Now available in an attractive paperback, Modernists and Mavericks is
Martin Gayford's impressively researched and well-reviewed chronicle of
postwar London painting.
Modernists and Mavericks explores the development of painting in
London from the Second World War to the 1970s based on an exceptionally
deep well of firsthand interviews, with artists such 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. 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, Alberto
Giacometti, and the traditions of Western art, from Piero della
Francesca to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the postwar painters were
bound together by their confidence that this ancient medium could do
fresh and marvelous things, and their urge to explore, in their diverse
ways, the possibilities of paint.