CANR
WORK TITLE: THE PURSUIT OF ART
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: www.martingayford.com/
CITY: Cambridge
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 239
http://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500238752.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-22/freud-s-man-in-blue-scarf-remembers-friend-appreciation-by-martin-gayford.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 14, 1952; married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended Cambridge University; graduated from the University of London.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, art historian, editor, and critic. Spectator, art critic, 1994-2002, anc current art critic; Sunday Telegraph, art critic; Bloomberg News, chief art critic, until 2013; Uninversity of Buckingham, Senior Research Fellow in the History of Art at the Humanities Research Institute and a member of the Department of History of Art.
AWARDS:New Horizons Awards, Bolognaragazzi Awards, 2019, for A History of Pictures for Children.
WRITINGS
Also contributor to the London Daily Telegraph.
SIDELIGHTS
Author, art historian, and critic Martin Gayford examines one of the late nineteenth century’s more unlikely artistic collaborations in The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles. In late 1888, noted painter Vincent Van Gogh leased a house in the small southern French town of Arles. “Faced with yellow stucco, the building seemed to symbolize his vision of a life lived in full sunlight,” commented Clive Wilmer in the New Statesman. Van Gogh was at the height of his artistic powers and was creating some of the canvases that would secure his place in art history. However, Van Gogh was also a very lonely man. In his quest for artistic community, he convinced another artistic great, Paul Gaugin, to join him in Arles. The two painters shared house and studio for nine difficult, turbulent weeks, during which they worked, drank, talked, read, visited prostitutes and museums, and inspired each other.
Gayford describes the difficulties of living with Van Gogh. The artist was a constant talker, unhygienic, surly, and prone to drunkenness, when he would also become violent. Gaugin was a much more reserved personality. The studio they shared was cramped and tiny, and Gaugin had to walk through Van Gogh’s bedroom to get to his own. Their time together was characterized by Van Gogh’s worsening mental condition, probably as the result of bipolar disorder, and culminated in his infamous ear-slicing, after which Gaugin left for Paris. The two artists would never see each again, yet during their short time together, they significantly influenced each other’s work. Gayford “sees this period as a turning point in the work of each artist and in the history of art, and he chronicles every day, sometimes every hour, of their life together,” noted a reviewer in the Economist. “Gayford manages to get right inside these complex minds, analyzing their thoughts, fears, ambitions, complaints and fantasies with admirable clarity,” commented Richard Cork in the Guardian. Gayford offers “fascinating interpretations of the work” that each artist created during the “short, stormy conjunction” of their personal and professional lives, commented Jennifer Reese in Entertainment Weekly.
“The achievement of Gayford’s book is to indicate the value of those nine weeks—to both artists and, therefore, to the thrust of modern painting,” commented Wilmer. Jenny Gasset, writing in the School Library Journal, called it an “accessible and even affectionate work of art history,” while a Kirkus Reviews contributor named it “lucid and learned and propelled by a piercing dramatic irony.” A Publishers Weekly critic observed that it is “impossible to entirely understand” the motivations of Van Gogh and Gaugin during their period of collaboration in France, but “these pages deliver as close and vivid an image as may be possible.”
After completing The Yellow House, Gayford teamed with Anne Lyles to write Constable Portraits: The Painter and His Circle. He also penned Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, a book about his experience posing for famed painter Lucian Freud. Gayford spent 250 hours sitting for the resulting portrait, “Man with a Blue Scarf” (2005). For his next effort, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, Gayford presents a series of interviews with, and essays about, the renowned English painter David Hockney. Ultimately, the volume is an exploration of aesthetics, and Gayford records his impressions of Hockney and of their conversations. Gayford and Hockney, who is best known as a landscape painter, discuss the changing media for the distribution of imagery, from cave paintings to digital photography and the iPad. Hockney comments that drawing helps one to see the world differently, and he and Gayford additionally offer comparisons between his art and the work of Van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer, John Constable, and Giambattista Tiepolo.
Discussing A Bigger Message in an ambivalent London Observer review, Ben Lewis commented: “On the whole, Gayford is informative but not probing. I longed for more description of what the studio assistants do, and who actually buys Hockneys nowadays, but the author has a tone that, at times, combines the excessively reverential with the somewhat banal. … This book, then, will help clear up the mystery of what David Hockney has been doing for the past five or six years, but it will not solve the conundrum that he presents to art critic.” Countering this opinion in Spectator, Grey Gowrie asserted: “Eloquence has been put to good use by Martin Gayford,” who “has kept himself in the picture sufficiently to nudge and stimulate Hockney, whose book A Bigger Message effectively is. Gayford provides, therefore, a companion to David Sylvester’s Conversations with Francis Bacon, a key text for modern art.” As Harriet Lesser pointed out in the online Washington Independent Review of Books, this “book is a love song to art.” Gayford “has a natural style of writing about and talking with Hockney. He asks excellent questions about the durability of landscape and the efficacy of photography and makes pointedly interesting comparisons between Hockney and Constable and others.” She concluded that the collected conversations present “an erudite writer and a wonderful artist in a book that feels like eavesdropping: It could be a literary painting.”
Gayford tackles one of art’s icons in his 2013 biography, Michelangelo: His Epic Life. This is an attempt at biography on the large scale, at 648 pages, and the length is fitting, for Michelangelo lived a life on the grand scale. Almost ninety when he died, Michelangelo has been called by many the greatest sculptor or painter ever, with his enormous marble statue of David and Sistine Chapel fresco. His life spanned the Renaissance to the Counter Reformation, and he did not confine his creative output to canvas and marble: he was also the author of more than three hundred poems.
Reviewing Michelangelo in the Spectator, Ross King called it a “dazzling new biography.” King added: “The end result is a perceptive and finely nuanced biography that’s as compellingly readable as Gayford’s earlier histories. Despite its size, the work is a marvel of economy as it hurtles smartly through the action-packed decades that see Michelangelo scurrying back and forth from Florence to Rome, with long forays in the marble quarries of Carrara.” Writing in Apollo, art historian Paul Joannides was also impressed with this work, commenting: “The book is consistently readable; particularly admirable–perhaps a consequence of Gayford’s practice as a journalist and reviewer–is the ease and flexibility with which he moves from close focus on, say, a significant drawing, to a consideration of the project for which it was made, to an account of the context of patronage, to Michelangelo’s own state of mind and health; this results in a densely textured and convincing account.”
Gayford teams with former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,Philippe de Montebello, on the 2014 work, Rendez-vous with Art, an extended discussion about the experience of viewing art, largely in museums. The book is arranged in twenty-three chapters dealing with different locations, from museums such as the Louvre, Palazzo Pitti, or the Prado, to churches, and the authors’ own homes. The discussions focus on how and why we look at art and what we gain from doing so. The book also includes numerous color prints of iconic works of art. Booklist contributor Lindsay Bosch remarked on the underlying objecting of this work: “Rather than a traditional art history or theoretical text, the authors seek to revive, through their journeys and conversations, the timeless pleasures of looking deeply at artworks themselves.”
Reviewing Rendez-vous with Art in Choice, K.M. Keogh felt that it “offers an intimate entry point into the process and pleasure of encountering art objects within museums and other collections.” Keogh rated it as “highly recommended.” An Apollo contributor had further praise, terming it a “thought-provoking read.” Library Journal contributor Marianne Laino Sade also had a high assessment, noting: “Top-shelf art appreciation behind the scenes makes this one-to-one ‘opportunistic’ and ‘impulsive’ discourse stand out.” Sade added, “The authors are clearly passionate about their shared history of art in museums.”
Gayford collaborated with artist David Hockney on a pair of books, A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen from 2016, and its 2018 juvenile spin-off, A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings. In both titles, the authors supply copious visuals spanning the time in their subtitles to illustrate the basics of visual expression and technique.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer called A History of Pictures for Children a “rich volume [that] urges readers to think of art history as a living communication between artists past, present, and future,” while Booklist contributor Sarah Hunter felt that it would “spark kids thinking about what constitutes art.” Reviewing A History of Pictures, Washington Post contributor Bruce Watson commented on the areas of expertise of each of the authors: “Though Hockney knows his art history, Gayford is the expert, spicing the conversation with rubicons in the long cavalcade of imagery.” Watson thought that reading the book was akin to “touring a great museum with an artist and critic chatting over your shoulder.”
