Richard Calvocoressi – författare

A pioneering collector of Cubist art, the English art historian and critic Douglas Cooper was one of the most important—and divisive—figures in the international art world of the 20th century  Born into a wealthy family whose money was made in the 19th century in Australia, Douglas Cooper (1911–1984) built up much of his collection of works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger in the 1930s. He also trained himself to become a respected art historian, his reputation as a scholar resting largely on his catalogue of the Courtauld Collection (1954) and his catalogue raisonné of Juan Gris (1977). He also organised exhibitions of Gauguin, Braque, and two major displays of Cubism. The second of these, The Essential Cubism, co-curated with Gary Tinterow and held at the Tate in 1983, was one of the most remarkable accumulations of Cubist painting, sculpture, and drawings ever brought together.  Based on extensive research and packed with new material and fresh interpretations, Irascible focuses on Cooper’s colourful life and significant accomplishments: his financing and directorship of the Mayor Gallery in London as a young man in the 1930s, when he became close to artists such as Francis Bacon, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst; his wartime experiences as an ambulance driver in support of the collapsing French army in 1940; his job as a senior Monuments Man in charge of tracking down Nazi-looted art in Switzerland; his move to the south of France in the early 1950s, taking his collection with him; and his legendary feuds with leading figures and institutions in the British art world. This book is also the definitive account of Cooper’s collecting, art dealing, writing, and curating.

A prolific artist with a protean output, Georg Baselitz has rethought the conventions of a range of media, predominantly painting and sculpture, over the course of a career of some sixty years. Born in 1938, Baselitz was expelled from art school in East Berlin in 1956 for ‘socio-political immaturity’, and moved to the western half of the city. By the late 1950s, he had rejected the dominant tendencies of both sides of the country and his singular achievement was to reintroduce the figure, compromised and discredited though it was by both Nazism and Communism, into art. By drawing attention to art by ‘outsiders’, such as psychiatric patients, and invoking a Parisian model of existentialist art and literature, Baselitz proposed an alternative European tradition that did not eliminate the human subject. In alluding later to movements in German painting such as Expressionism as well as to artists like Munch, he also consciously rehabilitated the kind of art that was condemned by Hitler as ‘degenerate’. The book follows the development of Baselitz’s unique style from his earliest work through to the most recent creations of his eighth decade. Calvocoressi’s masterful construction of a chronological narrative helps us to evaluate Baselitz’s work in terms of the disruptions of his life – historical upheavals witnessed alongside an astonishing career.With 406 illustrations in colour