Bøker av Martin Gayford

David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he journeys through lockdown in rural Normandy.

A record of a private conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, this title reveals via reflection, anecdote, passion and humour the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface.

The making of pictures has a history going back perhaps 100,000 years to an African shell used as a paint palette. In this book, each chapter addresses an important question: What happens when we try to express reality in two dimensions? Why is the 'Mona Lisa' beautiful and why are shadows so rarely found in Chinese, Japanese and Persian painting?

As a way of making images, pigment applied to any surface from cave wall to canvas, painting has been around for tens of thousands of years. Yet it has proved capable of endless renewal. Now in the third decade of the twenty-first century it is once more at the forefront of contemporary art. How Painting Happens will consider how and why this is so, examining this perennial medium through the eyes of its exponents past and present.Martin Gayford will draw on interviews carried out over more than two decades with, among many others, Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Georg Baselitz, Frank Bowling, Richard Estes, Lucian Freud, Katharina Fritsch, Rebecca Horn, Shirazeh Houshiary, Lee Ufan, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Frank Stella, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Luc Tuymans, and Zeng Fanzhi.These diverse artists talk about how they work, the different routes by which they came to be painters, their contemporaries, and predecessors. With painters' insight they discuss such previous exponents of the brush as Titian, El Greco, Edward Hopper, Suzanne Valadon, Petrus Christus, Van Gogh, Degas, Klee, and Delacroix.Altogether, this book will present a fresh, multidimensional perspective on the medium--so ancient and yet simultaneously so modern, and still capable of doing things no other art form can.

A visual journey through five centuries of the city known for centuries as 'La Serenissima' ¿ a unique and compelling story for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art. Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. The achievements of the Bellini brothers, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese are a key part of this story. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: Turner, Monet, Sargent, Hodgkin, and many more. Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner, and others enrich this tale. Nor is the story over. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world, and it remains the site of important artistic events. The last chapter concludes in 2022, with discussion of work by, among others, Bill Viola, Marina Abramovic, and Ai Weiwei. In this elegant volume, Gayford ¿ who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, covered every Biennale since 1990, and even had portraits of himself exhibited there on several occasions ¿ takes us on a visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known as 'La Serenissima', the Most Serene. It is a unique and compelling portrait of Venice for both lovers of the city and lovers of its art.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'A burst of springtime joy' Daily Telegraph 'A springboard for ideas about art, space, time and light' The Times 'Lavishly illustrated' Guardian David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural Normandy On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquility for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year before, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art. Spring Cannot be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art's capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney's new, unpublished Normandy iPad drawings and paintings alongside works by van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, colour, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see... but about how to live.

Brings together, for the first time, Lucian Freud's oil on copper paintings, including his lost portrait of Francis Bacon and two works that have never been reproduced before.

David Hockney (b 1937) has always been closely associated with Pop Art and California, where he has lived for much of his life. This study of his work redefines him as an important painter of the English countryside, addressing the artists place in the landscape tradition, his video works and their relationship to English landscape film-making.

First published to accompany Piano Nobile's exhibiton at Piano Nobile Kings Place, Thomas Newbolt: Drama Paintings - A Modern Baroque, this fully colour illustrated book presents a substantial publication on contemporary artist Thomas Newbolt.

One of our leading art critics and writers, Martin Gayford, recounts his travels and meetings with the world's greatest artists.

A masterfully narrated account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated throughout with documentary photographs and works of art

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) spent seven months painting a portrait of the author who is an art critic. In this title, he describes the process chronologically, from the day he arrived for the first sitting through to his meeting with the couple who bought the finished painting.

Two artistic giants. One small house. From October to December 1888 a pair of largely unknown artists lived under one roof in the French provincial town of Arles. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh ate, drank, talked, argued, slept and painted in one of the most intense and astonishing creative outpourings in history. Yet as the weeks passed Van Gogh buckled under the strain, fought with his companion and committed an act of violence on himself that prompted Gauguin to flee without saying goodbye to his friend. The Yellow House is an intimate portrait of their time together as well as a subtle exploration of a fragile friendship, art, madness, genius and the shocking act of self-mutilation that the world has sought to explain ever since.

At thirty one, Michelangelo was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the world; long before he died at almost 90 he was widely believed to be the greatest sculptor or painter who had ever lived (and, by his enemies, to be an arrogant, uncouth, swindling miser).For decade after decade, he worked near the dynamic centre of events: the vortex at which European history was changing from Renaissance to Counter Reformation. Few of his works - including the huge frescoes of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the marble giant David and the Last Judgment - were small or easy to accomplish. Like a hero of classical mythology - such as Hercules, whose statue he carved in his youth - he was subject to constant trials and labours.In Michelangelo Martin Gayford describes what it felt like to be Michelangelo Buonarroti, and how he transformed forever our notion of what an artist could be.

When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of a Suffolk country neighbour, he little knew how long it would take to make her his wife. The impediment to their marriage was simple: 'that necessary article cash'. He was a painter without sufficient funds to support the daughter of a prominent London lawyer, and both he and her grandfather, the formidable (and sometimes comical) Rector of East Bergholt, disapproved of the match. It would be seven long, difficult years before they could marry, but in that time he would become one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century.Martin Gayford writes superbly about Constable's early years as a painter and Maria and John's correspondence provides the lively backdrop to the story; one of lovers' tiffs, London versus country life, encounters with Turner, Byron and Wordsworth, royal scandals and rivalries at the Royal Academy. All the time, John Constable battles to become a painter who can earn his living and win Maria's hand.