We went to the exhibition at the Barbican on postwar painting, which is in many ways a revelation: half familiar because so many of the artists have remained well known – Francis Bacon, John Bratby, Eduardo Paolozzi, Prunella Clough; half deeply unfamiliar because so much of the work is little seen and not well known. I thought the organisation of the exhibition by topic worked really well, like the section on Cruising which gets one to view the paintings of Bacon and Hockney purely in terms of their sexuality and the following section, Surface/Vessel which combines the work of Lucie Rie and William Scott, obvious as a pairing when one sees it, but not necessarily seen before. No catalogue available as yet.
Lucie Rie, Bottle, Dolomite Glaze:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Totally agree , a really good show which brought to the fore names thst are less familiar , brilliant pairings . That magnificent Hans Coper pot with the Scott’s so obviously great you wonder why it hasn’t been done before . The central room with the brutal Barbican architecture and the hang with Paolozzi , Shawcross , Davies , Themerson, Cordell and those blue walls was a knockout . But so were so many of the other rooms
Look forward to the catalogue