William Coldstream : Catalogue Raisonné

The first scholarly authorized Catalogue Raisonné of the artist, with comprehensive exhibition details and citations

William Coldstream became one of the significant twentieth-century cultural icons, who influenced generations of art students. Numbered amongst his cycle of distinguished luminaries were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Benjamin Britten, Sir Kenneth Clark, Adrian Stokes, A J Ayer and Anthony Blunt; as well as many artists and establishment figures whose portraits he painted, including one Prime Minister.   However, celebrated Coldstream was to become he revealed a somewhat tormented and anxious mind racked with self-doubt. Was he ever going to be appreciated as an artist, will people understand his painting or will he ever gain control of his personal life? Coldstream liked to compartmentalize his life, and almost certainly none of his artistic friends knew all the facets of his extraordinarily complex, secretive and eccentric life; less so about his painting. Yet, this was in contrast to his outwardly lively, witty and charming public personality.

This publication is the first complete catalogue raisonné and first comprehensive essay to critically scrutinize Coldstream’s entire output, his singular painting method and to clarify his empiricist approach to objective realism, which hitherto has been largely misunderstood by art historians and critics. The book contains some 300 colour illustrations of the artist’s figurative paintings and includes important lost paintings, and clarifies Coldstream’s artistic development from the 1920s until his death in 1987.

Each painting is chronologically described in full and accompanied by supportive text to place Coldstream’s figurative painting within a cultural context.

Details

• Author: Peter Rumley
• Hardcover: 212 pages 
• Date published: March 2018
• Language: English
• Delivery: Allow 1-2 weeks
• ISBN: 978-1908326799
• Product Dimensions: 29 x 27.7 cm