11 Lesser-Known, Mostly Contemporary Paintings You Should Hunt Down the Next Time You’re in London

André Derain was born into a middle-class family in the small town of Chatou, just outside Paris. He refused to follow his father into the family business as a patisserie chef and, instead, attended a fine art course at the Académie Carriere in Paris, where he met Henri Matisse. It was under Matisse’s tutelage that Derain was subsequently introduced to the work of Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. Their work, together with the developments of the Symbolists and the Neo-Impressionists, informed his own art. Boats in the Harbor, Collioure (in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts) was painted in the summer of 1905, when Derain, together with Matisse, worked in this small Mediterranean fishing port near the Spanish border. Although using a traditional subject matter, the bright colors—applied in fragmented blocks—must have appeared unfinished and almost clumsy to a contemporary audience; for Derain, it was the most effective means of conveying the effect of bright light where tonal contrast is completely eradicated. In 1906 Derain was commissioned to execute a series of London cityscape paintings, in which scenes of the River Thames—reminiscent of the work of Claude Monet from two decades earlier—were reinterpreted with dazzling color. Although a surprising traditionalist, Derain was an influential contributor to the Fauves, a group that experimented with non-naturalistic colors and laid the groundwork for Abstract Expressionism. (Jessica Gromley)

In 1963 students at the Royal College of Art in London were set an Easter project. They were given the choice of two themes: “Figures in a High Wind” and “Christ at Emmaus.” One of these students was a young painter called Patrick Caulfield. Taking on both themes, he portrayed a windblown Christ at Emmaus. Christ at Emmaus is a fascinating painting when considered in the context of its time and in relation to Caulfield’s maturing style. Along with many of his peers, Caulfield was drawn toward Pop art, and this work has Pop’s characteristic impersonal flatness and graphic aesthetic. Another aspect of the Pop approach is shown here in the artist’s appropriation of existing visual imagery: the pattern around the border of the image was derived from the design of packets of dates. Caulfield did not generally refer to religious subjects in his later work, but he was inspired by ancient art, in particular decorative Minoan artifacts and frescoes. This influence can be seen in his depiction of the large vase next to the figure under the tree; pottery of this kind is a recurring image in later works. Other indications of Caulfield’s stylistic direction are evident in this painting—the clear black outline, use of alkyd house paint on board, and flat, linear composition are all present. His paintings over the next 10 years were concerned with the subtlety of still lifes and interiors, his subject matter refined with a brilliant use of color and pattern. Christ at Emmaus is an extraordinary early work by one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 20th century. (Roger Wilson and Jane Peacock)

During his Pop period, Derek Boshier made a number of figural paintings exploring the effects of consumerism and mass media on British society at the time. These were exhibited in “Image In Revolt” at Grabowski Gallery, London, in 1962, along with work by Frank Bowling. Drinka Pinta Milka, created at the Royal College of Art, refers to a long-running Cadbury’s ad campaign for their Dairy Milk chocolate bar that featured the much-remembered but meaningless slogan “a glass and a half of full cream milk per half pound.” Boshier paints their trademark glass of milk being poured over and into people falling through space along with the chocolate bars. The title refers to a public information campaign in which citizens were advised to “Drinka Pinta Milka Day” to stay healthy. To Boshier, such information represented the sinister side of the postwar British welfare state—a nannying social control over many by an elite few. His uniform, faceless humans, shaped and displaced by the milk, are part of an “identi-kit” set that forms a larger, rigid structure—it is not only the milk that is being homogenized. Pop art concerned itself with “smashing” previously sacred images: while Jasper Johns recontextualized the Stars and Stripes, Boshier used the Union Jack, drooping and falling down with the figures, to suggest the downfall of the old imperial nation in the wake of global consumerism. (Karen Morden)

British artist Stephen Farthing was educated in London—at St. Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art—but moved to New York in 2000. His works show him as an accomplished portrait painter, landscape artist, draftsman, and designer. He held his first solo exhibition in 1977, his work was featured in the São Paulo Biennale of 1989, and he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1998. Farthing’s commissions included the carpet design that was commissioned by the Grosvenor Estate and the architectural drawings of the Oxford University Press buildings in England. In 1999 he was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London to paint six eminent historians, in a work titled Past and Present. To prepare for the work, Farthing took more than one hundred photos of the sitters and asked the historians to fill in a questionnaire, so that he could build up a mental picture of their personalities as well as a visual image of their faces.