In his 2018 work, Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters, Gayford provides an overview of the London painting scene from World War II to the 1970s. In addition to the major talents of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney mentioned in the subtitle of the book, Gayford also writes of and includes interviews with a number of other painters of the period, such as Victor Pasmore, Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, Gillian Ayers, Bridget Riley, John Hoyland, and Leon Kossoff, among many others. Gayford shows a connection between these artists who were quietly exploring new directions in painting while much of media attention was on the painting world of New York.
“In this comprehensive, intimate inspection of the London art scene between 1945 and 1970, Gayford observes that there was a ‘great opening up’ immediately after the war,” noted Spectator reviewer Patrick Skene of Modernists and Mavericks. Skene went on to comment that the “peculiar excellence of this informative survey is exhibited best in passages about the three supermavericks of the subtitle.” A Kirkus Reviews critic had praise for the work, writing: “This well-researched history shows the enduring results of such single-minded nonconformity.” London Guardian reviewer Alexandra Harris remarked that Gayford has been talking with and interviewing London artists for more than three decades. He is personal friends with Hockney and sat for a portrait by Freud. Harris noted that Gayford “doesn’t just nip into the studio with a notepad: he has a gift for sustaining conversations that unfold across decades. … In Modernists and Mavericks he draws on a huge archive of interviews to piece together a history of postwar painting in London, from the Camberwell students of the 1940s, working in the ruins of a bombed city, to the pop artists who collaged images of shining new-made lives in the 1960s.” Harris added: “The great figures of the 60s are passing – which is all the more reason to be grateful for a book that takes us right into their world.” Writing in the Financial Times, Grey Gowrie thought that Gayford’s “driving account of a miraculous time in British art may well prove its memorial. … Gayford’s eye for the dramatic, his novelist’s approach, feasts upon events and stories.” And reviewing the work in Marina Times, Sharon Anderson felt that “Gayford weaves stories about relationships — artists as friends, as students and teachers, and as participants who combined to define painting from Soho bohemia in the 1940s to the swinging ’60s.” Anderson added: “Throughout Modernists and Mavericks, Gayford’s storytelling characterizes London’s eclectic approach to visual art and the multiple possibilities stemming from the single question: ‘What can painting do?'”
In his 2019 publication, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations, Gayford offers a recounting of his travels as an art historian, voyaging around the world to meet artists and see great works of art. Among the less easily accessible of the latter are the prehistoric caves of France, the artist Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania, and exhibitions in Iceland. He meets Cartier-Bresson in Paris and Robert Rauschenberg in New York, among a host of others in this art tour with fifty color illustrations. A Kirkus Reviews critic termed this a “passionate globe-trot through the history of art and art appreciation,” as well as an “art expert’s often enchanting paean to being there, however inaccessible that pursuit may be.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Gayford, Martin, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 2010.
PERIODICALS
Apollo, March, 2014, Paul Joannides, review of Michelangelo: His Epic Life, p. 192; September, 2014, review of Rendez-vous with Art, p. 129.
Booklist, November 1, 2006, Kevin Nance, review of The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gaugin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles, p. 24; October 15, 2018, Sarah Hunter, review of A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings, p. 43.
Bookseller, April 14, 2006, “Lend Him an Ear: Gayford Puts Flesh on Van Gogh’s Bones,” review of The Yellow House, p. 39.
Choice, April, 2015, K. M. Keogh, review of Rendez-vous with Art, p. 1303.
Economist, April 29, 2006, “Sunny Side Down: Van Gogh and Gaugin,” review of The Yellow House, p. 89; March 21, 2009, review of Constable Portraits: The Painter and His Circle, p. 88.
Entertainment Weekly, November 17, 2006, Jennifer Reese, review of The Yellow House, p. 135.
Guardian (London, England), April 8, 2006, Richard Cork, “Brushes with Genius,” review of The Yellow House.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2006, review of The Yellow House, p. 820; April 15, 2018, review of Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters; July 1, 2019, review of The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations.
Library Journal, October 1, 2014, Marianne Laino Sade, review of Rendez-Vous with Art, p. 80.
New Statesman, May 29, 2006, Clive Wilmer, “Companion Piece,” review of The Yellow House, p. 54; September 27, 2010, Richard Calvocoressi, review of Man with a Blue Scarf, p. 83.
Observer (London, England), October 9, 2011, Ben Lewis, review of A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney.
Publishers Weekly, September 18, 2006, review of The Yellow House, p. 45; October 15, 2018, review of A History of Pictures for Children, p. 136; November 27, 2018, review of A History of Pictures for Children, p. 91.
School Library Journal, November, 2006, Jenny Gasset, review of The Yellow House, p. 173; August, 2018, Carol Goldman, review of A History of Pictures for Children, p. 85.
Spectator, October 29, 2011, Grey Gowrie, review of A Bigger Message; December 14, 2013, Ross King, review of Michelangelo: His Epic Life, p. 85; May 5, 2018, Patrick Skene Catling, review of Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters, p. 36.
Washington Post, November 23, 2016, Bruce Watson, “A History of Pictures’ — from the Cave to the iPhone.”
ONLINE
Buckingham History Festival, https://www.buckinghamhistoryfestival.org/ (August 19, 2019), “Martin Gayford.”
Financial Times, https://www.ft.com/ (May 4, 2018), Grey Gowrie, review of Modernists and Mavericks.
Gresham College, https://www.gresham.ac.uk/ (August 19, 2019), “Martin Gayford.”
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 5, 2018), Alexandra Harris, review of Modernists and Mavericks.
Marina Times, https://www.marinatimes.com/ (September 1, 2018 ), Sharon Anderson, review of Modernists and Mavericks.
Martin Gayford, http://martingayford.co.uk (August 19, 2019).
University of Buckingham, https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/ (August 19, 2019), “Martin Gayford.”
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (April 16, 2012), Harriet Lesser, review of A Bigger Message.
Martin Gayford studied philosophy at Cambridge, and art history at the Courtauld Institute of London University. He has written prolifically about art and jazz, contributing regularly to the Daily Telegraph and also to many art magazines and exhibition catalogues. He was art critic of the Spectator 1994-2002 and subsequently of the Sunday Telegraph before becoming chief art critic for Bloomberg News until 2013. He is now once again art critic for the Spectator.
His book about Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, The Yellow House (2005) was published in Britain and the USA to critical acclaim, and has been translated to date into five languages.
Constable in Love, a study of John Constable’s romance with Maria Bicknell, and their lives between 1809 and 1816 was published in 2009 by Penguin Fig Tree; he was also co-curator with Anne Lyles of the exhibition “John Constable Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery and Compton Verney in 2009.
His portrait by Lucian Freud, “Man with a Blue Scarf” (2005) has been exhibited at the Correr Museum, Venice and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His book about posing for Lucian Freud, also entitled Man with a Blue Scarf, appeared in 2010.
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney was published by Thames & Hudson in September 2011, and was followed by Michelangelo: His Epic Life in 2013. Rendez-vous with Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2014, and co-authored with Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
A History of Pictures: From Cave to Computer Screen was also co-authored with David Hockney, and was followed by Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters in April 2018.
Martin Gayford is married, with two children, and lives in Cambridge, England. He can be found on Twitter at @MartinGayford.
I’m a writer, mainly about art and jazz. I am currently the art critic for The Spectator magazine, and also contribute to many other publications. I have recently finished A History of Pictures: from Cave to Computer Screen, co-authored with David Hockney. My previous book was Rendez-vous with Art, co-authored with Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. My other books all scrutinize the working process of great painters: nine weeks in the life of Vincent van Gogh, seven years of John Constable’s romance with his wife-to-be, around 250 hours which I spent sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud, a series of dialogues exploring painting, landscape, space, time and perception with David Hockney, and a biography of Michelangelo Buonarrotti.
Martin Gayford is art critic for The Spectator. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf, A Bigger Message, and Rendez-vouz with Art (with Philippe de Montebello), and Modernists and Mavericks.
Martin Gayford is art critic for The Spectator and the author of acclaimed books on Van Gogh, Constable and Michelangelo. He is the author of Man with a Blue Scarf, Rendez-vous with Art and A Bigger Message. He has collaborated with David Hockney on A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney and A History of Pictures, and has co-written a volume of travels and conversations with Philippe de Montebello: Rendez-vous with Art.
Martin Gayford studied philosophy at Cambridge, and art history at the Courtauld Institute of London University. He has written prolifically about art and jazz, contributing regularly to the Daily Telegraph and also to many art magazines and exhibition catalogues. He was art critic of the Spectator 1994-2002 and subsequently of the Sunday Telegraph before becoming chief art critic for Bloomberg News. His book about Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, “The Yellow House” (2005) was published in Britain and the USA to critical acclaim, and has been translated to date into five languages.
