School of London was a term coined by the artist R.B. Kitaj (1932-2007) to describe a group of London-based artists who devoted themselves to figurative painting in the 1970s in an art world dominated by abstraction. The term goes back to Kitaj's catalogue text for an exhibition held in 1976 and developed into an umbrella term for figurative painters of the time. The artists, who varied greatly in their painting styles, were not united by an explicit expression or agreement on what this new figuration should look like, but primarily by a shared respect for the tradition and history of figurative painting.