Paperback edition of a highly aclaimed 1990 monograph which was the first full study of the artist's work, with 254 illustrations, 174 in duotone and 80 in colour. Auerbach himself selected the paintings for the book as representing the most important of his career. The author is a well-known writer, critic and television presenter and art critic of TTime' magazine. Previous books include TThe Shock of the New' and TThe Fatal Shore'.

Includes essays on the figurative painter's energetic, brilliantly colored landscapes & portraits that recall the Old Masters.

Martin Gayford’s masterful account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated by documentary photographs and the works themselves The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s has never before been told before as a single narrative. R. B. Kitaj’s proposal, made in 1976, that there was a “substantial School of London” was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley. Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint.

“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” —ARTnews Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation at restaurants, in taxis, and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon were friends and contemporaries, as were writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden. The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other works, telling photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud in his studio, and images by such great artists of the past as van Gogh and Titian who are discussed by Freud and Gayford. Full of wry observations, the book reveals the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art.

"This is the most comprehensive publication to date and the only book in print on the work of Frank Auerbach, a painter who in recent years has become one of the preeminent artists of our age, widely admired for his vivid, impulsive, depictions of the world around him." "Auerbach, who was born in Berlin in 1931 and came to Britain when he was eight, paints, repeatedly, people he knows well and places he is familiar with. His drawings and paintings are strikingly immediate; their impact has urgency; they relate in various ways as much to certain preferred Old Masters as to the contemporary artists with whom he tends to be associated, notably Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud." "The book is definitive, featuring as it does 200 color plates together with a separate reference section comprising around 1,000 images-many of them not previously reproduced." --Book Jacket.