The art scene in Great Britain turned more international after World War II, while at the same time the British art scene had a particular relationship with American movements more than with any European movements. Among the important British artists to emerge in this period were Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson, Bacon, Hockney, and Caro. There were also more exhibitions of younger British artists, and work of these artists showed a more international character than had been true before the war.
In the early 1950s, a group of social realist painters emerged under the name the Kitchen Sink School, and they acquired this name by selecting drab and sordid subject matter. The chief exponents of this type of painting were John Bratby and Jack Smith, Edward Middleditch, and Derrick Greaves. These artists showed in their selection of subject matter and their violently aggressive technique a new expression of the post-war mood of the "angry young men" of the nation. This mood did not last beyond the mid-fifties, for then the movement known as Pop Art developed out of seminars held at the I.C.A. by the Independence Group under the leadership of critic Laurence Alloway and architectural writer Reyner Banham. Pop art arrived in the 1961 exhibition "The Young Contemporaries" with works by Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Joe Tilson, and Peter Blake. They would be followed by Kitai, Hockney, Boshier, Richard Smith, and Allen Jones (Osborne 82-83).
Beginning about 1950, there was a renewal of interest in abstract art in Britain, and the central figure in this renewal was the Euston Road painter Victor Pasmore. He had started a searching investigation of modern art and had read the published writings of the great Post Impressionists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, and CTzanne. He also studied the Russian abstract artist Kandinsky. He turned to abstract art himself and by 1950 was using a range of simple geometric forms such as the square, t...