Bøger af Frances Spalding

The National Portrait Gallery's series of compact, fully illustrated, historical guides to literary and artistic personalities and themes. Written by well-known contemporary writers, they use works from the Gallery's Collection to examine the lives, thoughts and relationships within each selected group.

Spalding reveals and explores the intimate relationship between the course of Stevie Smith's life and the evolution of her art, into which she assimilated not simply the events and emotions of her private life, but the influences on her imagination of her wide and varied reading.

The moving story of the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf, revealed through her own letters to those closest to her.

The Times and Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 'Superb ... Spalding is a lucid and revealing guide who wears her scholarship lightly' Sunday Times 'Spalding¿s prose is as clear as a Ravilious greenhouse, her thoughts as orderly as a Ben Nicholson white relief' The Times A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain's leading art historians and critics. The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names ¿ Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer ¿ have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britain¿s leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange. Throughout these years, the pursuit of `the real¿ was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the `romantic¿, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.

Vanessa Bell is central to the history of the Bloomsbury Group, yet until this authorised biography was written, she largely remained a silent and inscrutable figure. Tantalising glimpses of her life appeared mainly in her sister, Virginia Woolf's, letters, diaries and biography. Frances Spalding here draws upon a mass of unpublished documents to reveal Bell's extraordinary achievements in both her art and her life. She recounts in vivid detail how Bell's move into the Bloomsbury Group and her exposure to Paris and the radical art of the Post-Impressionists ran parrallel with an increasingly unorthodox personal life that spun in convoluted threads between her marriage to Clive Bell, her affair with Roger Fry, her friendship with Duncan Grant and relationship with her sister.

In this compact survey of Bridget Rileys career, the dialogue between monochrome and color in the British artists work is explored over a span of 50 years through 2015 in essay and image. Accompanying the 201617 show at the Scottish National Gallery, the hardcover publication sports an Op Art cover and includes 30 illustrations of the artists work

This revealing, highly illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) by a leading authority on the Bloomsbury Group accompanies a major exhibition of portraits of the world-renowned British novelist, essayist, biographer and critic and her circle at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

The life of the painter and designer Duncan Grant spanned great changes in society and art, from Edwardian Britain to the 1970s, from Alma-Tadema to Gilbert and George.

Traces the development of British art and examines the careers of influential artists such as John Singer Sargent, Vanessa Bell, and David Hockney.