“Constable in Love”, a study of John Constable’s romance with Maria Bicknell, and their lives between 1809 and 1816 was published in 2009 by Penguin Fig Tree; he was also co-curator with Anne Lyles of the exhibition “John Constable Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery and Compton Verney in 2009.
His portrait by Lucian Freud, “Man with a Blue Scarf” (2005) has been exhibited at the Correr Museum, Venice and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Martin Gayford is married, with two children, and lives in Cambridge, England. His book about posing for Lucian Freud, also entitled “Man with a Blue Scarf” is published by Thames & Hudson in September, 2010.
Martin Gayford is Britain’s best-known and most widely published commentator on art history and contemporary art. His portrait has been painted by Lucian Freud, and the picture has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Portrait Gallery, London; and he wrote about the experience of posing for Freud in his book, Man with a Blue Scarf: on Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (Thames and Hudson, 2010). A friend of David Hockney, he has recorded his discussions with the Yorkshire-born painter, now resident in California, in his A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (Thames and Hudson, 2011).
His research has focused on biographical studies of painters, among them Michelangelo, Constable, Gaugin, and Van Gogh. And in parallel with his career as an art historian, he has been art critic of The Spectator magazine and The Sunday Telegraph newspaper before becoming Chief Art Critic for the international television network, Bloomberg News. He is a regular contributor to the British journal of art criticism, Modern Painters.
Martin Gayford
Senior Research Fellow in the History of Art
Martin Gayford is a Senior Research Fellow in the History of Art at the Humanities Research Institute and a member of the Department of History of Art. He studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. Over three decades, he has written prolifically about art and music in a series of major biographies, as well as contributing regularly to newspapers, magazines and exhibition catalogues. In parallel with his career as an art historian, he was art critic of The Spectator magazine and The Sunday Telegraph newspaper before becoming Chief Art Critic for the international television network, Bloomberg News. He has been a regular contributor to the British journal of art criticism, Modern Painters.
His research has focused on biographical studies of painters, often with a particular focus on their relationships with contemporary society and their fellow artists. His books include a study of Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles, The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles (Little Brown, 2006), which was published in Britain and the USA to critical acclaim, and has been translated, to date, into five languages; Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter (Penguin, 2009), a study of John Constable’s romance with Maria Bicknell and their lives between 1809 and 1816; and A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (Thames and Hudson, 2011).
Mr Gayford was the instigator and curator (with Anne Lyles) of an exhibition, John Constable Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery in 2009, which was also shown at Compton Verney, Warwickshire.
His portrait has been painted by Lucian Freud, and the picture has been exhibited at the Museo Correr in Venice; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the National Portrait Gallery, London. His subsequent book about the experience of posing for Freud, Man with a Blue Scarf: on Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (Thames and Hudson, 2010) has been translated into German, Dutch and French.
Gayford, Martin THE PURSUIT OF ART Thames & Hudson (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 10, 8 ISBN: 978-0-500-09411-2
A passionate globe-trot through the history of art and art appreciation.
Spectator art critic Gayford (Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters, 2018, etc.) believes in the power of being present; when it comes to viewing art, "there is no substitute for being there." "The deepest and richest experiences are not virtual but physical," he writes. "They involve looking at real things and talking to real people." The author chronicles his travels from the mountains of China to Marfa, Texas, all in search of a genuine art experience. As a travel writer, Gayford is an exceptional guide: His visit to Targu Jiu in Romania to see Constantin Brancusi's masterwork Endless Column is an inspirational pilgrimage, while his hunt for Lorenzo Lotto's oeuvre in Northern Italy is a riveting study in unstable itineraries, expectations, and adaptation. Some journeys are simply interviews with contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter and Jenny Saville; while often captivating, they lack the sense of adventure that makes other sections of the collection so transportive. The author's account of his trip to Beijing to cover the British artists Gilbert & George is a standout, as it simultaneously functions as a travelogue and an artist profile. While Gayford's passion is contagious and will conjure in readers dreams of travel, he also unintentionally narrows the landscape of art appreciation. "To understand Tintoretto," he writes, "you've really got to go to Venice." While he may be correct, he also effectively pushes a gate closed on casual aficionados who may never make it to Italy. A private visit to Anselm Kiefer's studio organized by the Royal Academy and an exclusive, early viewing of Roni Horn's "Library of Water" in Iceland are rapturous treks to read about, but they also feel within reach only to the financially elite and those with top-tier press credentials.
An art expert's often enchanting paean to being there, however inaccessible that pursuit may be.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gayford, Martin: THE PURSUIT OF ART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591278978/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9e353050. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591278978
A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings
David Hockney and Martin Gayford, illus. by Rose Blake. Abrams, $24.99 (128p) ISBN 978-1-4197-3211-9
Artist Hockney and art critic Gayford take a conceptual approach to art history, moving between topics (why we make art, what makes art interesting) rather than presenting a linear overview of art movements and eras. Descriptive headings and guiding questions open the sections, which include "Watch this Space: How do artists set the scene?" and "Mirrors and Reflections: How do artists play with light?" Blake integrates original illustrations, which include playful representations of the collaborators (and Hockney's pets). The authors also ask questions, explore historical context, address the psychological dimensions of works, and, refreshingly, share their own associations and perspectives on the pieces. The rich volume urges readers to think of art history as a living communication between artists past, present, and future. Ages 10-14.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings." Publishers Weekly, 27 Nov. 2018, p. 91. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A564607427/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0de62c2c. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A564607427
A History of Pictures for Children.
By David Hockney and Martin Gayford. Illus. by Rose Blake.
Oct. 2018.128p. Abrams, $24.99 (9781419732119). Gr. 5-8. 709.
Famed contemporary painter Hockney, along with art critic Gayford, offer an inviting, pleasant stroll through art history in this colorful, winsomely illustrated volume. Beginning with the first known artwork--cave paintings--Hockney and Gayford expound on art in alternating, conversational paragraphs, covering techniques, such as printing and calligraphy; movements, including cubism and impressionism; and innovations, from the camera obscura to video game design. Adapting the text from their adult book, A History of Pictures (2016), Hockney and Gayford offer paragraphs that might occasionally be a bit hard to follow for kids unfamiliar with the subject, but their commentaries about the well-reproduced artwork on almost every page offers keen, illuminating insight on how to look at and appreciate art. Blake's genial, bright, cartoonish art, scattered throughout the pages, adds to the welcoming atmosphere, and while the view of art history presented here is unfortunately pretty conventional (mostly men, mostly European or American), the tools Hockney and Gayford use to talk about everything from prehistoric handprints to iPhone photography will spark kids thinking about what constitutes art. --Sarah Hunter
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hunter, Sarah. "A History of Pictures for Children." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2018, p. 43. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A559688166/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b64f6dc. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A559688166
A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings
David Hockney and Martin Gayford, illus. by Rose Blake. Abrams, $24.99 (128p) ISBN 978-1-4197-3211-9
Artist Hockney and art critic Gayford take a conceptual approach to art history, moving between topics (why we make art, what makes art interesting) rather than presenting a linear overview of art movements and etas. Descriptive headings and guiding questions open the sections, which include "Watch this Space: How do artists set the scene?" and "Mirrors and Reflections: How do artists play with light?" Blake integrates original illustrations, which include playful representations of the collaborators (and Hockney's pets). The authors also ask questions, explore historical context, address the psychological dimensions of works, and, refreshingly, share their own associations and perspectives on the pieces. The rich volume urges readers to think of art history as a living communication between artists past, present, and future. Ages 10-14. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings." Publishers Weekly, 15 Oct. 2018, p. 136. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A561512002/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=24bd9239. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A561512002
Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters
by Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson, 24.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 339
This is an important, authoritative work of art criticism that recognises schools of painters, yet displays the superior distinctions of individual geniuses. Martin Gayford, The Spectator's art critic, concedes that the identification by R.B. Kitaj, an American painter, of a 'substational School of London' was 'essentially correct', though in London there was no 'coherent movement or stylistic group'.The only characteristic shared by London painters has always been merely that they live in London. There have been some influential personal relationships, even cases of a sort of cosiness, especially in the French Pub, the Colony Room and other drinking venues in Soho and Fitzrovia.
In this comprehensive, intimate inspection of the London art scene between 1945 and 1970, Gayford observes that there was a 'great opening up' immediately after the war. In that pivotal era, 'a London art world that had previously been small and provincial turned its attention to what was happening elsewhere in the world'. Artistic dominance had shifted from Paris to New York, but London was becoming increasingly significant.
