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Loving Martin Gayford's new book!

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Before I go to see Freud, Bacon and other members of the ‘London group’ (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/all-too-human) I’m reading and have nearly finished Martin Gayford’s Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & The London Painters just out in 2018. What a wonderful introduction or resume of the period in art – as it was in London anyway. This book talks about art movements without mystifying them or, in the manner of some academic accounts, reifying them.

It allows you to see how intellectual history and the choices and decisions of both individuals and groups interact. No-one is reduced. There isn’t much on Pauline Boty but what there is shines!

The account of Hockney – maverick in chief – places him where he should be as a rebel against over-domineering discourses, notably those of academic art history. Even Martin Kemp (Leonardo specialist in chief) enjoyed that aspect of Hockney’s work.

I treasure most the lesser known artist’s vignettes and the attempt to rearrange the canon with a healthier appreciation of Bomberg, Kitaj, and Kossoff. You can rise from this book and go and find them out (or find them again!). There are wonderful perceptions about the importance of Victor Pasmore’s Kandinsky impersonation (in career-shape rather than in the art per se). And this gave me more reason to go and see the British Museum’s bit on John Craxton’s sojourn in Greece with Leigh-Fermor.

A lively boundary-crossing period gets a respectful but understanding outline here. Gayford doesn’t cross the boundaries for you but you can get back into the artists and do it for yourself. It was good to see William Coldstream treated interestingly in this context.

I’m thinking again though about the ‘starry night’ of this book – it is Frank Auerbach’s role as co-narrator and subject. His greatness shines. I was shocked to hear the story about the thick impasto period and why it was as it was but that kind of maverick shine glints through even the greatest artists’ marriages of form and content.

Do read it. Gets you through the boring bits in formal art history and even helps you to put that chore into a wider historical perspective. He calls it a group biography. I see what it means but that is a reductive description in my view.

Steve

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