Artists' London : Holbein to Hirst / Kit Wedd with Lucy Peltz and Cathy Ross.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wedd, Kit.

Contributor:

Peltz, Lucy.

Ross, Catherine, 1953-

Wedd, Kit.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Artists--England--London.

Artists.

London (England)--Intellectual life.

London (England).

England--London.

Physical Description:

160 pages : illustrations (some color),color maps, portraits ; 28 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Merrell, 2001.

Summary:

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, London's reputation as a world capital of the visual arts has never been greater. The East End of the city is the locus for thousands of painters, sculptors, photographers and designers who have transformed a largely neglected area into a vibrant creative quarter. The migration of practitioners and galleries to the East End over the last thirty years is only the latest example of the colonization of a region of the city by artists. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the City was the focus for the profession, while from the beginning of the eighteenth century a westward movement began that would continue for the next two hundred years, reflecting the parallel development of the artist's persona from craftsman to respectable gentleman to decadent dandy.

In the eighteenth century artists followed fashionable London along the Strand to the new squares of Covent Garden and Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square), eager for patronage and willing to emulate the lifestyles of their social betters in order to attain it. The foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 consolidated respectability as the ideal of the aspiring artist. A century later the 'palaces of Art' that successful artists built in Kensington made them almost indistinguishable from their patrons. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the suffocating conservatism of the Establishment caused many artists to seek a different path that led them further west still, to Chelsea. Dante Gabriel Rossetti -- eccentric, drug-addicted, living in Bohemian squalor -- and James McNeill Whistler -- dandified, sharp-tongued, contemptuous of convention -- epitomized the artist in the popular imagination.

The twentieth-century annexation of such previously unprepossessing areas as Camden Town, Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Soho, by Walter Sickert, Francis Bacon and others, consolidated the myth of the artist as outsider that began in the late nineteenth century. 1950s Soho in particular offered a cosmopolitan buzz and sexual freedom that seemed quite alien to the mainstream of British society, epitomized by the legendary Colony Room. Artists' London explores the complex relationships between artists and the areas of London they inhabit, relationships that continue to this day as the patrons now follow the artists around the city, and such figures as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin create new myths for a new century.

Contents:

London's Creative Quarters: An Overview 7

1 1560-1690 - From the City to the West End 10

2 1685-1800 - Markets for Art: Covent Garden and Leicester Square 32

3 1800-1835 - Rural Retreats: Hampstead, Twickenham and Richmond 48

4 1770-1850 - 'Artists' Street' in Marylebone 66

5 1860-1900 - Alternative Paths to Kensington and Chelsea 82

6 1905-1920 - Art Movements: Camden Town, Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia 106

7 1930s and 1950s - Progressive Hampstead and Permissive Soho 124

8 1960-2000 - Colonizing the East End 138.

Notes:

Published in connection with the exhibition at the Museum of London, 2001.

Published in pbk. as: Creative quarters.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Related Work:

Wedd, Kit. Creative quarters.

ISBN:

1858941415

1858941423

OCLC:

46505369