Postwar Modern, Barbican Art Gallery, review: a poignant reminder of hope and humanity among the ruins

There is almost unbearable poignancy to the timing of the Barbican’s Postwar Modern. In focusing on artists who came to prominence in Britain between 1945 and 1965, this is an exhibition of work by those whose formative years passed against the backdrop of violent destruction and huge loss of life.

It opens with the image of photographer Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bathtub on the day of his suicide. Mud from the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps is still stuck to her boots, which she has lined up beside the tub on the Nazi leader’s patterned bath mat. Miller is symbolically washing herself clean of the filth of war, but what comes next?

Each artist in this exhibition has, one way or another, had their world ripped apart. Some – among them Franciszka Themerson, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Eva Frankfurther – arrived in Britain as refugees. One of the few works to reference this directly is Themerson’s small painting Eleven Persons and One Donkey Moving Forwards (1947) a jumble of child and adult bodies flying through a flaming orange sky.

Others, among them Lynn Chadwick, Nigel Henderson and William Turnbull, had been pilots during the war, experiences that provoked thoughts about the relationship between body and machine. The second gallery is dominated by Chadwick’s fine metal sculpture The Fisheater (1951). Part bird, part weapon, it is mesmerising: at once sinuous and skeletal. An enormous swooping arrow, it hovers, ominous, within the Barbican’s double-height galleries.

On the home front, portions of Britain’s major cities had been flattened by aerial bombardment. Francis Bacon spent an early part of the war helping recover the living and dead from the rubble.

Contemporary photographers show life within these bomb-damaged cityscapes becoming normality. Bert Hardy’s photographs of Birmingham in the 50s show children making impromptu adventure playgrounds in huge expanses transformed into flattened wastelands scattered with broken bricks and scraps of metal debris.

The figures in Roger Mayne’s Children in a Bombed Building Bermondsey, London (1956) grin mischievously, as though the whole thing were a wonderful adventure. For those born in the years after the war, this spectral cityscape of teetering, empty buildings was the backdrop to life. One little sprite in white ankle socks stands two storeys up at the top of what was once an interior staircase but now lacks any visible means of support.

Two decades after the war, Shirley Baker’s photographs shows women and children in Manchester still going about their daily lives in a shattered streetscape with exposed wallpaper and other fragments of domestic interiors still adhering to the sides of damaged terraces.

The broken city drew the eyes of painters too. Frank Auerbach and his friend Leon Kossoff entombed their canvases beneath thick, sticky fields of earth-toned paint, echoing the muddy pits of central London as the city started to dismantle the damage and slowly rebuild itself.

These landscapes strewn with tortured metal and machine parts invited a new sculptural language, too. Today we’d describe Eduardo Paolozzi’s humanoid figures as robotic zombies: they are broken-looking things, made from found fragments pressed into clay, bodies that reflect the material surface of the city itself.

How to love after so much horror? How to make a home in a broken city? After three galleries of monumental work, Postwar Modern makes a sudden switch, diving down into the tortured intimacy of John Bratby and Jean Cooke.

In the mid 50s Bratby was one of the artists associated with a domestic realist tendency, part of a group known as the “kitchen sink” painters. Rather than the idealised turn-of-the-century interiors – presided over by a wife in the role of domestic angel – these artists showed messy, poverty-stricken homes, full of domestic clutter, in which all of life’s dramas seemed to play out in one cramped room.

Bratby’s paintings are well known – celebrated, even: his wife Cooke’s less so. The room dedicated to their work opens with a self-portrait by Cooke with one eye bruised purple and swollen up. Suddenly Bratby’s painting of her, nude, hunched behind a table filled with cornflake and sugar packets, looks oppressive and controlling. (Cooke painted Bratby, too, but he was permitted to keep his dressing gown and pyjamas on.)

Another painting by Cooke appears to be a spring still life – pots of flowering plants arranged on a mantelpiece – until we see her face peeking through at the bottom, as though covertly inserting herself in the painted world. Bratby, apparently, was prone to violent fits of temper, taking out his rage both on his wife, and on her paintings.

Lucian Freud seemed to love the effect of tears welling up within the female eye: the way they distort and distend, dominating the face. Across three portraits, we see his first two wives – Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood – so meticulously captured on the point of tears that its hard not to wonder whether Freud was deliberately cruel specifically to achieve this effect.

Garman is newly pregnant: grasping the stem of a cut rose she is likewise a bloom that has been “plucked”. The thorns digging into the flesh of her hand seem a kind of martyrdom in anticipation of worse pain. In Hotel Bedroom (1954) Blackwood weeps in bed while Freud paints himself as a devilish figure in the shadows, observing the misery he has caused.

A modern relationship of a quite different kind is celebrated in Sylvia Sleigh’s private paintings of her younger lover, the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway. In both he appears in romantic period gowns, strung with pearls, in the guise of “the bride”. Alloway apparently showed them to close friends, but they were considered too transgressive for public exhibition.

Rather than dividing the artists according to cliques and movements, Postwar Modern asks instead what they were looking at and thinking about: working women, geometry, the human body, the atomic bomb. This approach opens the show up. Rather than a roll call of familiar figures, it is hugely enriched by, among others, women and artists from Commonwealth countries, whose contributions to British modernism were for a long time overlooked.

There are some fantastic pairings. FN Souza’s tormented, furious Christ, glaring at us eye to eye from the cross beside John Latham’s fragmenting black sun create an opening gallery full of brooding menace. William Turnbull’s heavy, restrained bronze woman, standing in front of Magda Cordell’s vast, explosive, colour-saturated Figure 69 (1958) suggests the outward strength and inner turmoil of a traumatised body.

Small, blocky wooden statues by Kim Lim stand in a line before Anwar Jalal Shemza’s loosely patterned abstract paintings: both artists took inspiration from Asian traditions still considered subordinate within British art schools of the day.

Hanging over the whole of this show, with its nightmare heads, and photographs of youthful figures partying in broken cityscapes, is the long shadow of the war. On the one hand this is a show about building a new life, a new world, and new kinds of art: on the other it is about the legacy of violence, destruction, bereavement and deracination.

It all feels painfully close to home, but perhaps it’s a good moment to be reminded of all this complex inner life and creative thought, all this raw humanity.

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-65, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 3 March – 26 June