Praeterita

“Monotype: Mediums and Methods for Painterly Printmaking,” Julia Ayres (Watson-Guptill, 2001).  Buy the book here . The book that I’m recommending this week is a practical guide to monotype/monoprint (purists say that they are two different kinds of prints, though I tend to say ‘monoprint’ to mean both). A monotype is a print that: starts with an application of ink on a surface, either rolled or painted; is further manipulated by adding to it or wiping parts away; results in a one-off print. This differs from intaglio or relief printmaking because you can make an image very quickly by just painting with pigment, laying paper over it, and applying some pressure. Julia Ayres provides a useful introduction to the history of the monotype, and follows that with chapters containing specific instructions on the different ways of making these prints: additive monotype, subtractive monotype, contact monotype; working with watercolours, oil based inks, and lithographic inks; using ...

'De Kooning: An American Master' by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Knopf, 2004), has everything you need in the biography of an artist: lots of interesting detail about his early life (Holland, poverty, apprenticeship, emigration); glamorous bohemian poverty in the New York of the 1940s; making it as an artist, getting drunk and fighting in the Cedar tavern in the Greenwich Village of the 1950s; multiple marriages, infidelities, a final descent into dementia; and lots of great work. The authors tell all this at great length, yet always at a level that sustains your interest. The following extract is part of their introductory summary to De Kooning's life: Introduction, p. xvi Surprisingly, this was the first major biography of De Kooning in English, even though it came out in 2004. I bought and read it then, and its glorious picture of the artistic milieu of post-war New York still stays with me. ( Buy it here .)   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

'Matisse', Lawrence Gowing, Thames & Hudson, 1979 If you’ve ever seen paintings by Lawrence Gowing (1918-1991), you would recognize the style of the Euston Road School: portraits, interiors, some street scenes, some landscape, still lives; muted colours, covering the full spectrum between brown and dark brown; very moody and quiet in tone; a certain looseness in the paint application, drawing a little from the work of Cezanne, but based on observation; in the context of the time, traditional and quite conservative. In many ways Gowing would be the last person you would expect to write a great book on Matisse. Yet in my opinion this is the best book not just on Matisse’s art, but one of the best books every written on the process of painting itself. In a biography of an artist, such as Hilary Spurling’s excellent two-volume life of Matisse, you don’t expect profound art historical analysis or complex theories about the artistic process. It’s usually enough if the biogr...

This compelling biography by Beth Archer Brombert (published by University of Chicago Press, 1997 - Amazon link here ), brings together most of the existing biographical sources on the artist's life, together with more recent archive material, and presents a constantly illuminating narrative of Manet's life, his friendships with other artists and writers (Monet, Baudelaire, Degas, Morisot, and above all Emile Zola), his times, and his work. Brombert is very good at moving between details of Manet's life, his works, and the society that surrounded them. After discussing the changing nature of sexual relations in mid-nineteenth century Paris, here is her description of 'Olympia': 'Olympia', 1865 "Unlike Titian's alluring goddess, this modern Venus is not a sexual object, a plaything of the gods or men, but a self-possessed, self-assertive individual. Her body may be her stock-in-trade, but it is she who has full control over it. Though a court...

  I first read Matthew Collings’ work in the 1990s, after he began making TV programmes for the BBC and publishing books like Blimey ! In one of those weird connections created by modern technology, he is now one of my Facebook friends – thought I don’t claim this as a particular badge of merit, seeing as he’s ‘friended’ about 35,000 other people, too. However, this recent connection made me pick up Blimey ! again, to see whether my generally positive memory of it would hold up. The title, suggesting a mildly ironic exclamation that someone confronted by early 90s Young British Art would make, sets the tone of the writing: deadpan, literal, consisting of emphatic and declarative statements, employed to apparently mocking effect. I say ‘apparently’ because although he does send up art world pretentiousness, his aim in talking about Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sara Lucas, et al, was not to do a hatchet job on them. When he likes something, Collings’ creates these long, rhythmic, run...

This week's recommended book is 'Poets on Painters', edited by J. D. McClatchy (University of California Press, 1990). A friend gave this to me a few months ago (or at least I think it was a gift!). Several of the entries at the start of the book are familiar essays from the early twentieth century, written by poets in defence of the new art movements of the time. Examples: Ezra Pound on Vorticism, Gertrude Stein's essay 'Pictures', which is from a series of lectures given as part of a lecture tour of the USA in 1931, part-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. But the value of the book lies in the fact that it gathers up a lot of shorter, occasional pieces that don't often get reprinted. They are mainly by American poets - Stevens, cummings, Rexroth, Creeley, Ashbery - but they are full of interesting thoughts on art, which remain interesting even if I don't agree with them. For example, in Against Abstract Expressionism, Randall Jarrell writes: ...

This week I have been reading a biography of the British composer Benjamin Britten, whose music finally clicked for me a few years ago after I saw the Met Opera's production of "Peter Grimes". For British people of a certain age, it's difficult to think of Britten without interference from Dudley Moore's wicked parody, where he plays a Britten-style arrangement of 'Little Miss Moffet' and sings it like Peter Pears. Pears was Britten's lover for many decades, and a singer who performed in the premieres of many of Britten's works. Carpenter's biography is very good on the dynamics of their relationship, its ups and downs, and ins and outs, as it were. The portrait he paints of Britten is of a musical genius who could be pretty ruthless, collaborating with librettists, organisers of the Aldeburgh festival, and other musicians for years, and then suddenly dropping them or firing them with no second thoughts. But it's clear that Carpenter lik...

Starting today, a new feature in which I write about an arts-related book that I am reading. First, "Oskar Kokoschka: A Life", by Frank Whitford (Atheneum, 1986). This biography of the Austrian Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka is a good introduction to the artist and his life. It’s a little unbalanced, devoting half of its pages to the first thirty years of his life, and then squeezing the succeeding decades into the remaining pages. But the author may have taken that decision because Kokoschka lived into his nineties, and all the interesting stuff happened to him by the time he was in his mid-thirties. And Kokoschka’s early adulthood was fascinating. I’ve known the outlines of his biography since I first got to know his work when I was a teenager, but this book told me lots of stuff I didn’t know. For example: his first training in art school was as a printmaker, and not a painter; when he exhibited his paintings for the first time in about 1908, his first plays were al...