Artists

By a fine coincidence, two legendary icons of British art were being feted in London on the same evening last month, and both are primarily famous, to the public at least, for their depiction of the Queen. At the National Portrait Gallery, the director Sandy Nairne hosted a dinner to celebrate the portrait oeuvre of Lucian Freud, while the Victoria and Albert Museum opened its major exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s lifetime lensing of Elizabeth II. In the 1950s these two artists were the epitome of London society. Beaton, by way of his groomed exquisite taste and laconic manner, was the epicene idol of sophisticated drawing rooms; the nascent Freud, 30-odd,

In the summer of 1520, Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of his protégé, the painter Sebastiano del Piombo, to Cardinal Bibbiena, an influential figure at the court of Pope Leo X. The testimonial carried some weight, for Michelangelo was by now Italy’s most admired sculptor, with what are nowadays called ‘signature achievements’ such as the David, the Pietà and the Dying Slave to his credit. Seven years earlier, what is more, he had completed the magisterial decoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, among the most ambitious  projects in the history of painting, for Pope Julius II. It comes as something of a surprise, therefore, to find

Long in the writing, deep in research, heavy to hold, this is the latest of umpteen biographies of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90). But it should be said straightaway that it is extremely readable, contains new material and is freshly, even startlingly re-interpretative of a life whose bare bones are very familiar. The more one reads, the more absorbing it becomes, both in its breadth of approach and its colossal detail. Potential readers, however, should be warned: this is no sentimentalising study, no apologia for the excesses of the ‘mad genius’ of popular renown. Quite the contrary: one’s dismay intensifies as the self-crucifixion of Van Gogh’s life unfolds, disaster after disaster

A pleasingly tactile canvas-like cover adorns this heavy book and proclaims its purpose; the boldly brushed illustration is a detail from ‘Mauve Primulas on a Table’ painted in January 1928 when the artist was in his mid-fifties. He wrote of a ‘painting orgy’ and how he suffered ‘tennis-elbow from holding my brush for 8 hours solid’. Patricia Reed’s catalogue note adds, ‘the work is a synthesis of the motifs that interested him at this moment: a tilted picture plane, textured cloth, penumbrated shadows, a cropped bowl and a pair of open scissors’. It is pertinent to follow with a quote from Merlin James’s introductory essay on Nicholson’s ‘Painting and Experience’,

Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often upset the world of art ever since. Picasso aside, he is the wittiest modern painter, in the sense not just of being funny, but intelligent; a whole history of Western art is both contained and extended by his originality. For example, it was both funny, and in the 1960s brave, to apply Boucher’s soft pornography

The legend of the glamorous artist Sheila Fell (1931–79), with her striking looks — black hair, white skin, large eyes — who died young, has tended to obscure the real achievement of her art. The legend of the glamorous artist Sheila Fell (1931–79), with her striking looks — black hair, white skin, large eyes — who died young, has tended to obscure the real achievement of her art. She was part of a talented generation which included her friends Frank Auerbach, Jeffery Camp and Craigie Aitchison, and was given her first solo exhibition at the age of 24 by Helen Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London. Fell came

Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Tom Rosenthal has been a life-long admirer of Lowry’s work, spending his formative years in Greater Manchester and even interviewing the old curmudgeon for Radio 3 in the 1960s. One of his aims in this book is to dispel the various myths that have grown up around Lowry and his critically underestimated art. It has become fashionable in the art world to look down on Lowry

Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. But the biographer was undeterred. As an English author of books on the arts and the chief arts critic of the Irish Independent, he was a friend of Hill’s for the last 37 years of his life. With access to 40,000 letters and other papers in the artist’s archive and to innumerable other sources of revealing evidence, Arnold has probably come as

This book collects nearly 300 examples of Alasdair Gray’s work as a painter and illustrator. This book collects nearly 300 examples of Alasdair Gray’s work as a painter and illustrator. As an art student in 1950s Glasgow, he scorned the conservatism of tutors who painted the way ‘Monet might have painted had he been timid and Scottish, with an inferior grasp of colour and design’. Instead of traditional still lifes and landscapes, he produced devious biblical scenes populated with weird and sinewy figures inspired by Blake, Breughel and Bosch. Gray remarks that his mother’s death when he was 17 gave him a horrified fascination — further fuelled by his eczema

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it. Much the same thing has been said by many artists and writers, but seldom has this proposition been so tested as it is by ‘32 Campbell’s Soup Cans’. In the Factory, as he called his atelier, Warhol made paintings of photographs, casually silk-screened prints of blown-up acetates of blow-ups from contact sheets of original negatives, copies of copies, images of images. He inverted high and low culture. He expressed something, defined something, about our psychic relationship to the stuff that surrounds

Some years ago, Edmund de Waal inherited a remarkable collection of 264 netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie, whom he had got to know 20 years previously while studying pottery and Japanese in Tokyo. Each week the young de Waal visited his urbane, elderly relative and his friend, Jiro. He heard ancient family stories and was introduced to the hare and all the other miniature carvings in ivory or wood, each one ‘a small, tough explosion of exactitude’. When eventually he inherited the netsuke, he felt he had also been ‘handed a responsibility — to them and to the people who have owned them.’ Although the netsuke originated in 18th- century

The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. One player turned up wearing pyjamas, another held the bat the wrong way round while a third — a Frenchman — thought the game had finished every time the umpire called ‘Over’. The Allahakbarries were skittled out for just 11 runs and under the circumstances it seemed entirely appropriate that the team’s name should have been derived from the Moorish phrase for

This book recounts a terrible story of self-destruction by two painters who, in their heyday, achieved considerable renown in Britain and abroad. Robert Colquhoun (1914-62) and Robert MacBryde (1913-66), both from Scottish working-class families, met in 1932 when they were students at the Glasgow School of Art. From then onwards they were personally and professionally inseparable in their headlong rise to fame and descent downhill. Although both have been the subject of anecdotes and snapshots in many a memoir of the period — all those accounts of Soho and ‘Fitzrovia’ — this is the first full-length study devoted to them, the result of over 20 years’ research. Their early life

Art fraudsters, especially forgers, have a popular appeal akin to Robin Hood. Their cock-a-snook cunning provides a twist on those money shots on the Antiques Roadshow when some dotty great aunt from Sidmouth discovers her umbrella stand is Ming Dynasty. ‘How much?’ cries Dotty. The forger levels the field from the other side of the pitch. When some shipping magnate finds his Monet ‘Nympheas’ is more pond scum than Giverny gold the public collapses into bouts of schadenfreude. Many books and films have covered this subject, and yet The Conman has a particularly interesting tale to tell. This is a true story not only of dubious oils but also the

Just as there are people who are their own worst enemies, so there are books that are their own worst reviews. Mark Griffin’s A Hundred or More Hidden Things, a new biography of the Hollywood film-maker Vincente Minnelli, is one such. No review could possibly be as damning as a verbatim reproduction of its irresistibly putrid pages. Minnelli’s achievement certainly does merit attention. In fact, for the auteurist critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, who argued that a film’s distinction derived primarily, even exclusively, from the degree to which it reflected its director’s own personal visual and thematic preoccupations, his was practically an open-and-shut case. At least to the initiated, a

I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this: Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke. I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this: Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended with a more temperate strain from the Mudge family of Basingstoke. Those passages seem to claim too much for heredity, and to bear out A. J. P. Taylor’s dictum that snobbery is the occupational disease of historians. But there