Postwar Modern:
Artist Spotlight

Anwar Jalal Shemza was born in 1928 in Shimla, then the summer capital of both British India and the regional Punjab government. After finishing his schooling, Shemza moved to the province’s non-seasonal capital, Lahore, to study Philosophy, Persian and Arabic at the University of the Punjab, but dropped out and transferred to the Mayo School of Arts. Upon graduation Shemza built a reputation for himself as a prominent creative polymath, producing nationalistic propaganda for the newly-established Government of Pakistan and designing and editing Ehsas, a respected Urdu art and literature periodical. Before long, Shemza began to write, publishing four critically acclaimed novels, writing artistic and architectural scripts for children for Radio Pakistan and becoming a founding member of the Lahore Art Circle.

In 1956, after his illustrious career in a young Pakistan, Shemza moved to London for further study at the Slade School of Fine Art as the beneficiary of a British Council scholarship. Upon arrival, Shemza’s prior successes went unnoticed and, compounding any discomfort he felt about this new lack of name recognition, he encountered a British art world in which the legacies and styles of his Eastern culture were looked down upon as less sophisticated than those of the West. Shemza would later recall a lecture by the art historian Ernst Gombrich in which this crystalised for him. Recalling the way in which all of his emotions about this new state of affairs coalesced, Shemza said:

Franciszka Themerson was born in Warsaw, Poland. Her father, Jakub Weinles was a painter, her mother, Łucja was a pianist, and so was her sister, Maryla. Franciszka graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1931 and that year married the writer, Stefan Themerson. Their creative collaboration started with making avant-garde films.

In 1938 they moved to Paris, which was at the time the centre of the art world. After the Second World War started the Themersons were separated. Franciszka found herself in London, Stefan ended up in Vichy, France. After he was able to join her in London in 1942, they made two more films. A few years later, when the possibility of making more films came to an end, they founded their publishing company, Gaberbocchus Press, which they ran together for 31 years. Gaberbocchus was referred to as the first avant-garde publisher in London.

Throughout this time, Franciszka painted and drew. She began drawing figures into canvases already primed with thick washes of oil paint. Her figures writhe, fly and jump through the paint’s texture at a wild array of angles and positions in a manner that Themerson termed ‘bi-abstract’:

Kim Lim was born in Singapore to a family who spent the wartime Japanese occupation in Malaya (now Malaysia). After a short postwar return to Singapore, Lim embarked upon a move to London to pursue an art degree at the Slade School of Art. Lim’s experiences in Singapore and London, as well as her ability to travel between them during holidays, informed her unique approach to abstraction in sculpture and printmaking.

Shirley Baker was born in Salford, but grew up in Manchester and Chatsworth, where she was evacuated to during the Second World War. After finishing school, Baker studied photography in both Manchester and London at Manchester College of Technology, Regent Street Polytechnic and the London College of Printing. Between 1960 and 1975, Baker embarked on a mammoth, almost compulsion-like documentation of inner and Greater Manchester city streets, capturing them in their postwar tumult. After the passing of the Housing Repairs and Rents Act in 1954, houses deemed unsafe or unsanitary were demolished and replaced, while the remaining debris of bombsites began to be cleared away. It is this shift that Baker documented in her photography of slums and fast-disappearing estates. Baker spoke about how the rapid demolition of a postwar reality that, though unpleasant, had become the status quo, motivated her street photography: