Charles Saumarez Smith – författare

Sir John Vanbrugh was one of Britain’s greatest architects and the designer of some of the most important and best beloved English country houses, including Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. This beautifully illustrated biography draws on close study of Vanbrugh's letters to bring to life his ideas, beliefs, friendships and buildings, as well as providing insight into his professional practice and working relationships. Vanbrugh was, by the standards of architects of the time, a worldly figure, friend and ally of the great, with a strong sense of the imaginative characteristics of architecture, its power of evocation, and the emotional impact of a building’s massing, particularly when compared to the more disciplined and scholarly work of his contemporaries Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor.Charles Saumarez Smith paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose architecture was shaped by his personality. The book also explores Vanbrugh's activities as a playwright and theatre manager, his circle of friends, his place in 18th-century society, and, in a final section, his influence on later architects from Robert Adam to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

The National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy all saw either radical architectural interventions or rethinks of their mission under Charles Saumarez Smith’s leadership, making him uniquely qualified to explore the ways in which art museums have changed over the past century and examine where they might be headed in the future. For this book, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey to art museums across the globe. From Tate Modern in London to the Benesse House Museum on the Japanese island of Naoshima; from the Getty Center in Los Angeles to the Museum of New and Old Art, a ferry-ride from Hobart in Tasmania; from the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the West Bund Museum in Shanghai – he has visited them all, casting an acute eye on the way the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it and the organizing principles by which it is displayed. What has changed over the past century? Where the public once visited museums to be educated in art history, he argues, they are now more likely to be in search of a private, aesthetic experience. Museum displays that were automatically didactic, chronological and either national or Western in viewpoint are now thematic and global. While museums used to be invariably in city centres, they may now be in remote locations, destinations of cultural pilgrimage. And where architects once created neutral spaces in which to display art, they now build spectacular architectural landmarks, stamping an identity on run-down neighbourhoods and sparking regeneration through cultural tourism. With 122 illustrations in colour

In this first major study of the work of the painter John Wonnacott (b.1940), Charles Saumarez Smith has surveyed a body of work produced at a tangent to the orthodoxies of modernism. Exploring the artist's formative experiences at the Slade, which connected him with artists such as Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews and the School of London more broadly, Saumarez Smith roots Wonnacott's approach in his commitment to the discipline of drawing, his acute skills in observational analysis and the mechanics of graphic invention that makes his visual response to the world so memorable. Alongside commissioned portraits created in the grandest of architectural spaces, from naval bases to the Painted Hall at Greenwich and including John Major in 10 Downing Street and the Royal Family in Buckingham Palace, he has produced a revealing diary of self-portraits stretching back from his early teens and landscape paintings of light and sky which are celebrations of his native Essex coastline. In presenting the full range of Wonnacott's impressive oeuvre, the scope of the artist's remarkable achievement is revealed.