From October 10th, 1998, to January 20th, 1999, the Dina Vierny Foundation – Musée Maillol presented for the first time in Paris a major exhibition dedicated to the School of London and its disciples, pioneering figures of the figurative art revival in post-war England.

While Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud had already been celebrated in France, this exhibition offered a fresh perspective, bringing together an entire generation of British artists—including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, Paula Rego, Leon Kossoff, and R.B. Kitaj, the first to define this group under the term “School of London.”

This generation of painters, working in the English capital from the late 1940s onward, strongly asserted their commitment to figurative art at a time when abstraction dominated the art scene. Gathering at the Colony Room, a renowned club in London’s Soho district, they opposed abstraction and sought to promote a form of painting in pursuit of “truth,” aiming to transcend appearances to reveal the depth of their subjects.

The exhibition also featured the works of a new generation of young artists, still unknown on the Parisian art scene at the time: Bill Jacklin, Stephen Conroy, Celia Paul, and Tony Bevan, among others—all born between the 1940s and 1960s.