featured in Christian paintings witnessing the death of Jesus. But he said the creatures represented the avenging Furies from Greek mythology. The Furies punish those who go against the natural order. In Aeschylus’s tragedy The Eumenides, for example, they pursue a man who has murdered his mother. Bacon first exhibited this painting in April 1945, towards the end of the Second World War. For some, it reflects the horror of the war and the Holocaust in a world lacking guiding principles.

Gallery label, September 2023