What about elsewhere in the culture? Last year, the famous abstract cover of The Bell Jar was replaced for the 50th-anniversary edition with a figurative image: a young woman fixing her makeup. More Mad Men than Plath, critics said. How vulgar to have a realistic image of a woman instead of a sophisticated abstract one. But the shift from abstract to realism was telling.

In 2008 the Threadneedle Prize, which aims to showcase the best in new figurative and representational art, was founded. The prize is worth £20,000, and the shortlist for 2014 has just been announced. The shortlisted works will be exhibited at London's Mall Galleries this autumn, next door to the ICA, once one of the temples of abstract art, co-founded by Herbert Read, who championed abstraction in a famous debate with Kenneth Clark in 1935.

Perhaps the greatest change, however, has been in recent exhibitions. These have asked interesting and original questions about the place of figurative art in the 20th century. In the Clark show at Tate Britain, the paintings and drawings by John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Paul Nash were a revelation. The exhibition confirmed that these were major artists. There have been few bodies of work which have more movingly represented the devastation caused by the Second World War. British landscapes, buildings ruined by the Blitz, scenes of urban devastation, refugees and figures sheltering in the London Underground from German bombs, beautifully depicted in paintings like Coventry Cathedral and Somerset Place by John Piper, Nash's Battle of Britain, the landscapes of William Coldstream and Graham Bell, the industrial paintings of Graham Sutherland, such as A Foundry and the pictures of refugees by Mary Kessell.

These works raise many questions about the place of abstract art in art history. Abstract art may have been at the forefront of modern art in Paris, very briefly in revolutionary Moscow and in post-war New York, it was always less true in wartime Britain. This isn't a matter of parochialism or nationalism. The exchange between Clark and Herbert Read over abstract art and Surrealism in the Listener in 1935 or the writings of John Berger in the New Statesman in the early 1950s show that this was always contested in the very heyday of abstract art.

The forthcoming exhibition at the Ben Uri Gallery, Re-figuring the Fifties, shows that the 1950s, like the war years, are open to new interpretations. It includes work by such different figurative artists as L.S. Lowry, Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther and (here I should declare my personal interest) my father, Josef Herman. What is striking is the range of artists: Jewish refugees like Frankfurther and Herman, northern artists like Lowry and Sheila Fell, the daughter of a coalminer from Cumberland, and Eardley who moved to Glasgow in 1939 and worked in Scotland through the 1940s and '50s. It is rare to see an exhibition where three of the five featured artists  are women. There is also the diversity of subjects: mothers and children, Jewish refugees, coal miners and working men.

Re-figuring the Fifties not only puts figurative art centre-stage, it also reminds us of what a political decade the long 1950s were, from the Labour landslide in 1945 to Aldermaston and the New Left, how regional British culture was then and how interested it was in realism and humanism, before the Pop Art revolution of the late 1950s and early '60s. What the great Paris and New York museums represented as the heyday of abstraction was a much more complicated story.