With his profound knowledge of flora and fauna, a growing interest in pre-Columbian cultures and personal experience of significant political changes in the Caribbean, Aubrey Williams arrived in London with a unique visual and intellectual vocabulary. In the early 1950s, London was a city with few apparent signs of black presence, and the visibility of Williams’s work represented one of the first challenges to the white dominance in the British art establishment. Williams was also very active in the Caribbean Artists Movement, founded in 1966 to strengthen the visibility of Caribbean artists in the UK. Williams’s paintings have evolved through many different phases over the course of his career – from immaculately accomplished depictions of animals, to figurations and explosive, colourful abstracts. Williams drew influence from Olmec, Maya and Warao imagery, from abstract expressionism, science fiction, the symphonies and quartets of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, as well as artists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Diego Rivera, Yves Klein and Rufino Tamayo.
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery was given the entire British Empire and Commonwealth Museum's collection in 2012, including two other untitled 1982 works by Williams. This work is part of a series that Williams painted in relation to symphonies by Dmitri Shostakovich, who Williams regarded as the greatest composer of his time. His Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, Op. 113 for bass soloist, bass chorus, and large orchestra was composed by him in 1962. It consists of five movements, each a setting of a different Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem that describes aspects of Soviet history and life. The symphony is commonly referred to by the nickname Babi Yar, one of the poems published by Yevtushenko in 1961.
