British Artists – serie

When Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucufixion was exhibited in 1945 Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992) instantly became the most controversial painter in the country. By the end of his life his status as one of the giants of modern art was established, as was his reputation for hard drinking and heavy gambling. Andrew Brighton casts fresh light on Bacon's formation as an artist in gay and aristocratic bohemian London circles. He locates Bacon at the core of contesting ideas and values, while firmly grounding his reading of Bacon's work in an understanding of his working methods and technique. Penetrating the seeming horror of Bacon's painting this book reveals the ideas, the beliefs and the life that formed one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century.

Patrick Caulfield was a student at the Royal College of Art between 1960-63 alongside David Hockney and Allen Jones. His subject matter draws more from the masters of modern art such as Braque and Gris than from the consumer culture that preoccupied his fellow students. His work is characterised by a reductive, streamlined use of line and the depiction of banal, everyday objects saturated in colour. Caulfield consistently used screenprint for his graphic work following his introduction to the medium by Richard Hamilton and Chris Prater in 1964. The deceptive simplicity of his images, perfectly matched by the aesthetic capacities of the process, is clear throughout the various phases of his printmaking career. During his lifetime the Serpentine Gallery, the Hayward Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London all held major retrospectives of his paintings. More recently his prints were the subject of a survey at Tate Liverpool. Caulfield died in 2005 having made an indelible contribution to British painting and printmaking.

Alfred Wallis spent most of his life in the Cornish ports of Newlyn, Penzance and St Ives, and went to sea as a young man. His main occupation was as a dealer in marine supplies and he was in his seventies before he took up painting 'for company'. He sold his works for a few pence, and died in the poorhouse. Wallis is now recognised as one of the most original British artists of the twentieth century, the directness of his 'primitive' vision and the object-like quality of his paintings being highly valued. This book revises previous accounts of Wallis's life in the light of new research and traces the development of his painting over seventeen years. It also looks at the mythology that grew up around Wallis and at the sustained interest in the irascible eccentric whose work affected a generation of British artists.

Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) was one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century, first coming to international prominence with his famous 'white reliefs' of the 1930s. A pioneer of abstract art in Britain, he played a significant role in the European avantgarde, forming close links with Picasso, Braque, Arp, Mondrian and others. At the same time he had a strong sense of tradition, maintaining a life-long attachment to landscape and still-life forms. Central to the establishment of a modernist art community in St Ives, Nicholson's importance as a disseminator of international avant-garde ideas in Britain cannot be overstated. His career spanned more than 60 years and embraced carved reliefs, paintings, drawings and prints. Virginia Button's engaging, fully illustrated survey provides a detailed examination of Nicholson's life and work in St Ives, giving a thorough introduction as well as new insights into the evolving practice of this major artist over a period of six decades.