Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters [Hardcover]

Well-researched& a fascinating look at postwar London artists, filled with entertaining figures.If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it. You soon will be.Martin Gayford has been talking with artists for 30 years. He doesnt just nip into the studio with a notepad: he has a gift for sustaining conversations that unfold across decades& 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.[A] superb survey of British painting from 1945 to 1970, London& Gayford recounts the artists lives and their travails with sympathy and understanding& [a] wonderfully accomplished book, full of anecdotes and aper?us.Superb& Gayford deploys Bacons voice to brilliant effect, and you hang on to every word& This is a book about community and influence; about the connections, sometimes powerfully strong and sometimes only thread-like, between artists of dizzying talent and wildly varying impulses.Theres a wonderful sense of intimacy and an abundance of critical insights in Martin Gayfords vivid portrait of Britains post-World War II modernist painters& Well-documented and elegantly written&Gayford covers terrain from the historical to the biographical, from the sociological to the psychological, from the stylistic to the technical.Through interviews, anecdotes, and ample illustrations, Gayford brings to life Londons art world& By focusing on the art, Gayford convinces readers that postwar-London artists were right: painting really can do marvelous things.A radical reassessment of the School of London canon& Engaging and erudite& Gayford offers a rethinking of his complex subject that is pluralĂ#