"In 1962 a suitable obscure booked called The London Nobody knows was published. Written by Geoffrey Fletcher, it was, to say the least, an idiosyncratic guide to the city, one that veered off the usual tourist route of places and parks and heading straight down the shadowy bank streets into a world more foreign and exiting than anything on the standard itinerary. It was in a Dickensian world of fog and gaslights, in which the Old Bedford Music Hall stands abandoned and rotting, a remnant of the rumbustious theatre immortalised by Walter Sickert in the late nineteenth century, and where rag and bone men drive their horse drawn carts past bombed out terraces. It is that time-worn, shabby city that the artists in this exhibition knew, and it was there that they made some of their most important works." [Toby Treves; Bacon, Freud, Mehta, Souza; Grosvenor Vadehra exhibition catalogue; 2007]
Grosvenor Vadehra presents Bacon, Freud, Mehta, Souza, as the second part in their programme of International Art exhibitions at their premises in New Delhi. Starting in the spring of 2006 with a show of perhaps the very father of modern art, Picasso, this next exhibition progresses to look at those who are in many ways indebted to his legacy, four of
the masters of Post-war 20th Century painting. Though contrasting in their cultural backgrounds, these painters are in many ways connected through their artistic beginnings and their response to a London ravaged by war, each respectively exposing through their work the anxieties and fears of Man in the shadow of its aftermath.
