Aptly described as 'an artist's artist', Peter Kinley (1926-1988) was a well-respected painter who achieved great early success and commanded much attention during his lifetime. His work was extensively reviewed during his career, but little has been published about it since his death over twenty years ago. This book, the first substantial monograph on Kinley, redresses this omission.
Through biography and art-historical discussion, the texts by Catherine Kinley and Marco Livingstone provide an in-depth analysis of Kinley's life and work and chart his development from the figure paintings, still-lifes and landscapes of the mid-1950s to the succinct and emblematic works for which he is best known. Livingstone's analysis of the paintings demonstrates how they underwent a dramatic stylistic and philosophical shift in the 1960s towards a flatter, more hieratic style that encoded experience in bold, pared-down compositions. Complemented by a detailed discussion by the artist's widow of his eventful life, from his formative years in Vienna through to his maturity in London and Wiltshire, this book offers the definitive account of Kinley's artistic evolution.
Including 100 colour images of key works from Kinley's forty-year career, the narrative is also supported with biographical photographs from the Kinley family archive. These illustrations, combined with informative and illuminating texts on his paintings and on his singular life, make this publication an essential resource for anyone interested in this key British artist and the period in which he worked.
Contents: Still, life: The Chamber Music of Peter Kinley's paintings - Finding a Voice; Totems; A Search for Essentials; Towards Matisse; Shifts of Emphasis; Nature; New Horizons: India
The Wiltshire Years; Endgame: The Far Reaches of Representation, Marco Livingstone: Peter Kinley 1926-88: Pictures from a Life, Catherine Kinley; Chronology; One-man Exhibitions; Selected Group Exhibitions; Public Collections; Select Bibliography; Index
About the Author: Catherine Kinley studied painting at St Martin's School of Art and at the Royal College of Art. She was a curator at Tate from 1978-2004, curating numerous exhibitions and displays of British and international art, and writing on painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance. Latterly, she headed the Tate team responsible for contemporary acquisitions. She first published on Peter Kinley in 1984 and is his widow. Marco Livingstone is an art historian and independent curator who has written extensively on Pop Art and more widely on contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. After studying at the University of Toronto and the Courtauld Institute of Art, he worked as Assistant Curator of British Art at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, as Deputy Director of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford and as Deputy Editor of the Grove Dictionary of Art before going freelance in 1991. He is the author of the acclaimed Pop Art: A Continuing History and of monographs and major exhibition catalogues on numerous artists including David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Paula Rego, Clive Barker, Stephen Buckley, Jim Dine, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal and Duane Michals. His book Hockney's Portraits and People was awarded the 2004 Sir Bannister Fletcher Award for best book on the arts. Also published by Lund Humphries are his monographs on Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake and Richard Woods.
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