The House of Dudley

The first monograph on Richard Smith, a key figure in the development of British art.Richard Smith (1931-2016) was one of the most original painters of his generation, and one of the most underrated. As Barbara Rose said of Smith’s major Tate Gallery retrospective in 1975, he was ‘at once in and out of touch with the currents of the mainstream … au courant and aloof at the same time.’ That he latterly slipped under the radar to some extent is partly explained by his detachment from the mainstream as well as by his frequent switching of studios between England and the USA, although this helped charge his creative batteries. He is the only artist of his stature who has not been represented by a monograph, which the dazzling presentation of images in Richard Smith: Artworks now fulfils. It has been produced with the generous collaboration of the Richard Smith Foundation. Richard Smith: Artworks traces Smith’s entire career, from the breakthrough lyrical abstraction of the early Pop-inflected paintings, through the radical shaped canvases and three-dimensional works that he produced in the 1960s, to the ‘Kite’ works beginning in 1972 and, eventually, his return to the flat canvas. As a Senior Curator at Tate, Dr Chris Stephens knew Smith well, and he contributes a wide-ranging introduction to Smith’s art and life. Prof David Alan Mellor investigates and explains the Anglo-American cultural contexts that drove Smith’s art, while Alex Massouras’s two themed essays, ‘Young and British’ and ‘From Motion Pictures to Flight’, explore Smith’s originality from fresh perspectives. The book is completed with an Afterword by its editor, Martin Harrison.

A compelling and lively history that examines the lives of British artists from the late-19th century to today.

In This is Tomorrow Michael Bird takes a fresh look at the ‘long twentieth century’, from the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign to the turn of the millennium, through the lens of the artists who lived and worked in this ever-changing Britain. Bird examines how the rhythms of change and adaptation in art became embedded in the collective consciousness of the nation and vividly evokes the personalities who populate and drive this story, looking beyond individual careers and historical moments to weave together interconnecting currents of change that flowed through London, Glasgow, Leeds, Cornwall, the Caribbean, New York, Moscow and Berlin. From the American James McNeill Whistler’s defence of his new kind of modern art against the British art establishment in the latter half of the 19th century to the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s melting icebergs in London, he traverses the lives of the artists that have recorded, questioned and defined our times.

At the heart of this original book are the successive waves of displacement caused by global wars and persecution that conversely brought fresh ideas and new points of view to the British Isles; educational reforms opened new routes for young people from working-class backgrounds; movements of social change enabled the emergence of female artists and artists of colour; and the emergence of the mass media shaped modern modes of communication and culture. These are the ebbs and flows that Michael Bird teases out in this panoramic account of Britain and its artists in across the twentieth century.