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Description: | This drawing shows customers in the Atlantic pub on the corner of Brixton's Atlantic Road and Coldharbour Lane. Mike Hawthorne based this work on an earlier drawing that he completed in 1980.
At that time, some Brixton residents regarded the Atlantic as a 'racist pub'. A former customer recalled 'the white man who owned the pub would break your glass after you had finished using it'. The Atlantic was one of the first buildings to be attacked during the Brixton riots in 1981.
A self-taught artist, Hawthorne has been drawing and painting since childhood. The first nine years of his life were spent in Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
Hawthorne describes his early influences as MAD magazines, illustrations of the American Civil War and television newsreels of Biafra and Vietnam. His paintings also draw on European medieval traditions of depicting heaven and hell. Since 1975 Hawthorne has worked in London, creating rock, reggae and jazz visuals and underground 'comix'. | License: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ | Publisher: | Museum of London | Rights holder: | Digital image Museum of London | Subjects: | Power and Politics Leisure Art and Design | Temporal: | 1987 | Source: | Museum of London | Identifier: | http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/rser... | Go to resource |
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