Book of the Month January 2023: Dennis Creffield
Happy New Year from Lund Humphries! We hope you are having a happy and healthy start to 2023. We're particularly looking forward to London Art Fair later this month, and seeing works by some great British artists... last year we published books on several stars of modern British art: William Turnbull, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Dennis Creffield, John Wonnacott... so to start the year off right, we've chosen DENNIS CREFFIELD: ART AND LIFE by Richard Cork as our January Book of the Month! Use the code MONTH20 at checkout to get 20% off this month only.
About the Book:
Hugely admired by artists and writers from Henri Cartier Bresson to the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, the extraordinary life and work of painter Dennis Creffield (1931-2018) are explored in this, the first major monograph on the artist.
The narrative traces the artist's 'Dickensian' upbringing, his formative experiences as a teenager under the tutelage of David Bomberg, his conversion to Catholicism and his award-winning years at the Slade. Focus is given to Creffield's passions for the stories of England, not only in the Cathedral drawings, but in his expressive work on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, on Blake and in his paintings and drawings of London, the great Petworth House, Cornish tin mines and the eerie military buildings on Orford Ness.
Complementing his work on England's sacred and profane identity is an equally audacious body of work on the human body, from tender paintings of mother and child to erotic paintings of women to his late paintings of men near death - Turner, Nelson and Rimbaud. To quote his fellow artist R.B. Kitaj, Creffield's cover has been 'well and truly blown'.
About the Author:
Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster and curator. He has been art critic for the Evening Standard and the Times, among others. Alongside academic posts and curating exhibitions for venues including Tate and the National Gallery, he is author of numerous books, including his ground-breaking study of David Bomberg, and has been awarded the Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Banister Fletcher Award and the Art Fund Award. He is also Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy.
