Alicia Foster – författare

Warpaint by Alicia Foster is a compelling tale of truth and lies, tragedy and black comedy, loosely based on the lives of four painters of the time.England, 1942: a dark world of conflict, hardship and subterfuge where information is a matter of life and death and art has become a weapon.In a gothic villa deep in the woods near Bletchley Park, the 'Black' propaganda team use intelligence to make propaganda designed to demoralise the enemy. For Vivienne Thayer, employed as an artist at the villa, the war has worked out well so far, she has an indulgent husband and a new lover. And while the government quibbles over what cannot be shown officially, at the villa there are no such restrictions - but where does the subterfuge end?Meanwhile, on the Home Front, three women painters - Laura Knight, Faith Farr and Cecily Browne - have been tasked by the War Artist's Advisory Committee with recording wartime life, brightening the existence of a public starved of culture, and summoning up the bulldog spirit in their art. Together they must battle with the men in power, including Churchill himself, to control the stories that can be told.As the course of the war turns and the lives of both groups collide, each woman must ask herself what can be revealed and what must be concealed, even from those closest to them.Alicia Foster grew up in Yorkshire and lives in Kent. She has a PhD in Art History and when she's not writing herself, she teaches art students. Warpaint is her first novel.

A beautifully written and fascinating new history of early twentieth century bohemian London, one that places forgotten female voices firmly at its centreEarly 20th century bohemian London was supposedly a home for outsiders, but accounts of it have been dominated by a set who were born insiders: the well-connected and wealthy Bloomsbury Group of Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey. But we have neglected another Bohemia, that of artists who did not fit that rarefied world - and are now mainly forgotten. And because the occupants of the fringes, and the forgotten, often find their way there because of their sex, this alternative Bohemia is a story of women. In THE REAL BOHEMIANS, Alicia Foster gives us the stories of twelve women, well known whilst alive but increasingly lost to us. These were artists, writers and performers who operated as outsiders, but whose work and influence was profound. Through a series of meetings between them, against a backdrop of the haunts of bohemian London - bedsits and flats, Soho and the Café Royal on Piccadilly - these lives and the influence of their work, are unveiled.Featuring: Katherine Mansfield * George Banks * Anne Estelle Rice * Jessica Dismorr * Helen Saunders * Katie Gliddon * Dora Carrington * Dolly Henry * Laura Knight * Lydia Lopokova * Iris Tree * Nancy Cunard * Nina Hamnett * Dorelia McNeill

A Sunday Times Art Book of the Year: the first critical illustrated biography of this much-loved artist, locating her firmly in the art worlds of late 19th- and early 20th-century London and Paris. One of the most significant British artists of the twentieth century, Gwen John (1867-1939) made her life and work within the heady art worlds of London and Paris. This critical biography demolishes the myth of Gwen John as a recluse and situates her, brilliant, singular and assured, amid a rich cultural milieu that included James McNeill Whistler, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Maude Gonne. Art historian, curator and novelist Alicia Foster draws on previously unpublished archival sources to explore John’s many relationships with artists and writers, including her affair with Auguste Rodin, passionate friendships with Jeanne Robert Foster and Véra Oumançoff, and correspondence with, among others, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and her Slade compatriot and fellow painter Ursula Tyrwhitt. John’s library, ranging from writing by her friends Rilke and Arthur Symonds to French philosophy and religious thought, is considered, as is her part in the increasing presence and visibility of women artists in the early-twentieth-century art world. From the life rooms of the Slade to the Paris salons, this is the story of an artist both devoted to her craft and deeply involved in the life and creativity of her era. With over 120 illustrations, Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris offers a lively, meticulously researched portrait of Gwen John as a vital and utterly compelling figure in twentieth-century art history.

Radical Women tells an original story of British modernism from the perspective of Jessica Dismorr's career, along with the women artists - some famous, some lesser-known - she worked and exhibited with.The work of Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939) has been described as encapsulating 'the stylistic developments of twentieth-century British Art', and her oeuvre certainly encompasses some of its most exciting moments - from Rhythm in the early 1910s, through Vorticism, towards post-war modernist figuration and finally into the abstraction she shared with radical political artists groups in the 1930s. Within this period of intense creativity, which extended beyond art to literary and design accomplishments too, Dismorr was privileged to work and exhibit alongside some of the most exciting female artists of the time, including Barbara Hepworth and Winifred Nicholson, to lesser-known figures such as Dorothy Shakespear, Anne Estelle Rice and Helen Saunders. Bringing a web of fascinating connections to light for the first time, this publication provides a fresh interpretation of a pioneering period and the role women played within it.