The World New Made: Figurative Painting In The Twentieth Century Hardcover

Timothy Hyman

Figurative painting is due a reappraisal. In this passionately argued volume the distinguished writer and artist Timothy Hyman cuts a new path through the tangle of twentieth century art. The World New Made explores the work of more than fifty individual painters, presenting a collective `Resistance' who together offer a human-centred alternative to the dominance of the Abstract or the Conceptual in conventional narratives of modern art. Structured not as a survey but as in-depth studies of more than 130 specific artworks, this lavishly illustrated book brings these often-marginalized artists centre-stage: not just Alice Neel and Balthus, Max Beckmann and Frida Kahlo, but also Marsden Hartley and Charlotte Salomon, Bhupen Khakhar and Jacob Lawrence. A rich cast is brought to life, partly through their own writings. As the author argues, `All across the world, isolated artists found new idioms for human-centred painting in the midst of modern life.' Starting out from the `reinvention of representation' that followed Cubism (with artists that include Leger, Chagall and Carra), The World New Made guides the reader through the `New Thingness' [Neue Sachlichkeit], where individuals as various as Dix, Grosz and Burra rejected Expressionist histrionics. A new emphasis on the artist as protagonist emerges in painters ranging from Pierre Bonnard to Stanley Spencer, while visionaries and `Outsiders' (such as Rabindranath Tagore, Ken Kiff and Henry Darger) present new challenges. In the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, in the work of artists from R. B. Kitaj to Leon Golub and William Kentridge, a new `history painting' is glimpsed. This powerful new book, distilled from many decades of looking, painting and writing, assembles the free spirits who offer a counter-argument to Western formalism and a foundation for the figurative painters of the twenty-first century. With 158 illustrations

9780500239452

English

Thames & Hudson Ltd

15/Nov/16

256

Timothy Hyman is well known both as a writer on art and a painter. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2011 and is an honorary research fellow at University College London. He has exhibited widely and his work is in many public collections, including the British Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Deutsche Bank Collection. He was lead curator of Tate's major Stanley Spencer retrospective exhibition and has written a pioneering monograph on Bhupen Khakhar. His articles have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Magazine, and he is the author of Bonnard and Sienese Painting, both published by Thames & Hudson.

A delight: deeply but lightly erudite, intimate, written with exquisite intelligence' - The Australian 'A thing of beauty' - Sunday Times 'Brings together decades of critical viewing and reading into a richly thoughtful text' - Times Literary Supplement 'This magnificent book by a practising painter ... will change for ever our sense of the "story" of modern art' - Gabriel Josipovici 'Highly original ... there are brilliant insights and connections on every page' - David Bindman 'Magnificently illustrated, this is art history at its most eye-popping and also - thanks to philosophical forays in which Hyman explores identity and the friction between self and society - it's most brain-tickling' - Observer (Peter Conrad's Books of the Year) 'It's time that the balance was redressed, and Timothy Hyman's scholarly and enjoyable book sets about the task with great vigour. The quality of the writing makes the reader want to look again and more closely at the artists discussed' - The Spectator 'Wonderfully concrete in detail and wide-ranging in scope, Timothy Hyman's 'The World New Made' constructs a new and convincing scenario for the history of twentieth-century painting' - Linda Nochlin