Richard Hamilton’s picture of gallerist Robert Fraser handcuffed to Mick Jagger remains an icon of the Swinging Sixties. Art, drugs, and rock and roll fuelled a new generation eager to ruffle the feathers of Britain’s polite society.
A colleague of Fraser’s, art dealer Kasmin remembers: “In the 60s, optimism arose in the art world and we newer people thought we could change the prevailing British culture and make the Visual rival the Literary attitude.”
Kasmin is now conjuring up some of this wild energy at Sotheby’s London with an exhibition opening on September 4, 2013. “The New Situation: Art in London in the Sixties” gathers works for sale and works on loan by the likes of David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and Anthony Caro.
No doubt to encourage investors to explore more accessible (and available) options, the show also features some of these artists’ lesser-known contemporaries. Sculptor David Annesley, who studied under Anthony Caro at St Martins, and Robyn Denny, an abstract painter — who, despite representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1966, and being the youngest artist to be granted a solo exhibition at Tate in 1973 — has virtually fallen into oblivion.
Kasmin is well-suited curator for this exhibition. His gallery at 118 New Bond Street was the first purpose-built white cube space in London, and one of the art world’s epicenters at the time. The dealer has also been particularly discerning: he gave Hockney his first solo exhibition in 1963.
“We admired daring enthusiasm,” he explained. “We were enemies of ‘good taste.’ For us, paintings were no longer adjuncts to polite living, and sculptures went wild. No more ‘over the mantelpiece’ or on a plinth, the artworks challenged and exulted. We were on a several year-long ‘high’.”
“The New Situation: Art in London in the Sixties,” September 4-11, 2013, Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, London
