Lund Humphries Celebrates 85 Years of Publishing
We're celebrating Lund Humphries' 85th birthday this Autumn with publication of a biography of our erstwhile Chairman Peter Gregory (1887-1959) – the influential arts patron and collector who launched the company’s pioneering programme of art monographs in the mid-1940s.
Peter Gregory: Publisher and Patron of Modern British Artists by art historian Valerie Holman draws on previously unpublished archival material to show how, through his work as a publisher, printer, art collector and philanthropist, Peter Gregory became one of the 20th century’s most effective champions of contemporary art and design. Alongside his work at Lund Humphries and his many public roles, Gregory is perhaps best known today for the Gregory Fellowships in the Creative Arts, the UK’s first artist-in-residence scheme, which he established at the University of Leeds in 1949.
The book’s subject is closely intertwined with Lund Humphries’ own history: originally formed as a printer in Bradford, our book publishing on the visual arts dates back to Autumn 1939 and the publication of An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy by Frank Lloyd Wright. Just five years later, under Peter Gregory’s visionary leadership, Lund Humphries published the first large-format illustrated monograph on Henry Moore (Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, 1944) and went on to publish the first illustrated monographs on the leading Modernist artists of the time, including Paul Nash (1948), Ben Nicholson (1948 and 1956) and Barbara Hepworth (1952).
As we celebrate our 85th birthday, Lund Humphries continues to thrive as an independent publisher of beautifully produced books on the visual arts, with a list which now ranges across Art and Architectural History, Modern and Contemporary Art, and books for arts professionals. ‘The spirit of Peter Gregory, his belief in the value of the arts and of publishing as an educational tool, is very much alive in our publishing today’, says Managing Director Lucy Myers.
Other highlights of Lund Humphries’ Autumn 2024 list include Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers edited by Rob Airey; a monumental illustrated survey of the work of Victorian architect William Butterfield written by Nicholas Olsberg; AI and the Art Market by Jo Lawson-Tancred in the series Hot Topics in the Art World, co-published with Sotheby’s Institute of Art; and the first illustrated monograph on Dutch 17th-century artist Gesina ter Borch, the next volume in the Illuminating Women Artists series, co-published with Getty Publications in North America.
Discover all forthcoming books HERE