It takes many years of close-up scrutiny and intense conversations to become an expert art critic. Would-be painters who work hard at their craft are often lonely, need guidance and are glad to confide in a sympathetic, knowledgeable critic. 'At one time or another,' Gayford writes, 'I have met and talked to many, indeed most, of the prominent artists' discussed in this book.
At the end of the second world war, a new generation crowded London's art colleges as never before, with new experimental excitement. The young students overcame traditional conservatism and looked to the future rather than the past. Abstract Expressionism was an American creation. According to Gayford, the term Pop Art was a London coinage, but it was in New York that it was produced on a large scale. The majority of painters on both sides of the Atlantic no longer submitted to the academic discipline of drawing from human models and plaster casts. Before long, the difficult technique of drawing was hardly taught at all. Since the first daguerreotype of 1839, few artists used photographs for reference, but there seemed to be no point in attempting to compete with them to achieve realistic figurative art. As Gayford mentions, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rothko, Pollock, Matisse and others succeeded without cameras.
By the mid 1950s, the London Zeitgeist brightened. In the late 1960s, the Menswear Association condemned in vain 'the codswallop fashions of perverted peacocks' of the Carnaby Street shops of swinging London. In the meantime, an increasing number of ambitious London painters made an 'American Journey', Gayford notes: 'the mid-20th-century equivalent of the 18thcentury Grand Tour'. Like those explorers, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the bars of Greenwich Village, the galleries of midtown Manhattan and the sumptuous studios of East Hampton, I encountered avant-garde freedom and the oppression of conformity with commercial artistic dogma, fashion and commerce. Soi-disant and genuine painters were as eager to talk about their aesthetic philosophies, know-how and tax problems as so many patients displaying symptoms of chronic diseases.
Back in London, fabulously prosperous galleries and auction houses stimulated the painting of countless outsize, gaudy, American-style abstractions. Perhaps in emulation of Andy Warhol, who made a fortune marketing images of soup tins and Marilyn Monroe, in London, too, some enterprising painters and their managers established mass-production art factories. Every profitable innovation attracted many imitations. Action Painting and Op Art were presented as 'isms' for all who dared.
Gayford achieved analytical understanding of all sorts of London modernists, from Frank Auerbach to Bridget Riley, and they are all allowed their say, in reports of nice equilibrium. The modernist London painters are interesting in themselves: they added extra intellectual flavour to all the other arts in our bizarre contemporary culture. 'The major painters of London were all idiosyncratic mavericks,' Gayford concludes, 'even when they were modernists.' The peculiar excellence of this informative survey is exhibited best in passages about the three supermavericks of the subtitle.
David Hockney, Gayford's co-author of A History of Pictures, having been brought up in a socialist household in Bradford, was pleasantly surprised to be admitted to London's Royal College of Art. There he was befriended by Kitaj, who praised a sample of Hockney's draughtsmanship as 'the most skilled, most beautiful drawing I'd ever seen'. Hockney since then has always boldly asserted his individuality. When he first visited America, he celebrated its free-and-easy customs by dyeing his black hair blond, and he has repeatedly reinvented himself stylistically.
Lucian Freud seemed to develop backwards when he chose to paint figuratively, but he went far beyond ordinary realism, inspecting physiology as penetratingly as if dissecting its musculature. A close friend of Francis Bacon's, he declared: 'Francis depended entirely on inspiration, which made him rather brittle. He was completely untrained, and couldn't draw at all but was so absolutely brilliant that through sheer inspiration he could somehow make it work.'
Bacon's inspirations were richly varied, including Velazquez, Picasso, William Blake, naked men entwined on a bed, life in the 'gilded gutter' and 'Calvary without salvation'. After oysters and champagne at Wheeler's in Old Compton Street, he showed me the fertile chaos of his studio in Reece Mews, Kensington, where he said he felt that he was 'a member of a group of one'. Gayford's portrayal is tragi-comically wonderfully revealing, and the quotations seem to carry on from David Sylvester's famous interviews. 'Ninety-five per cent of people are absolute fools,' Bacon said, 'and they're bigger fools about painting than anything else.' Caption: John Hoyland, 7.11.66, 1966
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Catling, Patrick Skene. "School of Soho." Spectator, 5 May 2018, p. 36+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540211953/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0cbb62f6. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540211953
Gayford, Martin MODERNISTS AND MAVERICKS Thames & Hudson (Adult Nonfiction) $39.95 6, 12 ISBN: 978-0-500-23977-3
An eminent British critic casts a spotlight on a major period of art history in London.
According to Spectator art critic Gayford (History of Art/Univ. of Buckingham; Michelangelo: His Epic Life, 2013, etc.), the paintings that came out of London from 1945 to 1970 are artistically significant yet less celebrated than those of cubist Paris or Renaissance Venice. This book, an attempt to correct the oversight, is a survey of the noteworthy figures from this era, from William Coldstream, co-founder of the Euston Road School of painting, to the era's most famous innovators. Among them are Francis Bacon, whose "pursuit of a realism that would activate the nervous system" led him to such experiments as incorporating dust into a gray flannel suit in his painting Figure in a Landscape (1945); Lucian Freud, creator of unflattering nudes that "were among the most radically unclassical ever seen"; and David Hockney, whose groundbreaking portraits of fellow gay men, "clarity and subtlety of line," and innovative rendering of the play of light on California pools, made him one of Britain's most renowned painters. Gayford acknowledges that these artists had no "coherent movement or stylistic group," and the book suffers for it: chapters feel randomly organized rather than unified. However, this is still a fascinating look at postwar London artists, filled with entertaining figures, such as the Cornwall neighbor who thought so little of the work Bacon produced during a brief residence there that, when the artist returned to London, the neighbor "used some of Bacon's paintings on hardboard to mend a hen-house roof."
Frank Auerbach, one of many artists interviewed for the book, said his contemporaries belonged to "a British line of artistic mavericks, 'people who did exactly what they wanted to do.' " This well-researched history shows the enduring results of such single-minded nonconformity.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Gayford, Martin: MODERNISTS AND MAVERICKS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375197/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf3e7a8f. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375197
Rendez-vous with Art. By Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford. Sept. 2014. 248p. illus. Thames & Hudson, $35 (9780500239247). 700.
Former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art de Montebello and art critic Gayford embark on an "experiment in shared appreciation," traveling to the great museums of the world to stand together in front of the masterpieces that move them. Wandering the halls of the Prado, Palazzo Pitti, and the Louvre, the connoisseurs allow themselves extended encounters with ancient classics and Renaissance masters, formulating a series of conversational and loosely organized dialogues. Though they are extremely knowledgeable on the historical background of the works, the authors' main focus is more narrowly aesthetic. Their exchanges center on the importance of sustained observation, on the formal characteristics of beauty, and on the work museums perform in framing the visitor's experience. The outspoken de Montebello particularly emphasizes the importance of the viewer's own emotional connection with art in discriminating the good from the great. Rather than a traditional art history or theoretical text, the authors' seeks to revive, through their journeys and conversations, the timeless pleasures of looking deeply at artworks themselves and to mark the irreplaceability of first-person artistic encounters.--Lindsay Bosch
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bosch, Lindsay. "Rendez-vous with Art." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2014, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A385404251/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26861ba8. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A385404251
de Montebello, Philippe & Martin Gayford. Rendez-Vous with Art. Thames & Hudson. 2014.248p. illus. index. ISBN 9780500239247. $35. FINE ARTS
Eclectic art museum treasures prompt critic Gayford (Man with a Blue Scarf) and de Montebello, emeritus director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to engage their future readers with pleasant, unapologetically scholarly, nostalgic conversation in a dialog format. Gayford's short narrative smoothly connects the visits. Topics shift with careful editing as the men stroll through museums across continents, over a two-year span, stopping to ponder some 70 pieces (alas, no women artists). Several pieces evoke controversial responses, as when de Montebello decries modern museums' promotion of their collections and "artist-stars" as a form of entertainment. He stands firm that art "demands an effort ... if we are to be absorbed in its world." The tone of the Eastern antiquity section elicits the most effect on the complex issues of keeping "war booty" and other prickly aspects of acquisition and display. The authors are clearly passionate about their shared history of art in museums, the institutions' sense of place, and even their commiseration about "museum feet" (fatigue). VERDICT Top-shelf art appreciation behind the scenes makes this one-to-one "opportunistic" and "impulsive" discourse stand out. Not for researchers but for thinkers responding to its highbrow banter, this is for the avid art lover, curator, docent, museum studies student, and any well-traveled sophisticate who knows the way around a museum.--Marianne Laino Sade, Maryland Inst. Coll, of Art Lib., Baltimore
Sade, Marianne Laino
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sade, Marianne Laino. "de Montebello, Philippe & Martin Gayford. Rendez-Vous with Art." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2014, p. 80+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A383327274/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3a8efd0d. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A383327274
Michelangelo: His Epic Life
by Martin Gayford
Fig Tree, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 662, ISBN 9781905490547
Spectator Bookshop, 23 [pounds sterling]
Early on in this dazzling new biography, Martin Gayford compares Michelangelo, with his daunting artistic tasks, to Hercules, the subject of an early (and now lost) sculpture. A Michelangelo biographer is likewise faced with an intimidatingly Herculean task. 'Few other human beings except the founders of religions,' acknowledges Gayford, 'have been more intensively studied and discussed.' Such was Michelangelo's fame --he became 'something approximating to a modern media celebrity'--that in his own lifetime he was the subject of three biographies.
