Interviews with Artists 1966-2012


Book Description

A collection of forty interviews by Michael Peppiatt with artists from 1966 to 2012.




Soho in the Eighties


Book Description

A fascinating glimpse into 1980s Soho by leading journalist and writer Christopher Howse. In the 1980s Daniel Farson published Soho in the Fifties. This memoir is a sequel from the Eighties, a decade that saw the brilliant flowering of a daily tragi-comedy enacted in pubs like the Coach and Horses or the French and in drinking clubs like the Colony Room. These were places of constant conversation and regular rows fuelled by alcohol. The cast was more improbable than any soap opera. Some were widely known – Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Tom Baker or John Hurt. Just as important were the character actors: the Village Postmistress, the Red Baron, Granny Smith. The bite came from the underlying tragedy: lost spouses, lost jobs, pennilessness, homelessness and death. Christopher Howse recaptures the lost Soho he once knew as home, its cellar cafés and butchers' shops, its villains and its generosity. While it lasted, time in those smoky rooms always seemed to be half past ten, not long to closing time. As the author relates, he never laughed so much as he did in Soho in the Eighties.




33 Artists in 3 Acts


Book Description

This compelling narrative goes behind the scenes with the world’s most important living artists to humanize and demystify contemporary art. The best-selling author of Seven Days in the Art World now tells the story of the artists themselves—how they move through the world, command credibility, and create iconic works. 33 Artists in 3 Acts offers unprecedented access to a dazzling range of artists, from international superstars to unheralded art teachers. Sarah Thornton's beautifully paced, fly-on-the-wall narratives include visits with Ai Weiwei before and after his imprisonment and Jeff Koons as he woos new customers in London, Frankfurt, and Abu Dhabi. Thornton meets Yayoi Kusama in her studio around the corner from the Tokyo asylum that she calls home. She snoops in Cindy Sherman’s closet, hears about Andrea Fraser’s psychotherapist, and spends quality time with Laurie Simmons, Carroll Dunham, and their daughters Lena and Grace. Through these intimate scenes, 33 Artists in 3 Acts explores what it means to be a real artist in the real world. Divided into three cinematic "acts"—politics, kinship, and craft—it investigates artists' psyches, personas, politics, and social networks. Witnessing their crises and triumphs, Thornton turns a wry, analytical eye on their different answers to the question "What is an artist?" 33 Artists in 3 Acts reveals the habits and attributes of successful artists, offering insight into the way these driven and inventive people play their game. In a time when more and more artists oversee the production of their work, rather than make it themselves, Thornton shows how an artist’s radical vision and personal confidence can create audiences for their work, and examines the elevated role that artists occupy as essential figures in our culture.




Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1962-1979


Book Description

This book with its subsequent revised and augmented editions--has been considered a classic of its kind, and that reputation has become worldwide. As a discussion of problems of making art today it has been widely influential not only among artist but among writers and musicians. It has also been seen as the most revealing portrait that exists of one of the most singular artistic personalities of our times.




Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Art


Book Description

The Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Art illuminates important artists, styles, and movements of the past 70 years. Beginning with the immediate post-World War II period, it encompasses earlier 20th century masters, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, and other well-known figures, who remained creatively productive, while also inspiring younger generations. The book covers subsequent developments, including abstract expressionism, happenings, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, arte povera, feminist art, photorealism, neo-expressionism, and postmodernism, as well as the contributions of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol, Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Joseph Beuys, Christo, Anselm Kiefer, Judy Chicago, Ai Weiwei, and Jeff Koons. Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Art contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography, including more than 900 cross-referenced entries on important artists, styles, terms, and movements.This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about contemporary art.




Hendrix on Hendrix


Book Description

Though many books have chronicled Jimi Hendrix's brilliant but tragically brief musical career, this is the first to use his own words to paint a detailed portrait of the man behind the guitar.




Creative States of Mind


Book Description

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist’s state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist’s first inkling or ‘pre-sense’, through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’, and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist’s process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.




Regarding Warhol


Book Description

This sumptuous volume presents the first full-scale exploration of warhol's tremendous influence across the generations of artists that have succeeded him. Warhol brought to the art world a unique awareness of the relationship that art might have with popular consumer culture and tabloid news, with celebrity, and with sexuality. Each of these themes is explored through visual dialogues between warhol and some sixty artists, among them John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Damien Hirst, Alfredo Jaar, Deborah Kass, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and Luc Tuymans. These juxtapositions not only demonstrate warhol's overt influence but also suggest how artists have either worked in parallel modes or developed his model in dynamic new directions. Featuring commentary by many of the world's leading contemporary artists, as well as a major essay by the celebrated critic Mark Rosenthal and an extensive illustrated chronology, Regarding Warhol is an out-standing publication that will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary art.




The Making of Modern Art


Book Description

A new collection of key texts from a leading critic of modern art The critic Michael Peppiatt has been described by Art Newspaper as “the best art writer of his generation.” For more than 50 years, he has written trenchant and lively dispatches from the center of the international art world. In this new volume of key works, Peppiatt gives his unique insight into the making, collection, display, and interpretation of modern art. Covering the whole spectrum of modern art—from pioneers such as Gustav Klimt and Chaim Soutine, to collectors and dealers who played a pivotal role in the modern art world, to artists such as Francis Bacon, Bill Jacklin, and Frank Auerbach, with whom he had close relationships—Peppiatt interweaves personal anecdote with critical judgment. Each text is accompanied by a new short introduction, written in Peppiatt’s signature vivid and jargon-free style, in which he contextualizes his writings and reflects on significant moments in a lifetime of artistic engagement. This volume will provide readers with an exhilarating tour of 20th-century art.




Francis Bacon in Your Blood


Book Description

It is a story I have been wanting to write for a long time, telling it as it really was before that whole world that I shared with Francis vanishes... Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine that he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death thirty years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him, from Lucian Freud and Sonia Orwell to East End thugs; from predatory homosexuals to Andy Warhol and the Duke of Devonshire. He also frequently discussed painting with Bacon in his studio, where only the artist's closest friends were ever admitted. The Soho photographer, John Deakin, who introduced the young student to the famous artist, called Peppiatt 'Bacon's Boswell'. Despite the chaos that Bacon created around him, Peppiatt managed to record scores of their conversations ranging over every aspect of life and art, love and death, the revelatory and hilarious as well as the poignantly tragic. Gradually Bacon became a kind of father figure for Peppiatt, and the two men's lives grew closely intertwined. In this intimate and deliberately indiscreet account, Bacon is shown close-up, grand and petty, tender and treacherous by turn, and often quite unlike the myth that has grown up around him. This is a speaking portrait, a living likeness, of the defining artist of our times.




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