This wide variety of work may have been presaged by Flat Packed Rothman’s, which is made up of a number of materials and techniques, including acrylic, gloss paint, gesso, paper, resin, spray paint, and screenprinting. It is part of the Royal College of Art Collection. The work owes a great debt to Pop art and is one of a number of Farthing’s images that make use of everyday objects. The objects used here are layered one upon the other, as if in a collage. The several pairs of scissors, cigarette packets, and miscellaneous scraps of paper intertwine to make a hypnotic image, which suggests hidden layers beneath the superficial. (Lucinda Hawksley)

Artist and illustrator John Minton was associated with the British Neo-Romantic movement in art and poetry, an imaginative reaction against the 1930s preoccupation with gritty social issues and the austerity of Britain in the 1940s. In 1952 Minton decided to depict the death of Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, not an unusual choice of subject given that this was the patriotic period of the Festival of Britain and the Coronation. Minton’s painting is a reworking of a famous fresco in the House of Lords, made by 19th-century history painter Daniel Maclise. This fresco had long fascinated Minton because a reproduction of the work had hung in his schoolroom. The key elements of Maclise’s painting are present—Nelson dying in the arms of Hardy, the Black sailor pointing to the sniper who has just shot the admiral on the deck of HMS Victory—but they have been transformed to reinforce the work’s theatrical quality. The most obvious distortion in Minton’s painting is the near vertical deck; Minton said that he was hoping to reproduce the effect of a newsreel shot through a telephoto lens. He handles the composition coherently, the somber crowd swirling around the spotlit Nelson. The semi-Cubist elements in the details of masts, sails, and some of the figures may seem a halfhearted nod to Modernism, but the overall effect is dramatic and visually satisfying. The painting is part of the Royal College of Art Collection. (Reg Grant)

David Hockney’s art shows his experiments with a variety of styles and media as he was working not just as a painter but as a draftsman, printmaker, and photographer. I’m in the Mood for Love (in the collection of the Royal College of Art) incorporates handwritten text and stencilled letters and numerals recalling graffiti. The deliberately naive rendering of the figure and buildings belies the artist’s mastery as a draftsman. But, despite the presence of these hallmark elements of Pop art, this piece has an emotional depth that distinguishes it from other works linked with the movement. The large brushstrokes in the top left-hand corner, which point downward toward the figure, lend a particularly charged and brooding sense to the piece. The indistinct face of the central figure both draws the viewer into a suggested narrative and leads to a search for meaning in symbols like the red heart and white crescent. I’m in the Mood for Love evinces Hockney’s visual wit. (Alix Rule)

Mequitta Ahuja’s self-portraits are renowned. It is a form that she describes as “automythography,” as she considers her paintings to combine “history, myth, and personal narrative.” She describes her choice to use her own image as being related to her “unusual ethnic heritage”—she has both African American and Indian origins—and her need to “have imagery in the world that reflected [her] identity.” Using remote shutter technology, she photographs herself, carefully stage managing her own gaze, posture, and dress, and she uses the resulting image as source material for her painting. Fingering Vanitas (in the Saatchi Gallery) was first exhibited as a part of a series of allegorical paintings that were conceived to go beyond the self-portrait, to reflect on the act of painting itself. Ahuja took as her starting point Giotto’s biblical frescoes, with their use of inside-outside perspective. The artist is pictured sitting at a low table in a small, sparsely furnished room, but glimpses of the surrounding landscape can be seen through an open door and window. The colors are vivid and warm. Ahuja’s nude figure evokes Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian women; however, while Gauguin’s paintings objectify the female body and fetishize the women’s exoticism, Ahuja’s image is in no way sexualized. It represents the artist as a creator, not an exotic muse. While the image contains myriad references to both Western and Eastern art traditions, Ahuja has appropriated and modified these traditions, weaving a complex cultural experience for the viewer. (Stephen Farthing)

