ART
MODERNISTS AND MAVERICKS BACON, FREUD, HOCKNEY AND THE LONDON PAINTERS MARTIN GAYFORD Thames & Hudson, 339pp, £24.95, Oldie price £17.28 inc p&p
In his new book, art critic Martin Gayford describes how the work of artists including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach blazed out the bombed-out ruins of post-war London. As Rachel Cooke in the Observer put it: ‘New energies were stirring, their shoots taking hold just like those of the pink willow herb that would colonise the dead buildings.’
In the Guardian, Alexandra Harris was enthralled by a journey that takes the reader 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’. In the FT, Grey Gowrie found Gayford’s evocations worthy of a ‘novelist’, Stephen Smith in the
Evening Standard thought that ‘connoisseurs will enjoy the rich patina on Gayford’s anecdotes’, and Michael Prodger in the Times, praising a ‘superb’ study, noted that ‘during his long career, Gayford has interviewed many leading British artists of the post-war generation. These encounters have given him a great deal of verbatim comment from figures who were at the front line.’
Harris loved how the book ‘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”’. And Cooke marvelled at the way Gayford ‘deploys Bacon’s voice to brilliant effect and you hang on to every word, from his conviction that he wanted his pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, leaving a trace of human presence “as a snail leaves its slime”, to his sudden, hungry observation, made one sunny day in Soho, that a horizontal shadow “eats into the figure, like a disease”’.
IN MONTPARNASSE THE EMERGENCE OF SURREALISM IN PARIS FROM DUCHAMP TO DALI SUE ROE Fig Tree, 320pp, £20, Oldie price £14.80 inc p&p
The prevailing art scene at the beginning of the 20th century emerged in Montmartre, and with it the birth of the Modernist movement. Ten years later it shifted to the cafés and salons of Montparnasse. Sue Roe published her book on the Montmartre years and now she has moved to the second part of her story to depict the wonderfully eccentric and avant-garde Dada movement, followed by Man Ray and the birth of Surrealist photography, and eventually the arrival of Salvador Dalì. The whirling, agitated art which swirled out of the subconscious of these artists, and their wild, uncontrolled behaviour became enmeshed. Here is the story that brings together all the characters at once: Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Apollinaire, Cocteau, Max Ernst, de Chirico inter alia.
Roe recounts a time when art still had the power to shock and when the activities of the artists were testament to their art too. Michael Prodger, writing in the Times, emphasised that while their ‘behaviour may have been farcical, the art was serious’. Surrealism was a reaction to the First World War and, for him, Roe marshals the characters ‘with great finesse and shows how febrile was the milieu in which they lived’. John Carey, writing in the Sunday
Times, described Roe as a ‘talented writer’ but felt that the book lacked discipline; she ‘greets all things with starry-eyed enthusiasm’ but leaves the reader with a ‘conscientiously detailed muddle’. Dozens of characters appear in this ‘ceaselessly forward-moving narrative’, said Rachel Cooke in the
Guardian. Sue Roe ‘tells and tells and tells’. So much so that the highly colourful story is sometimes ‘wearying to read’.
THE RESTLESS WAVE MY TWO LIVES WITH JOHN BELLANY HELEN BELLANY Sandstone Press, 408pp, £19.99, Oldie price £13.69 inc p&p
The boozy, rackety life of Scottish artist John Bellany took its toll on his body but the brilliance of his talent remained undimmed. He died in 2013, ‘surviving alcoholism, many near-death episodes and a “miraculous” liver transplant’, as his old friend Fiona Green put it in
Camden New Journal. In an extract from her memoir in the Times, his widow Helen recalled a visit to Hastings when he tried to walk to the car: ‘He was still gasping from the effort when one of his teeth fell out. His whole body was disintegrating.’ In the car Bellany stuck the Pogues on the player full-blast. ‘ “F*** IT!” he shouted. And with the last ounce of strength remaining in his body he started hoarsely wheezing out in time with the music. The Pogues roared and the drumbeats picked up the spirit, shaking and reverberating it back to life. So off we went back to London.’ Jackie Mcglone in Herald
Scotland praised ‘a lavishly illustrated, passionate 400-page love letter to a remarkable man, a celebration of a unique talent and a portrait of a great love’, and John Mcewen wrote a paean to both Bellanys in the
Spectator: ‘It seems only natural that his life should be as epic as the world of myth and magic he conjured in his pictures. Helen recognised this. For all her talent she knew she lacked the required ego. In the mission to fulfil the self-proclaimed “grandeur” of his artistic ambition she would be his muse and anchor.’