| This dissertation evaluates the work of four artists working in London in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War as a set of distinct responses to the process of post-war reconstruction and the social conditions it engendered. Reconstruction, beyond the political restructuring and the physical rebuilding of the city, is understood as a cultural phenomenon in which changes in the urban landscape and society are intertwined and motivate distinct forms of artistic production. Each of the artists---Peter (Laszlo) Peri, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi---innovated processes of artistic production which deploy the material properties of various media to achieve new modes of figuration. Instead of engaging in a literal representation of a city-in-flux or devising a form of critical art in response to it, these artists developed distinct spatial, procedural, material and figural systems as part of a metonymic engagement with the progress of urban re-development. Extant and popular art historical taxonomies such as social realism, tachism, pop art, the School of London, and modernist realism are eschewed in favor of an understanding of these artists as similarly imbricated within, and intuitively cognizant of, their urban environment. They engaged in a variant of realism based, instead, in the production of social space, the social construction of identity and reproduction of sociological structures and phenomena in mediated form. |