David Salle’s work shows him gathering random images from all areas of history and culture, throwing them onto his canvases, and painting whatever sticks. His postmodern pastiche paintings have been called “ham-fisted” and “cynical, calculating, and cold” by detractors—to which Salle has responded, “Literal-mindedness doesn’t get you anywhere very interesting. I want to take bigger leaps.” His art plunges into art history, popular culture, pornography, and anthropology and piles images and styles on top of each other in oil paintings. There is no discernible method, meaning, or logic to the juxtapositions on Salle’s canvases, where a photorealist representation of a snapshot sits next to a graffitilike scrawl or is forced under a block of solid color. His images are layered the way posters and advertisements are pasted over each other on city billboards. This scattershot aesthetic is exemplified in Mingus in Mexico (in the Saatchi Gallery). Figures extracted from Roman myths are interwoven with an empty cartoon speech bubble, racist memorabilia, ghosts of chairs hovering in outline forms, and a carefully constructed copy of a girl drinking from a cup—an image he repeats in a number of other paintings. The Oklahoma-born Salle studied under conceptual art legend John Baldessari. While Baldessari’s impatience with the pretensions of art theory and art itself provides the conceptual foundation for Salle’s snappy, collagelike paintings, they surely recall Salvador Dalí and his investigations into psychological, not physical, realities. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Peter Davies’s paintings will be an invaluable primary source for future students’ dissertations on the incestuous links within the international art world at the end of the 20th century. Inspired by late-night Top 100 TV shows and best-seller lists, Davies paints spreadsheet-like lists and Venn diagrams in faux-amateur style. His idiosyncratic charts rank the recognizable names of his friends, peers, and art heroes according to indeterminable attributes such as being “hip” or “fun.” Next to each name he appends titles of the artist’s works or scathingly funny descriptive sentences. With his squiggly scrawl and use of cheerful basic colors, these works visually resemble props for a grade-school kid’s classroom presentation. But their benign appearance does not undermine the intelligent nastiness in his satire of the art-world’s cliquey market-driven mentality. The Hip One Hundred (in the Saatchi Gallery) rates Richard Patterson, who paints oil paintings of plastic figurines, as number one, five slots above Damien Hirst. When Davies painted The Hip One Hundred, he was 27 years old, and his chutzpah in stating “who is who” is part of the piece’s charm. Some of the pleasures of viewing Davies’s paintings lie in contemplating the rises, falls, and comebacks they relate, as his canvases make contemporary art history out of contemporary art’s fickle fashion. (Ana Finel Honigman)

Born in 1953 in South Africa, Marlene Dumas began her artistic education during the apartheid era at the University of Cape Town (1972–75). Thanks to a major grant, she then continued her studies at the Atelier ‘63 in Haarlem, Netherlands, where she remained. She also attended courses in psychology at the Psychological Institute of the University of Amsterdam between 1979 and 1980. Dumas became famous for her portraits of children and erotic scenes. She exhibited her work extensively in European venues and has been part of major international expositions such as the Venice Biennale (Italy) and Documenta VII, Kassel (Germany). Combining elements of Expressionism and conceptual art, her works are ink and watercolor pieces as well as oil on canvas. Her work is often disturbing; she insists on confronting difficult subjects such as childhood abuse and the sexual exploitation of women. Painted in 1993, Young Boys (in the Saatchi Gallery) is one of Dumas’s most accomplished and challenging paintings. A long line of boys fills up the picture’s ambiguous space. Toward the right the figures trail off into the distance, becoming mere outlines. Dumas’s rapidity of execution provides a real lightness of touch, which deeply contrasts with the gravity and disturbing power of the work upon the viewer. Her palette of colors, ranging from a grayish pink to a pale bluish gray, reinforces the general feeling of strangeness provided by the image. (Julie Jones)

Belgian-born, British-based Luc Tuymans is partially responsible for returning painting, a medium heralded as “dead” during the last half of the 20th century when installation and conceptual art ruled, back to the forefront of contemporary art. The artist is part of megacollector Charles Saatchi’s “chosen few,” and in 2003 he was one of the youngest artists ever to have a solo show at Tate Modern, London. In the 1980s Tuymans worked primarily as a filmmaker; cinematic influences show in his paintings, which are marked by allusions to cinematic techniques such as closeups, cropped frames, and sequencing. Yet, despite these modern touches, Tuymans’s return to painting demonstrates his belief that the classic genre remains capable of reflecting the heterogeneity of modern existence. In Within, we witness one of Tuymans’s signature subjects: the Holocaust. Often dubbed a “poetic painter,” Tuyman, instead of illustrating the historical event, creates a pale, washed-out painting depicting an empty birdcage in which melancholy pervades. The absence of the cage’s inhabitants symbolizes death. Feelings of guilt, loss, and a sense of collective consciousness haunt the viewer’s experience of this seemingly banal image. The work’s large size also contributes to its emotional gravitas—we are sucked in and overwhelmed by the void Tuymans paints in cool blues and grays. This image poses the question: what position do we take when looking? Are we victims trapped behind bars, or are we responsible for the suffering being evoked? Within is at the Saatchi Gallery. (Samantha Earl)