And he does not make things easy for biographers. He was an enigmatic, paradoxical figure, with his earliest biographer, Paolo Giovio, ruefully noting the disparity between his divine gifts and his 'unbelievable meanness'. He was also incredibly long-lived: born in 1475, in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici, he died almost nine decades later in Rome, during the height of the Counter-Reformation.
Indefatigably active as an artist until only weeks before his death, he produced a staggeringly abundant body of work: paintings, sculpture and architecture, as well as countless drawings and more than 300 poems. For over half a century, he was at the heart of political and ecclesiastical power, coveted by princes and the intimate of popes, one of whom, Julius III, planned to keep his embalmed corpse faithfully by his side if Michelangelo predeceased him (fortunately, the pope died first).
Gayford is the author of two lively, poignant studies of crucial episodes in the history of art: The Yellow House , detailing Gauguin and Van Gogh's tragic interplay during their nine weeks together in Arles in 1888, and Constable in Love , which follows the painter's love affair with his muse, Maria Bicknell.
Here, bucking the trend for microhistories and slimmed-down biographies, he turns to history on a grander scale, attempting to render full justice to a figure even more titanic than Constable or Van Gogh. His biography is therefore something of an epic in its own right, exhaustively researched and absorbing everything from contemporary letters and those first gossipy biographies, to the latest research into the finer points of Michelangelo's (surprisingly effective) business methods.
The end result is a perceptive and finely nuanced biography that's as compellingly readable as Gayford's earlier histories. Despite its size, the work is a marvel of economy as it hurtles smartly through the action-packed decades that see Michelangelo scurrying back and forth from Florence to Rome, with long forays in the marble quarries of Carrara.
The narrative is at its most engrossing when tracing the ups and downs of Michelangelo's erratic mid-life career. After the brilliant beginnings of the Pietá and the David--both completed before he reached the age of 30--came many unhappy years of frustrated and often fruitless toil. The Sistine Chapel fresco was a triumph, but Gayford shows how, with excruciating consistency, various other projects either languished incomplete or disastrously came a-cropper. Even the great Michelangelo, he reminds us as a corrective to the romantic hero-worship, 'could be mediocre'.
He may have been known in his own lifetime as Il Divino, but few of his works, even the greatest, escaped criticism of one sort of another. The David was regarded by many, Gayford points out, as a 'freakish oddity'. No sooner did it emerge from the workshop than it was pelted with stones (the doing of either a pro-Medici faction or 'Florentine yobs'), and its privates were hastily garlanded with gilded leaves--evidently to the satisfaction of Leonardo da Vinci, who sniffed that he wished it to have 'decent ornaments'.
It would not be the last time Michelangelo's insistence on nudity challenged viewers. His Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel--painted in the 1530s and memorably described by Gayford as a throng of 'groins, penises, breasts, testicles and buttocks'--struck a wrong note in a sober age of religious reform.
If Michelangelo's artistic adversities were the result of sanctimonious prudery, political vicisissitudes, and impossibly overambitious schemes (one project mooted by Pope Clement VII was a 76-foot-high marble colossus), much was also down to the artist's own stubborn and ornery nature. Gayford is clearly entranced by this bizarre and at times appalling character whose personality was as strained and contorted as one of his sculptures: the social snob who believed himself descended from 'the bluest blood in Tuscany', yet who mixed best with humble village stonemasons; the penny-pincher who extorted large sums from his patrons (and who died with a fortune in ducats squirrelled away in household jars), yet who could be 'extraordinarily, embarrassingly generous'; and the pious Christian whose 'strongest feelings of desire were denounced as sinful by the Church in which he believed'.
Gayford avoids undue speculation--most notably regarding Michelangelo's exasperatingly shrouded sex life--and sticks to the known facts. But he is imaginative and inquisitive throughout, distilling the tomes of scholarship and judiciously sifting the evidence. Mercifully, no doubt, he shies away from the numerous scholarly spats and knotty problems of attribution, although I would have enjoyed his frank take on a number of contentious works, such as 'The Entombment' and 'The Manchester Madonna', two unfinished works in the National Gallery.
The modern-day analogies occasionally jar: Pietro Torrigiano as Flashman; the fashion for love-sick sonnets taking hold in 16th-century Italy 'as rock and roll did in 1950s Europe'. But for anyone who believes that little is left to say about Michelangelo's paintings or sculpture, Gayford presents shrewd insights into their fascinating minutiae, such as the tantalisingly incomplete sig nature on the Pietá, or the way the nudity of the David was necessitated by the shape of the marble. He also punctures some age-old myths, and suggests that Michelangelo and Leonardo might actually have started off as mutual admirers and even possibly friends, sharing notes on a Latin teacher and copying each other's work.
A 1568 biography of Michelangelo declared him the greatest man the arts had ever known. Yet it is sobering to think that, at the end of his long life, he doubted his achievement. A despairing poem questions the worth of his sculptures ('so many toys') and wonders 'what /The point was'. He need not have feared. As Gayford shows, Michelangelo's greatest achievement lay not in even his finest works but rather in his own brilliant, belligerent, larger-than-life personality --in the way that, thanks to his energy and ambition, he 'transformed the notion of what an artist could be'.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
King, Ross. "A Herculean achievement." Spectator, 14 Dec. 2013, p. 85+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A357969330/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b799f4db. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A357969330
HOCKNEY, David & Martin Gayford. A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings, illus. by Rose Blake. 128p. bibliog. chron. glossary, index. notes, photos, reprods. Abrams. Oct. 2018. Tr $24.99. ISBN 9781419732119.
Gr 5 Up--Famed artist Hockney and British art critic Gayford team up to have "conversations" about "pictures" created throughout history. The works shown, a number of which are by Hockney, include cave art, paintings, photographs, movies, and computer-generated drawings. Though this art history survey doesn't take a strictly linear, chronological approach, the authors' knowledge and insight, shared in clear, straightforward language, helps readers understand how various artistic techniques and tools have been similar through the ages; are interconnected in some ways; and have served as influences on each other, though separated by geography and eras. Topics include the basics of picture creation: making marks, light and shadows, using space (perspective and telling stories through pictures), mirrors and reflections, painting and photography, and moving pictures. The text has a freewheeling, meandering tone. The majority of the included pieces and artists are Western; few women are represented, even as subjects. The book's design is attractive and colorful. Each speaker is identified by first name and a different typeface, and the pages are enhanced by illustrations that provide witty commentaries throughout. VERDICT Recommended for large public library and school library collections. In art classes, challenge students to make art, inspired by Hockney or other artists herein.--Carol Goldman, formerly at Queens Library, NY
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Goldman, Carol. "HOCKNEY, David & Martin Gayford. A History of Pictures for Children: From Cave Paintings to Computer Drawings." School Library Journal, Aug. 2018, p. 85+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A548561796/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c3491404. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A548561796
De Montebello, Philippe. Rendez-vous with art, by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford. Thames & Hudson, 2014. 248p Index ISBN 9780500239247 cloth, $35.00
52-4021
N7477
2014-932752 MARC
Rendez-vous with Art features an ongoing discussion between Philippe de Montebello (former director, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the art critic Martin Gayford about the experience of viewing works of art, particularly, though not solely, within the museum environment, in locations throughout the world. Though the focus is certainly on individual objects, the authors also grapple with the particular considerations of viewing works in museum collections. Because of the presence of artworks within institutions, no matter how comprehensive the collections, the view and even the understanding of artworks remain fragmentary. In other words, as the authors emphasize, the art that viewers see in these institutions is representative of the greater whole of the civilization or culture from which it emanates. Through 23 chapters arranged around different locations and with color illustrations of iconic works of art throughout, this volume offers an intimate entry point into the process and pleasure of encountering art objects within museums and other collections. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readership levels.--K. M. Keogh, Indiana University Libraries
Keogh, K.M.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Keogh, K.M. "De Montebello, Philippe. Rendez-vous with art." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2015, p. 1303. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A416401803/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fca4b678. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A416401803
Rendez-vous with Art
Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford
Thames and Hudson, 19-95 [pounds sterling]
ISBN 9780500239247
In this expansive series of conversations, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art joins forces with one of Britain's top art critics, the two men meeting in museums and galleries across the world to discuss the enduring power of art. The resulting texts are packed with their insights on aesthetic experience, the context of museums, and how display affects how we look at art. A thought-provoking read.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
http://www.apollo-magazine.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rendez-vous with Art." Apollo, Sept. 2014, p. 129. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A383177806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=42cd7905. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A383177806
Michelangelo: His Epic Life
Martin Gayford
Fig Tree, 30.00 [pounds sterling]
ISBN 9781905490547
Martin Gayford's biography of Michelangelo is the fifth to come out in English in recent years. 2009 saw those by William Wallace and Antonio Forcellino (the latter translated from the Italian of 2005), which--like Gayford's--cover the whole of the artist's life. In 2011 the first of a projected two volumes by Michael Hirst appeared, covering Michelangelo's career up to his transfer to Rome in 1534, as did a closely focused account of the early years up to 1508 by John Spike. And, of course, among earlier biographies, that by George Bull, and Linda Murray's documentary life remain useful. All have different emphases and strengths and all, in different ways, are laudable.
