School of London. Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Others, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 9 October 2018-13 January 2019

Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are probably “second-tier” celebrity artists: well known, and certainly recognisable, but without the iconic status of Da Vinci, Van Gogh or Picasso. However, this means that they retain some aura of mystery.

Their eerie styles, with bulging faces, alien-like figures and harsh colour schemes, are still striking with every look. Bacon and Freud were masters at making the familiar seem strange. Their humans are not quite human, their worlds made up of jaunty angles and flattened dimensions. Sometimes the level of realistic detail is startling, other times non-existent.

This exhibition puts Bacon and Freud alongside lesser-known contemporaries, and explores the role played by their “School of London” in British artistic tradition. On the one side are the experiments made by the likes of Michael Andrews and Paula Rego. On the other are the School’s inheritors in Cecily Brown and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. But don’t worry about these alphabeti-spaghetti names. The point is to enjoy the great creativity of British art in the second half of the last century, and to spot patterns and irregularities between both artists and individual works.

It might seem strange to sample British art all the way over in Hungary. But the exhibition isn’t just an isolated handful of paintings from abroad, to be looked at one by one. The curators have made this exhibition into an education on a whole artistic period, so you can enjoy the works in all their glory without being an expert.

That said, if you do enjoy it, why not follow it up with a visit to the Tate Britain back in London, where many of the works here are on loan?

Jonny Elling