When R.B. Kitaj put together The Human Clay, his ground-breaking 1976 exhibition of figurative art at the Hayward Gallery, he wrote: ‘If you have a great subject, say, a person or people or a face or some complex theme, you have no right to be negligent about form or colour. Great themes demand the highest artistic qualities and ambitions.’
The current loan exhibition at the newly reopened Haunch of Venison gallery (with a handy new shopfront on Bond Street) is a splendid example of great themes articulated by the highest artistic qualities and ambitions. Selected by Catherine Lampert, former director of the Whitechapel Gallery and now an independent curator and writer, it is an exploration of what Francis Bacon called ‘the mystery of appearance’, through the work of ten post-war London-based painters. These are Bacon himself, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Patrick Caulfield, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Leon Kossoff and Euan Uglow.
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