MODERNISTS & MAVERICKS

Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin were among a number of acclaimed artists painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s. This is the story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences and artistic concerns, drawing on extensive first-hand interviews, many previously unpublished, with important witnesses and participants. The art critic Martin Gayford teases out the thread connecting these individual lives, and demonstrates how painting thrives against the backdrop of Soho Bohemia in the 1940s and 1950s, and Swinging London in the 1960s. He shows how, influenced by such different teachers as David Bomberg and William Coldstream, and aware of the work of contemporaries such as Jackson Pollack and the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the post-war painters were allied in their confidence that this ancient medium, in opposition to photography and other media, could do fresh and marvellous things. An admirable and authoritative work of art criticism and an intimate inspection of the London art scene, the book is rich in anecdotes and aperçus. Other names include Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones, Daphne Todd and John Wonnacott. Without Bacon, or the equally idiosyncratic Freud, Riley or Hockney, the story that follows would surely have been quite different. A superb heavyweight tome of 352pp with dozens of glorious colour illustrations and other photographs and examples throughout. 114 illus.