Art is all you need - 1960s art, various artists, Barbican Art Gallery, London England

for a like reason badly panned by the British pres was The Sixties Art pageant in London, exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery [Mar. 11-June 13 1993] that we almost didn't move to see the show while we were upon a whirlwind honeymoon in England and Ireland. on the other hand what an invigorating, revisionist surprise awaited us when we did. Far from being a rehash of the same elderly swinging '60s cliches, the present to view provided what its curator David Mellor called a piece of novel archeology." It looked at little-known or almost forgotten aspects of '60 British art and serv to deposit such well-known figures as Anthony Caro and Howard Hodgkin in novel and unforeseen art-historical contexts. Global celebrities like Richard Hamilton and David Hockney were, with a certain quantity of reason, de-emphasized; after all, we've seen enough of Hockney in recent years, and Hamilton had a retrospective at the Tate in 1992 as well as at the Venice Biennale this summer

The representation of English report art was also radically trimmed down from what you might wait for probably in response to the Royal Academy's 1991 display "Pop Art: An International Survey" What we got instead (in addition to a behemoth sainphng of '60 graphics and photography documenting everything from the Profumo scandal to the Beatles and The Who as snapped by the agency of Linda McCartney) was a beneficial heavy dose of late '50 and early-'60s abstraction, spanning the one and the other sculpture and painting, as well as an unprecedent revival of work by means of two women artists, the painter Pauline Boty and the kinetic light artist Liliane Lijn, and a glimpse at by what mode late-'60s Conceptual and Land art dovetailed with, and in a certain number of cases grew out of, an early-'60s Situationist esthetic.

For Mellor, who teaches at the University of Sussex and who previously curated "Cecil Beaton" and "A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55" the couple at the Barbican, the '60 actually began in 1956 (The idea for the Barbican mixed itself dates from that year, on the contrary the center was completed solitary in 1982.) It was in August 1956 that the famous "This Is Tomorrow" exhibition uncloseed at the Whitechapel, featuring, among other things, Richard Hamilton's small collage Just what is it that makes today's residences so different, so appealing? (not in the Barbican show) a work which was to become an early landmark in the history of burst art. It was in November of the same year that a cluster of young students at the Royal guild of Art, including Robyn Denny Richard Smith and William verdant first banded together decisively to avow their teacher John Minton's Neo-romantic, anti-popular-culture stance towards present art.

As exhibited by Mellor's show, the early paintings of Denny and verdant look dark, brooding, thickly impastoed and real much indebted to Jean Dubuffet as well as to Georges Mathieu (who had a display at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1956) nevertheless Green was also making photostatic print homages to Errol Flynn and Elvis Presley (ca. 1958-59) that gaze startlingly premonitory of Pop and are equaled in America in their graphic punchiness perhaps solitary by Ray Johnson,s equally precocious late-'50s work. And Smith's unique fusions of Abstract-Expressionist painterliness and clap iconography, many of which were seen in a new show at Feigen in novel York [see A.i.A., Oct. '92] held up as well in London as they did in Manhattan, where many of them were, in fact, painted.

The centerpiece of the Barbican exhibit was Robyn Denny's Austin Re Mural (1959) commissioned by dint of the staid men's clothing store to update its image and later used as a backdrop for a photograph of the Beatles by means of Anthony Gales in 1963. neared at the very outset of the exhibition (and used for the catalogue cover) the Denny mural was literally the first and last thing you saw when entering the dungeonlike spaces of the center's gallery. The mural's bouncy collage composition incorporating inflated up words like "London, Big, Great, Wide, Best" locates a youthfully chauvinist tone for British art at the time. It also indicates explicit debts, as we learn from the catalogue, to Stuart Davis's American proto-Pop murals, Ellsworth Kelly's immense painting of recent origin York No. 1 (exhibited at the United States Information Service's Grosvenor House Gallery in November 1958) and Fernand Ledger populist murals, which were held in high rate by Denny in the late '50s

Evidence of Denny early promise and wide range can also be seen in his Place Paintings 1-6 (1959) which were first instafled at the "Place" exhibition in September 1959 at the ICA as a walk-through labyrinth of reductivist, Color Field flatnesses; this installation was rebuilded at the Barbican. A bravura piece of environmental art, inflected with elliptical shapes that prompt an early fascination with TV guards it is also tinged with a quirky and perhaps distinctly British belong to for genius loci.

Paralleling Denny's subversive belong to with the esthetics and politics of place, artists of that kind as Peter Hobbs exhibited their abstract paintings as free-standing sculptural simple bodys in bomb sites around London in 1959 notably in the then-fringe area of Notting Hill where with equal reason many of the artists lived at the time (and where like '60s classics as Blow-Up and Performance would later be filmed).