Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters

Author: Martin Gayford
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500774242
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Book Description
Martin Gayford’s masterful account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated by documentary photographs and the works themselves The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s has never before been told before as a single narrative. R. B. Kitaj’s proposal, made in 1976, that there was a “substantial School of London” was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley. Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint.

John Graham

Author: Alicia Grant Longwell
Publisher: Prestel
ISBN: 9783791356082
Category : Modernism (Art)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This monograph explores how John Graham became an influential figure in American painting and discusses the development of his distinctly American approach to art-making. John Graham was an American Modernist and figurative painter. He was a mentor figure to artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky and a notable influence on Abstract Expressionist artists such as Lee Krasner and David Smith. This book includes more than 50 paintings and a selection of important works on paper. Scholarly essays provide insight on each stage of Graham's career and the practice of art historical investigation, while commentary from contemporary artists offers an understanding of how Graham influenced their work. A reprint of Graham's seminal article, "Primitive Art and Picasso," first published in 1937, reveals his academic and artistic brilliance.

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

Author: Martin Gayford
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500770794
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” —ARTnews Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation at restaurants, in taxis, and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon were friends and contemporaries, as were writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden. The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other works, telling photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud in his studio, and images by such great artists of the past as van Gogh and Titian who are discussed by Freud and Gayford. Full of wry observations, the book reveals the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art.

Modernist Maverick

Author: Colin M. Robertson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615844718
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 63

Book Description
Catalogue documenting the exhibition of the same name.

Handcrafted Modern

Author: Leslie Williamson
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847834182
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
An intimate and revealing collection of photographs of astonishingly beautiful, iconic, and undiscovered mid-century interiors. Among significant mid-century interiors, none are more celebrated yet underpublished as the homes created by architects and interior designers for themselves. This collection of newly commissioned photographs presents the most compelling homes by influential mid-century designers, such as Russel Wright, George Nakashima, Harry Bertoia, Charles and Ray Eames, and Eva Zeisel, among others. Intimate as well as revelatory, Williamson’s photographs show these creative homes as they were lived in by their designers: Walter Gropius’s historic Bauhaus home in Massachusetts; Albert Frey’s floating modernist aerie on a Palm Springs rock outcropping; Wharton Esherick’s completely handmade Pennsylvania house, from the organic handcarved staircase to the iconic furniture. Personal and breathtaking by turn—these homes are exemplary studies of domestic modernism at its warmest and most creative.

Palm Springs Modern

Author: Adele Cygelman
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847844102
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
This classic volume, now available at a lower price, showcases jet-set homes designed by the likes of Neutra, Frey, Lautner, and others. Palm Springs is famous as a mecca for the international jet set. But the city has also attracted its share of eccentrics and mavericks who have left an architectural legacy that remains unsurpassed for its originality and international influence. This book examines the impact that architects and designers have had on the desert oasis, primarily from the 1940s to the 1960s. Palm Springs Modern features examples of midcentury modernism at its most glamorous, some of them the residences of prominent figures who commissioned weekend getaways in the desert, including Frank Sinatra, Walter Annenberg, and Raymond Loewy. Adéle Cygelman’s insightful text, a foreword by architectural historian Joseph Rosa, contemporary color photography by David Glomb, and the celebrated archival black-and-white work of Julius Shulman all capture the distinctly modern allure of America’s famed desert playground.

The Architecture of Alfred Browning Parker

Author: Randolph C. Henning
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813036779
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The first authorized examination of a twentieth-century architectural giant "A comprehensive survey of one of Florida's most prolific and influential architects of the mid-twentieth century. In an era when we seek resiliency in design and building, there are lessons to be learned in the work of Alfred Browning Parker, a subtropical master."--Anthony Abbate, AIA, and contributor to Miami Modern Metropolis Alfred Browning Parker (b. 1916) is one of the twentieth century's most famous Florida-based architects. A principal leader of the "Coconut Grove School" of tropical organic architecture, he is arguably the most renowned and honored architect in the history of Florida architecture, and his influence has been felt throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Attaining an almost rock star-like status in his home city of Miami, Parker was publicly praised by Frank Lloyd Wright, something Wright rarely did. Parker's work and philosophy has had an ecological and environmental basis since the early 1940s. He began expressing an interest in alternative fossil fuels and renewable energy sources in the 1970s, far ahead of the current trends in green and energy-conscious architecture. He has continually placed an emphasis on using local materials and has been increasingly praised for his early exploration in environmentally friendly design. ?Randolph Henning's overview of the life work of this modernist master features sixty-nine of the more than five hundred residential and commercial structures Parker created between 1942 and 2001. The descriptions are accompanied by nearly 400 color photographs, more than a third of which are vintage images from renowned photographer Ezra Stoller. Henning also provides a biographical narrative, excerpts from Parker's own writings, a full bibliography, and a complete list of Parker's works. Randolph C. Henning is the author of At Taliesin: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 and Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin: Illustrated by Vintage Postcards. He is a practicing architect and lives in Lewisville, North Carolina.

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney (Revised Edition)

Author: Martin Gayford
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500773408
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
“Sumptuously illustrated, this radiant volume encapsulates what it truly means to be a visual artist.” —Booklist David Hockney’s exuberant work is highly praised and widely celebrated—he is perhaps the world’s most popular living painter. But he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. This new edition includes a revised introduction and five new chapters which cover Hockney’s production since 2011, including preparations for the Bigger Picture exhibition held at the Royal Academy in 2012 and the making of Hockney’s iPad drawings and plans for the show. A difficult period followed the exhibition’s huge success, marked first by a stroke, which left Hockney unable to speak for a long period, followed by the vandalism of the artist’s Totem tree-trunk, and the tragic suicide of his assistant shortly thereafter. Escaping the gloom, in spring 2013 Hockney moved back to L.A. A few months later, Martin Gayford visited Hockney in the L.A. studio, where the fully-recovered artist was hard at work on his Comédie humaine, a series of full-length portraits painted in the studio. The conversations between Hockney and Gayford are punctuated by surprising and revealing observations on other artists—Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Picasso among them—and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of Yorkshire, Hockney’s birthplace, and California.

Peter Krasnow

Author: Michael Duncan
Publisher: Grand Central Press
ISBN: 9780935314748
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Peter Krasnow (1886-1979) is the great California modernist you don t know. Although revered during his lifetime by a coterie that included Edward Weston, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Galka Scheyer, among others, Krasnow remained largely out of the public eye, cantankerously resisting publicity or self-promotion while dedicating himself to an artistic ideal. He demonstrated extraordinary skills in each of his three major phases: the early representational paintings and wood carvings (1910-1930), the abstract wood sculptures (1936-1943), and the hard-edged geometric and patterned paintings (1940-1979).

The Pursuit of Art

Author: Martin Gayford
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500774889
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, Martin Gayford has travelled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayfords journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and outcomes, which he makes as much a part of the story as the final destination. Entertaining and informative, Gayford includes trips to see Brancusis Endless Column in Romania, prehistoric cave art in France, the museum island of Naoshima in Japan, the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and a Roni Horn work in Iceland. Interwoven with these accounts are journeys to meet artists Robert Rauschenberg in New York, Marina Abramovic in Venice, Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris or travels with artists, such as a trip to Beijing with Gilbert & George. These encounters not only provide insights into the way artists approach and think about their art but also reveal the importance of their personal environments. And in the process, Gayford discusses how these meetings have impacted on his own evolving ideas and tastes.