Modernists and Mavericks / Martin Gayford

Appreciating art is such a visual experience but Martin Gayford in his writings always does a fine job of bringing it to life.

He informs on the artist, many of whom he has interviewed and some of whom he knows better than that; he helps visualise a picture not merely by its composition, illuminating its context, content and position in the body of the artist ‘s work and the art movement of the times.

In Modernists and Mavericks he depicts the London post-World War Two painters. Even though there has been a great debate in British art between the figurative and abstract it’s more accurate to classify painters by reference to their milieu.

William Coldstream in Euston, Frank Auerbach in and of Camden Town; Francis Bacon of Soho in the fifties. Each is carefully considered as well as David Hockney and Lucian Freud.

Their art education is recounted and their life experiences too.

David Hockney was born in provincial Bradford, came down to London which initially excited him but when he got bored with closing times and post-war drabness, he found first New York and then Los Angeles the more exciting.

This might explain why many believe his best work was in the 1960s.

Francis Bacon, a true maverick, had self destructive force – he himself destroyed much of his earlier work and young men, champagne and gambling were always more appealing to him than the easel.

Because he sat for Lucian Freud and wrote a very good book about it Gayford is particularly perceptive in explaining his horizontal naked women.

You have the sense – probably an accurate one – that the painter has just had sex with them.

Picasso and then Bacon denigrated British art as ‘pretty’ or ‘decorative’, critical adjectives that exist to this day.

It’s unfair as, however much a Bacon may be worth or esteemed, could you really live with a homo-erotic violent Bacon on your wall?

The other day I heard a rich friend of mine talk of a visit to the yacht owned by a well-known billionaire based in the Bahamas. My friend said admiringly he has Bacons. Okay but put them up,on your wall not mine.

Equally do you want to look all day at the marbled white flesh and vagina of a Freud naked study?

Give me the rich colours of a Matisse view from the balcony to the sea any day of the week. To be fair to Gayford, he avoids taking a position.

However much Bacon might decry figurative artists, he writes, he is one at heart.

Another aspect of this book I especially liked is how the pictures are woven into the text. In a catalogue or art book, pictures and text are quite separate. Here as Gayford discusses a picture so it appears and very often too it’s inspiration.

This might be in the case of Hockney’s The Room, Tarzona a Macy’s advert for a bed.

Informative but not over opinionated, I would certainly recommend this book to art lover or non art lover alike.