School of London

A group of postwar artists who, rejecting the current Minimalist and Conceptual avant-garde, painted in figurative styles and whose members included Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, R.B. Kitaj, and Leon Kossoff. The name derives from Kitaj’s catalogue essay for the 1976 exhibition “The Human Clay,” which he organized at the Hayward Gallery, in London, where he referred to the figurative artists in the show loosely as the School of London.