Michelangelo's life was so long, his projects--pictorial, sculptural and architectural --on so large a scale, his work so imbricated with the political, religious and social worlds of his day, in which his position was as central as that of an artist could be, that one can read several biographies with little sense of repetition: each writer will select and recompose the elements of Michelangelo's life, art and world differently. Forcellino, for example, concentrates on the religious, social and personal tensions by which Michelangelo's life was riven; Wallace focuses on the means and modes of Michelangelo's production; Hirst establishes a precise chronicle of his life and actions; Spike's rich and nuanced account concentrates on his poetic and artistic sources.
Alone among the recent biographers, Gayford has no track record as a scholar of the Renaissance--his previous books were on 19th- and 20th-century art--and he does not tell us why he decided to write this one: presumably it was a labour of love. But he has mastered the sources and, without entrenched positions--or ego--to defend, has produced an account that is measured, detached but sympathetic, and guided by a profound awareness of the magnitude of Michelangelo's achievement: hence the subtitle. The book is consistently readable; particularly admirable--perhaps a consequence of Gayford's practice as a journalist and reviewer--is the ease and flexibility with which he moves from close focus on, say, a significant drawing, to a consideration of the project for which it was made, to an account of the context of patronage, to Michelangelo's own state of mind and health; this results in a densely textured and convincing account which, for me at least, led to an enhanced understanding of some of Michelangelo's motivations and movements. Gayford is adept at describing complicated schemes or situations: his accounts of the arrangement of the Sistine ceiling (Fig. 1), for example, or of the changes that Michelangelo made to St Peter's, are admirably clear and succinct. And he has a sharp eye for details that other biographers have missed: testimony about a mystical vision experienced by Michelangelo in 1513 for example--which inspired the artist to produce a watercolour--and the distressing revelation that his elder brother Leonardo was the victim of a sodomitical school teacher as a child; the psychological repercussions of this in the family must have been profound.
On the debit side the book shares a structural imbalance with most other biographies, in that the last 30 years of Michelangelo's working life are given much less space than the first 40. Artists' earlier years are generally more inviting to biographers than their years of attainment. But Michelangelo's massively inventive architecture, the intense spirituality of his private works, and the complex religious, social and intellectual situation of Rome in his later years are topics deserving fuller treatment. Currently--although there are concentrated pages in Forcellino--only Wallace gives roughly equal space to the last 30 years, and one looks forward to their expanded treatment in Hirst's second volume.
Gayford's lack of expertise in Renaissance art is only rarely a disadvantage. At times, when the reader would like decision, he abdicates judgement in deference to 'scholarly' disagreements, as though all such opinions have equal value and cannot be divided into wheat and--sometimes appalling--chaff. On-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand equivocations are the province of student essays: a serious writer should consider evidence and arguments and reach a decision. Gayford seems nervous of mistakes and prefers to hedge his bets but he is far from alone in this weakness. Thus, incomprehensibly uneasy about the authenticity of the presentation drawings made for Gherardo Perini in the 1520s, he avoids discussing them; and his mention of the Manhattan Cupid (c. 1494-96) is wholly inadequate. Parenthetically, it is depressing that this marvellous sculpture should have been so ill-treated. Ignored by Forcellino and Wallace, rejected without argument in a footnote by Hirst, it is accepted only by Spike --and even he evinces little enthusiasm. Perhaps writers have been scared off by the eruption of toxic journalism that greeted its rediscovery and the shameful attempts to deposit soot on its discoverer, Katja Brandt. But even were it not supported by immediately contemporary visual evidence, it is now obvious that, triumphantly vital in its new display at the Met, the Cupid is virtuosic, wholly autograph, and deeply enlightening about the young Michelangelo's technical and expressive range.
But Gayford's most egregious misjudgement is his dismissal in half a page of the four Accademia Slaves from the early 1520s, sculptures that have good claim to be the most elementally powerful figures ever carved by anyone. Michelangelo might have had help blocking them out, but to think that they are in any significant way studio works is ridiculous. In these sculptures, supremely, the artist was driven by his daemon; they are too large and energetic to fit into the base of the Julius tomb that had just been completed, nor could they coexist with the Louvre Slaves. To consider them attentively is to appreciate why it was so difficult for Michelangelo to complete major sculptural-architectural projects--local figural expression took precedence over, and came to disrupt, planned ensembles: Michelangelo's actors ran away with him, their performances overreaching their intended roles. Had Gayford given more thought to such issues in Michelangelo's work, his fine book would have gained still further in psychological and emotional depth.
Paul Joan aides is Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
http://www.apollo-magazine.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Joannides, Paul. "Another Michelangelo: the latest biography of Michelangelo adds much to our understanding of the man." Apollo, Mar. 2014, p. 192+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A361943757/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=218d2c0d. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A361943757
Byline: Bruce Watson
In the summer of 1839, when Louis Daguerre "forced the sun to take pictures," the first daguerreotypes led to a mania that gripped all of Paris. Chemicals, lenses and camera obscuras sold out at shops. Across the City of Light, men were seen balancing bulky boxes on tripods. "Everyone wanted to copy the view offered by his window," one Parisian recalled. "The poorest pictures caused him unutterable joy."
Pictures, two-dimensional models of a 3-D world, have captivated humanity since the first artist painted the first bison by torchlight. But the typical art history is defined by its medium, charting the progress of painting, photography or frescoes. Artist David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford have a broader purpose. Their big, beautiful book, "A History of Pictures," explores our long love affair with pictures from all media and all millennia.
The history of pictures, Hockney says, "begins in the caves and ends, at the moment, with an iPad." Hockney and Gayford trace the history in a conversation, similar to the one in their 2011 book, "A Bigger Message." Again the celebrated British artist proves as innovative in thought as he is on canvas. And Gayford, art critic for the Spectator, is a gentle guide, steering the conversation through a thematic tour of the world's images, some classics but most little-known.
Reading "A History of Pictures" is like touring a great museum with an artist and critic chatting over your shoulder. The conversation sometimes drones on, especially when Hockney rehashes his "optical theory" that artists from Jan van Eyck onward used lenses to project images onto canvas. But most of the dialogue, abundantly illustrated with full-page glossies, is original and surprising.
Where else would we find images from Giotto compared to Disney cartoons? Caravaggio to "Hollywood lighting"? Plato's cave to television? At times, Hockney and Gayford are encyclopedias of images, contrasting figures separated by centuries of art history. Elsewhere, they are awestruck amateurs, gazing in wonder at the beauty and power of a VelA zquez, a Hokusai, a sepia-toned photo by EugA[umlaut]ne Atget.
Some of the history, including a full chapter on Renaissance art, will be familiar to any museum-goer, but the authors enliven their tour by discussing the commonalities of pictures and the unique vision of their creators. Chapters focus on shadows, mirror images, moving images, staged photos and, finally, the future of pictures. Hockney includes some of his own works, including a stunning still life done on an iPad and a collage he made on an early fax machine. Pictures, he notes, are "a personal angle on reality."
