The integrity and humanism of Peter de Francia’s work stems from his socialist convictions.

Born in France in 1921 he studied art in Brussels and served in the British army during World War II after which he resumed his studies at the Slade School of Art in London where he began exhibiting in the early 1950s.

Ever since then he has questioned the purpose and validity of the liberal art Establishment’s championing of individualist formal innovation.

Disdaining vacuous content he addressed the political and philosophical issues of the times.

Renato Guttuso – with whom he worked in 1947 – and other communists Picasso, Leger, Beckmann and Grosz provided the visual languages and aesthetic outlooks from which he developed his work.

During the cold war, when the Western art world was increasingly emulating American abstraction and denigrating narrative figuration as hopelessly passe, de Francia painted three large history paintings exposing colonialist and fascist brutality.

Not surprisingly these have been shunned by mainstream histories of British art.

Indeed this is the first time that the first one The Execution of Beloyannis (1953) has been exhibited. Its subject is the Greek dictatorship’s execution of the charismatic communist along with others on the spurious charge of spying. The international campaign which tried to save him perpetuated a photograph of him holding a red carnation.

This is not an easy painting to look at. The sorrow of the tragedy is expressed by Expressionist distortions of anatomy, posture, scale and a sombre palette, without resorting to obvious descriptions of blood and guts.

The semi-naked, awkwardly twisted bodies of Beloyannis and two comrades are seen from above, so recalling contemporary filmic ways of seeing.

Beloyannis’s head is thrown back, mouth gaping uglily, not in sleep but in the sudden shock of violent death. One outstretched hand loosens its grasp of his red carnation, the other hand clutches his genitals - no more will this young man make love.

His two comrades have clasped hands in a last moment of succour and solidarity. The exaggerated scale of the hands and feet serve to heighten the painting’s emotive power.

Allusions to European art’s Christian martyrdoms and to previous depictions of political executions such as Goya’s Execution of the 3rd May give the work a universality of meaning which transgresses the specific circumstances of this event.

De Francia’s best known history painting is The Bombing of Sakiet. During the Algerian war of independence the French air force killed 58 civilians when it bombed Sakiet Sidi Yousef, a border village in Tunisia, claiming that it was used as a training camp for Algerian “terrorists.”

The current exhibition shows the little-known first version of this work in which the terror and chaos which aerial bombing brings is conveyed via the composition’s sharp diagonals, the jarringly vivid colours and the frantic gestures and postures of the victims.

The continuing relevance of these paintings is all too obvious given subsequent and current colonialist atrocities.

By the 1970s de Francia was addressing more generalised aspects of the foolishness and absurdity of human behaviour. The Disparates series of paintings and drawings which satirise mindless crassness, pomposity and cruelty is represented with Neither Rhyme Nor Reason (1970).

At a pool side a blank-faced woman grabs another chocolate with her fat fingers while all we see of her male companion lying in a hammock is the amorphous blubber of his stomach. His head – and mind? – are obliterated by the newspaper which serves him only as a sunshade.

But de Francia also creates ample celebrations of the pleasures of life in clear, joyful colours. In Figures, Evening Tunis (c. 1960) we sense the implied conviviality and camaraderie of strangers as a man carrying a sleeping child moves with the crowd in the city.

Devoid of sentimentality, Village Couple II with Dove (c. 1978) conveys the bonds of love and respect between people and the quiet dignity of domestic life.

In the cramped interior of their modest home the adults witness a child playing with a mischievous cat. That the creature leaves their pet white dove unmolested adds a message of the potential for peace.

Despite understandable restrictions of space, the gallery’s selection of paintings succeeds in showing the breadth of de Francia’s preoccupations over his working life. The inclusion of some of his incisive drawings would have been a bonus.

These works do not wring their hands in passive sorrow at injustice and cruelty, they are calls to action, to thought, to be informed. By also celebrating life and humanity at its best they remind us of the reasons to resist oppression.

In the novel A Painter of Our Time John Berger wrote that an artist “must be judged in relation to the always different and always present struggle of men to realize their potentiality more fully.” De Francia’s work answers this call.

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