Mel Gooding – författare

This beautifully illustrated book takes readers inside Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie's dynamic private collection of contemporary British art, an intended gift to the Yale Center for British Art. Spanning the past four decades, the collection includes major works by Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield, and John Walker, as well as important prints by Howard Hodgkin and R. B. Kitaj. At its core are 52 paintings and drawings by John Hoyland, widely considered one of Britain's foremost abstract painters. The Independent Eye features an interview with the Luries, as well as essays by leading critics and writers, some of whom were and are personally acquainted with the artists represented. These experts assess individual artists and works, explore their inspirations and methods, and define their shared experiences and values. They also address subjects such as the overall importance of the collection and postwar art in Britain.Distributed for the Yale Center for British ArtExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(09/16/10-01/02/11)

This is the first full-scale monograph of the life and work of the remarkable British artist Merlyn Evans (1910–73). Deeply affected by the poverty and violence that he witnessed in Glasgow during the depressed years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Evans developed a highly personal abstract style, combining plant, crustacean and mechanical forms. His work was fundamentally shaped by his conviction that art should be an engagement with life, reflecting psychological, ethical and political concerns. Surrealism became a major influence, but Evans’s subject matter became increasingly social and political, reflecting his growing concern over economic distress at home and political disaster in Europe. Living in South Africa at the end of the 1930s, he remained preoccupied by the European crisis, and his paintings made explicit reference to economic depression, atrocity and war. In London afterWorldWar II, he took up etching and aquatint and embarked on a distinguished printmaking career in parallel to his painting. He was deeply read in psychology, philosophy, politics, mechanics, optics, and the history and techniques of art, as well as in modernist literature and contemporary poetry. All these aspects of his thought found expression in his work as an artist and as a writer and teacher.

Cradle of Magic brings together two giants of 20th-century British painting: John Bellany and Alan Davie Alan Davie (1920–2014) was one of the first British artists to explore abstract expressionist forms and techniques, and his gestural paintings, rich with symbolism, demonstrate an interest in tribal art, as well as Zen Buddhism. John Bellany (1942–2013), over a long and prolific career, came to be considered one of Britain's foremost figurative painters. His intimate works, often filled with ghoulish, hybridized creatures, balance the uncanny, joyful and violent in powerful and original ways.The book comes with two different covers—one by each artist—and includes an essay by the acclaimed art historian Mel Gooding exploring the connections between the artists and the themes underpinning their paintings. Also included are two newly transcribed interviews with the artists recorded as part of the Artists' Lives oral history project at the British Library.

Over the past decade, Frank Bowling has enjoyed belated attention and celebration, including a major Tate Britain retrospective in 2019. This comprehensive monograph, published in 2011, is now available in an updated and expanded edition.Born in British Guiana in 1934, Bowling arrived in England in his late teens, going on to study at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Derek Boshier. By the early 1960s he was recognised as an original force in the vibrant London art scene, with a style that brilliantly combined figurative, symbolic and abstract elements.Dividing his time between New York and London since the late 1960s, he has developed a unique and virtuosic abstract style that combines aspects of American painterly abstraction with a treatment of light and space that consciously recollects the great English landscape painters Gainsborough, Turner and Constable. In a compelling text the art writer, critic and curator Mel Gooding hails Bowling as one of the finest British artists of his generation.