Art Historian Dr Jennifer Johnson explores the development of abstraction in post-war Britain in this fascinating talk.

In the years following the second world war, British artists reconsidered the questions around abstract art. On the one hand, the severity of the geometric forms of interwar abstraction were rejected, but a neo-Romantic approach to landscape also seemed inadequate in the post war world. Beginning with works by Wilhemina Barns Graham and Peter Lanyon, currently on display in the Ten Good Years Exhibition at the Heong Gallery, this talk will explore the development of abstraction in the period and its legacies in the contemporary painting also on display.

Dr Jennifer Johnson is an art historian and writer based in Oxford. In 2024-25 she held the Paul Mellon Fellowship at the British School in Rome, and has previously held research fellowships and lectureships in History of Art and English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her first book, Georges Rouault and Material Imagining was published by Bloomsbury in 2020, and she is currently finishing a book entitled Towards Abstraction: Cold War and Affect in the work of Prunella Clough and Sandra Blow. She has published widely on French and British art, and in 2025 contributed an essay on Gillian Ayres to the catalogue for the Heong exhibition of Ayres work.

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