Tate Britain Greatest Hits, Winter 2018/19

A recent wander round Tate Britain led to me snapping some of my favourite paintings there. Like the above, Peter Blake's Self-Portrait With Badges from 1961. The whole painting is wonderful and painted with a variety of techniques and to varying levels of finish. Peter Blake turned the act of slacking-off three quarters of the way through a painting into an art.

 

David Bomberg's Bomb Store from 1942, painted while serving as a war artist, is crammed with the forceful chunkiness that's in all his best work.

 

Charles Ginner's Piccadilly Circus from 1912, which is as flat as a Paint By Numbers kit and all the more charming for it.

 

Here's another Camden Town Group member doing his Post-Impressionist thing: Malcolm Drummond's Girl With Palmettes from 1914. Flat areas of colour, a nice subtle arrangement of complementaries, all good.

 

Another War Artist piece. Graham Sutherland's Feeding A Steel Furnace from 1941-2. That pink, yellow, orange and black combination comes up again and again in immediate post-War art. Sutherland used it, Bacon used it a lot until he hit the '60s and whacked up the saturation levels on everything.

 

Victor Pasmore, The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 1 from 1944-7. It's not often you get early Mondrian and late Seurat in the same painting. Bonus.

 

John Bratby's Still Life With Chip Frier, 1954. Bratby's simple drawing technique in paint is always a winner, even when it isn't. And you can just smell Albert Finney and Tom Courtney standing just out of shot. Aye.