Though Hockney knows his art history, Gayford is the expert, spicing the conversation with rubicons in the long cavalcade of imagery. Opening the chapter on "Photography, Truth and Painting," Gayford recounts an 1862 legal battle between French painters and photographers. Seems the painters had copied photos onto canvas, leading the photographers to sue for violation of copyright. But French copyright law applied only to art. Was photography an art? Painters protested that photography was nothing more than "a series of completely mechanical manipulations." The judge sided with them, but the photographers won on appeal.
Like any conversation, the talk is sometimes bogged down by banality. "People like pictures," Hockney says. "Pictures are a way of representing the world," Gayford chimes in. But once the talk turns to contemporary pictures, our image-drunk world unfolds beneath the eyes of these experts. Suddenly, the most iconic pictures are revealed to have deep roots. The crowded cover of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album is compared to the group portraits of impressionists made by Fantin-Latour. We learn that, long before Photoshop, photographers manipulated images in the darkroom or in the field. They ask: Can we trust photography anymore? Could we ever?
In comparing paintings with photos, both authors side with the former. To prove their point, they juxtapose a photo of France's Mont Sainte-Victoire with one of CA[c]zanne's many renderings of the mountain. Only the most evocative photos compare with what Damien Hirst calls the "yumminess" of paint. Yet whether made by hand or by camera, Hockney insists, any image deserving our attention must be "the product of hard looking, skill, and require the hand, the heart and the eye."
But pictures may be too much with us now. The stirring self-portraits of Rembrandt and van Gogh have morphed into the ubiquitous "selfies" of everyone everywhere. Estimates suggest that nearly 400 billion photos are taken each year, more snapped every few minutes than were taken in the 19th century. Hockney is not encouraged by this glut. Given its ubiquity and idiot-proof process, photography as we once knew it is over, he laments.
Gayford is less pessimistic. Smartphone cameras and other wizardry have made, he says, "a revolution as profound as that brought about by printing." Even if Hockney complains about a surfeit of photos, few of them memorable, the snapshots just keep coming. Google any word, click "images" and the clutter fills your screen. Such clutter demands a cleanup, which makes "A History of Pictures" vital reading.
Bruce Watson is the author of "Light: A Radiant History From Creation to the Quantum Age."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Watson, Bruce. "'A History of Pictures' -- from the cave to the iPhone." Washingtonpost.com, 23 Nov. 2016. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A471256288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4491ee5e. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471256288
Modernists and Mavericks by Martin Gayford review – Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London painters
An immersive history of painting from 1945 to the 1970s draws on a huge archive of the author’s interviews
Alexandra Harris
Sat 5 May 2018 09.00 BST
Shares
59
Comments
12
In conversation … Lucian Freud (left) with Francis Bacon in Bacon’s studio. Photograph: Daniel Farson
M
artin Gayford has been talking with artists for 30 years. He doesn’t just nip into the studio with a notepad: he has a gift for sustaining conversations that unfold across decades. His friendship with David Hockney has inspired remarkable collaborations, and when he sat for a portrait by Lucian Freud he made in return his own version of Man with a Blue Scarf, a written portrait of the painter painting.
In Modernists & Mavericks he draws on a huge archive of interviews to piece together a history of postwar painting in London, from the Camberwell students of the 1940s, working in the ruins of a bombed city, to the pop artists who collaged images of shining new-made lives in the 1960s. Gayford starts with people, moments and meetings, standing firm in the belief that “pictures are affected not only by social and intellectual changes but also by individual sensibility and character”. Three cheers for that faith in individuals. Other studies have debated the effects of state art funding and cold war cultural politics; this one brings us the expression of Leon Kossoff as he moves through heaven and hell with each brushstroke, Bridget Riley introducing the whisker of white that makes a black painting live, Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin talking hour after hour in the car down to Bath School of Art.
Pinterest
Black and white portrait … Bridget Riley in 1964. Photograph: David Newell Smith/The Observer
Advertisement
Many of the painters here were sceptical of interpreters pinning them down with words. But with each other they could be unstoppably voluble. Francis Bacon went around conducting “a mobile seminar”. Frank Auerbach (the most grippingly eloquent of the book’s voices) says that he and Bacon “talked, slightly drunkenly and wildly, for about 15 years”. As for Auerbach and Freud, the conversation went on for half a century.
The book’s span allows Gayford to plot several generations in relation to each other, and it’s striking how many of the most potent encounters involve forms of teaching. Simply walking down the street one day, Bacon pointed out to the young John Wonnacott how a shadow seemed to eat into a figure “like a disease”. “I rethought shadow,” says Wonnacott; it stayed with him all his life. There are dismal fallings-out at art school: Allen Jones, amazed that his tutors had omitted to mention the existence of Jackson Pollock, suggested suing Hornsey College for fraud. But David Bomberg emerges as a deeply valued teacher at Borough polytechnic, whose students inherited his convictions about the uncompromising effort that painting requires.
Effort and seriousness united the London artists. The Colony Room Club bar in Soho filled up after many a dinner at Wheeler’s, that’s true, as well it might after what Cyril Connolly called the “chopless chop-houses and beerless pubs” of the 40s. But the talk was never far from painting, and the next morning there was work. Gayford attends particularly to the relationship between long concentration and sudden achievement. For Kossoff, tirelessly painting a swimming pool in Willesden, north-west London, there would come a point when “conscious intention breaks up”. It was then that “the picture happened”.
Pinterest
Frank Auerbach in his Camden studio. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian
Kossoff and Auerbach stayed close to Camden; Freud thought it mad to travel when there were parts of London he had not visited. The particular environment of the city is perhaps most clearly felt in the account of what happened when Bacon ventured to St Ives, though the episode is also a welcome reminder of the vitality of British painting elsewhere. But the biggest news was coming from the US and everyone was forming some kind of relationship with the ideas coming from the new centre of the art world. Peter Blake posed in his Levi 501s, with American badges pinned to his jacket and Elvis magazine in hand, portraying himself as a gawkily dedicated fan. The picture has the wistful air of Watteau’s Pierrot, Gayford observes; there’s Gainsborough here, too, and Rousseau. It’s a beautifully complex self portrait of a young Englishman dressed for America.
Advertisement
New York and Los Angeles were the places to be; Hockney, Jones, Frank Bowling and Richard Smith all eventually went. But powerful work could come of not being there. The giant force of abstract expressionism intensified debates about whether external subjects had any role in the life of a painting. Was the “hard-edged abstraction” pursued by Robin Denny and William Turnbull a leap into the future or a dead end? If a Sandra Blow painting “put you in mind of landscape” was it then a figurative work? The conversations of Ayres and Hodgkin were charged by the fact of their work falling just (but decisively) to either side of the “invisible frontier” between abstraction and representation.
Ayres is a vivid presence and Gayford gives a fine account of her vast, tumbling, ever metamorphosing Hampstead Mural. He records her laughter as baffled onlookers wondered what she was doing. Ayres died last month, Hodgkin last year. The great figures of the 60s are passing – which is all the more reason to be grateful for a book that takes us right into their world.
• Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters by Martin Gayford is published by Thames & Hudson. To order a copy for £18.95 (RRP £24.95) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Modernists and Mavericks by Martin Gayford — a miraculous moment
A study of British painting is a compelling account of a great time in modern art
Timothy Behrens, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews in 1963 © The John Deakin Archive/Getty Images
Share on Twitter (opens new window)
Share on Facebook (opens new window)
Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)
Save
Save to myFT
Grey Gowrie
May 4, 2018
Print this page
4
Martin Gayford’s Man with a Blue Scarf (2010), an account of sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud, is one of the best books ever written about the art of painting. Freud used to take a notorious amount of time over a portrait. He needed to know, or get to know, his sitters personally in order to achieve what he called “truth”: the likeness of the whole person; the likeness of his own relation with them. He believed such things affected, indeed modified, appearance. He was pursuing, like Proust, an individual in a caught moment of time and he needed the experience of time to arrive there. When my old boss, Alfred Taubman, owner of Sotheby’s when I worked there, offered Freud a fortune to paint his wife, he was furiously rebuffed. “I do not know your wife.” That was that.Now comes Modernists and Mavericks, a study of British painting in the second half of the 20th century. To create some lines of demarcation, Gayford borrows a phrase used by the American painter RB Kitaj, who settled in London in the 1950s. He talked of a “London School” composed of Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff, Andrews, Hockney and himself. These painters were active in the 1960s, when the phrase was coined. All lived and worked in the capital, though Hockney spent much time in Los Angeles, a city he in effect invented for painting. In order to extend the range of his study, Gayford turns London into a sub-text for his book, a device for leaving out a number of talented artists like the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon. And because one of the few characteristics shared by British painters during this half-century was each one’s idiosyncratic response to the new wave in American painting, specifically New York abstraction in the late 1940s and 1950s, Gayford is in effect recounting the fall of Paris as the adjudicatory centre, the supreme court, of modern art. From the Impressionists, to Cézanne, to Matisse and Picasso, Paris ruled. The scale, the sheer excitement of vast abstracts by Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock and others pulverised British and European abstraction for a time. Gayford’s heroes, mainly figurative painters like Freud and Bacon, seemed to be making the most viable response.The book opens with a commercial phenomenon. In 2013 Christie’s sold Francis Bacon’s 1969 “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” for $142m. For over a generation now, art had moved intellectually, aesthetically and commercially to the English-speaking world. And the specifically English characteristic of this world was the reorienting of art from what was considered “modern”: that is, art as its own subject and first cause. Painters like Bacon, Freud and Hockney led the way back to matters human, messy, unpredictable, subjective. It is an exciting story. This is not a book about plasticity, or tactile values, or the merits of one medium (acrylic, say) over another (oil paint, say). There are the necessary paragraphs about philosophical issues like the relation of draughtsmanship to painting or issues posed by Hockney’s fascination with what EH Gombrich called “the art of illusion”. But these are never allowed to slow down the narrative. If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it. You soon will be. This is not a picture book with commentary. The images are there for the text.Although the book is primarily an account of how in reputational and market terms four great painters redefined the role of the human figure in modern art, Gayford does not allow his leading actors — Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and Hockney — to hijack the action. Like a novelist, he has subsidiary characters who are considered in their own right and whose work is important to the story of what he clearly believes were five great decades of British art. Two considerable female artists, Bridget Riley and Gillian Ayres, rejected the human figure. Yet even a sentence like this one is conceptually dodgy. You cannot exclude the viewer, or human powers of perception. When she hit the big time in New York, Riley was furious at being taken up by fashionistas; at finding herself, literally, in vogue. Her mentors were Seurat and Renoir. She wanted to do things to, and with, light, not clothes. Ayres, who has just died, was capable of vast improvised works: multiple messy gestures on canvas. But if you squint at them, or take off your glasses, Rubenslike rhythms appear.
Gayford’s eye for the dramatic, his novelist’s approach, feasts upon events and stories. The super-talented Pauline Boty died of cancer at 28. Then three technically brilliant and once famous non-figurative artists, Richard Smith, Robyn Denny and Bernard Cohen, fell out of fashion. Gayford runs into an elderly Smith queueing at the Venice Biennale. Once he had most of the British Pavilion there to himself.Gayford carefully avoids an elegiac note. This is because in spite of the Young British Artists who emerged at the end of the last century, the most interesting art of our own time may well be on the move, to China for instance. And for him, elegy would interfere with the narrative excitement of his account. Yet it is difficult for the contemporary reader not to sing a lament for the makers. Bacon gone. Freud gone. Kitaj gone. And Sutherland, Turnbull, Caulfield, Hodgkin, Uglow, Scott, Heron, Hilton, Davie, Andrews gone. Sandra Blow, Gillian Ayres, Prunella Clough, all gone. Keith Vaughan, whom Gayford curiously neglects, gone. But Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Auerbach, Hockney (presiding, as I write, over a massive new show in New York) and Allen Jones are with us still and working.
When she hit the big time in New York, Riley was furious at being taken up by fashionistas; at finding herself, literally, in vogue
All present something of a stand against young artists still very much in thrall to Marcel Duchamp, the granddaddy of conceptual art. The trouble with conceptual works is that they are, in effect, wisecracks. When you “get” them, that’s it. Oil paint carries an immense emotional radioactivity, a half-life dangerous and long-lasting.Reviewing Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, WH Auden wrote that just occasionally he came across a book he could not help feeling had been written specially for him. As one who has earned his living in the art market, and been a “trading” collector as well, I feel the same way about Modernists and Mavericks. I have, as it were, shared rooms in my life over the years with many of the painters whom Gayford celebrates, and all of the major ones. His driving account of a miraculous time in British art may well prove its memorial.Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters, by Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, £24.95, 352 pages
Book review: ‘Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and The London Painters,’ by Martin Gayford
Detail of Gillian Ayres, 1948, The Walmer Castle pub near Camberwell School of Art, with Gillian Ayres (center) and Henry Mundy (to the right of Ayres). Photo: Courtesy of Gillian Ayres
by Sharon Anderson
September 2018
Martin Gayford’s latest book takes on the history of London artists from the end of World War II to the 1970s. More than just an art history book, Gayford weaves stories about relationships — artists as friends, as students and teachers, and as participants who combined to define painting from Soho bohemia in the 1940s to the swinging ’60s.
Far left: Modernists and Mavericks Bacon, Freud, Hockney and The London Painters, by Martin Gayford.
WHY DO PEOPLE CREATE ART?
Fully illustrated by documentary photographs and artworks, Gayford draws on extensive interviews with artists to build an intimate history of an era. David Hockney said, “Reality is a slippery concept, because it is not separate from us. Reality is in our minds.” The objective and subjective, and the reasoning behind why people create art play into Gayford’s storytelling.
The painter William Coldstream, with his measured attention to detail in his dreamlike landscapes, struggled with the endless options presented by painting. Subject matter, being limitless, plagued his decision making. In an interesting twist, Coldstream admitted that a paying portrait customer helped his motivation. “If you have great difficulty in making yourself work, as I do, if the sitter’s really going to arrive you’ve jolly well got to be there and be ready to paint whether you feel like it or not,” he said.
In contrast, Francis Bacon became known for his instinctive, violent brushstroke style that caused some artists to suggest he couldn’t even draw. Subject matter seemed to come from a mysterious and random place inside the artist, and the canvases presented a kind of a chaos that provoked like an assault on the viewer. His outrageous personality added an extra level of mystery. Bacon famously destroyed many of his paintings after they were complete when the improvisation and accidents on the canvas no longer pleased him. This is positively cringe-worthy for the reader because we learn in the introduction that in 2013 Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold at Christie›s New York for $142.4 million and was, for a time, the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.
Francis Bacon, 1946, Painting. Image: © The Estate of Francis Bacon, all rights reserved. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
CHALLENGES OF WOMEN ARTISTS
The rise of prominent female painters in London and the challenges they faced are told through the experiences of artists like Gillian Ayers. The painting world, still decidedly masculine, encouraged women to be satisfied with the role of muse, or perhaps sacrificing their own needs to support and assist a boyfriend or husband with creative inclinations while ignoring their own. Prunella Clough’s ambitious urban landscapes Cranes and Men (1950) carries the same authority as the semiabstract scenes painted by Marcel Duchamp or Francis Picabia.
BIRTH OF POP ART
The centerpiece of the beginnings of pop art in late 1950s London is Richard Hamilton’s book, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). Its famous collage, a smiling muscle-bound male holding an impossibly large and comically phallic Tootsie Pop in a mid-century modern interior accompanied by a bare-breasted woman sitting on a sofa with a lampshade on her head, is considered the first masterpiece of Pop Art.
Gayford points out that artist Peter Blake claims to have originated the term “Pop Art” in London. During a conversation Blake had with English art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway, he discussed his inspiration to paint, which came from popular figures like rock ’n’ roll musicians in paintings like Got a Girl (1961). Blake was a fan, and his paintings grew out of that enthusiasm. During their conversation Alloway was said to have responded, “Oh, you mean a kind of pop art?” Another version of the story has composer Frank Cordell and the collagist John McHale inventing the phrase in 1954. In any case, when Alloway used the expression in New York in 1961, he baffled local artists Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, who went on to became prominent American figures of the Pop Art movement.
A NEW REALISM
Entertaining and illuminating stories abound in Gayford’s text about the charismatic realist painters David Hockney and Lucian Freud. Hockney, who began as a loose, gestural painter, became a photorealist with a bold sense of color as he depicted human subjects in varying interiors. Freud pushed the possibilities of paint to render in two dimensions the physicality of three-dimensional human flesh and presented human nudity in ways that were daring and sometimes confrontational. Ignoring the perfection of Greek statues, Freud offered human nudity — toes, knees, shoulders, and sexual organs — in a new realism that was believable.
Throughout Modernists & Mavericks, Gayford’s storytelling characterizes London’s eclectic approach to visual art and the multiple possibilities stemming from the single question: “What can painting do?”