Notes on a scandal | 1 March 2018

Leonard Rosoman is not a well-known artist these days. Many of us will, however, be subliminally familiar with his mural ‘Upstairs and Downstairs’ in the Grand Café at the Royal Academy, painted in 1986 when the artist was in his early seventies. Two worlds are portrayed with a degree of satire — dressy guests arriving for the private view of the Summer Exhibition and below, in sober grisaille, Royal Academy Schools students engaged on life drawing. ‘Upstairs and Downstairs’s wit and perspectival acuity notwithstanding, its status as a mural makes it easy to overlook, an extended splash of colour behind the Café’s lunch counter.

Leonard Rosoman is worth rediscovering. He was a fine war artist and a brilliant illustrator. But he does not fit neatly into the fragile story of British modernism. Abstraction passed him by, and even though he was a figurative painter he was never part of the School of London, the term invented in 1976 by R.B. Kitaj to describe himself, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff. Although we can draw a comparison with Michael Andrews — both created ambitious narrative multi-figure paintings and both had an elegant way with acrylic — Rosoman did not offer the visceral explorations of reality associated with Auerbach, Bacon and Freud.

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But he had a uniquely strange vision that from the late 1950s onwards conflated pop art and Victorian problem pictures. At the heart of the Pallant House exhibition Leonard Rosoman: Painting Theatre that I have curated are 16 rediscovered pictures based on John Osborne’s controversial 1965 play A Patriot for Me.

Rosoman and Osborne had a tender friendship that blossomed in the early 1960s, with Rosoman spending happy, bibulous weekends in Sussex with Osborne, his then wife Penelope Gilliatt, and, inter alios, the opera director John Copley and Gilliatt’s sculptor sister Angela Conner.