Michael Peppiatt | |
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Born | 9 October 1941 83) Wycombe, Buckinghamshire | (age
Occupation | Writer and art historian |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Website | |
michaelpeppiatt |
Michael Henry Peppiatt [1] (born 9 October 1941) is an English art historian, curator and writer.
Son of Edward George Peppiatt (died 1983), B.Sc, ARCS, of Silver Birches, Stocking Pelham, near Buntingford, Hertfordshire, technical and production director for a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, [2] and Elsa Eugénie (née Schlaich; died 1997). [3]
Michael Peppiatt studied at Brentwood School, Essex, at the University of Göttingen, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1964, MA 1985, PhD) [4] [5] and subsequently joined The Observer as a junior art critic. He then went to Paris to take up an editorial job at Réalités magazine, where he remained until 1969, when he was appointed arts editor at Le Monde . [6] In the mid-1970s he began reporting on cultural events across Europe for The New York Times and The Financial Times , becoming Paris correspondent for several art magazines, notably Art News and Art International . In 1985, Peppiatt became owner and editor of Art International, [7] which he relaunched from Paris, devoting special issues to the artists he most admired.
In 1994, Peppiatt returned to London with his wife, the art historian Jill Lloyd, and their two children, where he wrote the biography of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), whose close friend and commentator he had been for thirty years. Chosen as a "Book of the Year" [8] by The New York Times and translated into several languages, the biography is considered the definitive account of Bacon's life and work.
Peppiatt has curated numerous exhibitions worldwide, notably travelling retrospectives of the School of London, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Christian Schad and Antoni Tàpies. In 2009, Peppiatt curated an exhibition of sculpture by Dado for the Venice Biennale, [9] a Maillol retrospective for Barcelona, [10] and a Caravaggio-Bacon exhibit for the Galleria Borghese in Rome. [11]
In 2005, Peppiatt was awarded a Ph.D by the University of Cambridge for his publications on 20th-century art. He is a member of the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature, and since 2010 he has been on the board of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
In 2012, Peppiatt published Interviews with Artists, a book of more than forty interviews with personalities ranging from Jean Dubuffet, Balthus, and Oscar Niemeyer to Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Antoni Tàpies. [12] An exhibition on this theme was shown at Eykyn Maclean in London.
Peppiatt curated a Miró exhibition that travelled from the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg to the Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf, in 2014–15. [13] Peppiatt's latest memoir, Francis Bacon in Your Blood, was published by Bloomsbury in August 2015. [14] In 2018, Peppiatt curated the exhibition Bacon/Giacometti at the Beyeler Foundation, Switzerland. In 2022, Peppiatt curated the exhibition, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition charts the development of Bacon's work through the lens of his fascination with animals and its impact on his treatment of the human figure. [15]
Peppiatt has completed a new memoir about his life in Paris from the 1960s onwards, to be published by Bloomsbury.
Peppiatt serves on the advisory council of the UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. [16] . He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries [17] and the Royal Historical Society [18] .
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman and printmaker. Beginning in 1922, he lived and worked mainly in Paris but regularly visited his hometown Borgonovo to see his family and work on his art.
Louis le BrocquyHRHA was an Irish painter born in Dublin to Albert and Sybil le Brocquy. Louis' sister is the sculptor Melanie Le Brocquy. His work received many accolades in a career that spanned some seventy years of creative practice. In 1956, he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Acquisito Internationale with A Family, subsequently included in the historic exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art Brussels, World Fair 1958. The same year he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and left London to work in the French Midi.
Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor of the Ecole de Paris. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement art brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.
Julien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.
The painter Francis Bacon was largely self-taught as an artist. As well as other visual artists, Bacon drew inspiration from the poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Yeats, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare; Proust and Joyce's Ulysses.
Anthony David Bernard Sylvester was a British art critic and curator. Although he received no formal education in the arts, during his long career he was influential in promoting modern artists, in particular Francis Bacon, Joan Miró, and Lucian Freud.
Isabel Rawsthorne, also known at various times as Isabel Delmer and Isabel Lambert, was a British painter, scenery and costume designer, and occasional artists' model. During the Second World War she worked in black propaganda. She was part of an artistic bohemian society that included Jacob Epstein, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.
Triptych, May–June 1973 is a triptych completed in 1973 by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon (1909–1992). The oil-on-canvas was painted in memory of Bacon's lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of the artist's retrospective at Paris's Grand Palais on 24 October 1971. The triptych is a portrait of the moments before Dyer's death from an overdose of pills in their hotel room. Bacon was haunted and preoccupied by Dyer's loss for the remaining years of his life and painted many works based on both the actual suicide and the events of its aftermath. He admitted to friends that he never fully recovered, describing the 1973 triptych as an exorcism of his feelings of loss and guilt.
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a 1953 painting by the artist Francis Bacon. The work shows a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X painted by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in 1650. The work is one of the first in a series of around 50 variants of the Velázquez painting which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The paintings are widely regarded as highly successful modern re-interpretations of a classic of the Western canon of visual art.
Fragment of a Crucifixion is an unfinished 1950 painting by the Irish-born figurative painter Francis Bacon. It shows two animals engaged in an existential struggle; the upper figure, which may be a dog or a cat, crouches over a chimera and is at the point of kill. It stoops on the horizontal beam of a T-shaped structure, which may signify Christ's cross. The painting contains thinly sketched passer-by figures, who appear as if oblivious to the central drama.
Reginald Gray was an Irish portrait artist. He studied at The National College of Art (1953) and then moved to London, becoming part of the School of London led by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In 1960, he painted a portrait of Bacon which is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. He subsequently painted portraits from life of writers, musicians and artists such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Brendan Behan, Garech Browne, Derry O'Sullivan, Alfred Schnittke, Ted Hughes, Rupert Everett and Yves Saint Laurent. In 1993 Gray had a retrospective exhibition at UNESCO Paris and in 2006, his portrait "The White Blouse" won the Sandro Botticelli Prize in Florence, Italy.
The Hanover Gallery was an art gallery in London. It was opened in June 1948 by the German art expert Erica Brausen and financier and art collector Arthur Jeffress at 32A St. George's Street, W1, and closed on 31 March 1973. It was named after nearby Hanover Square. The Hanover Gallery was an important centre for modern art.
Three Studies of Lucian Freud is a 1969 oil-on-canvas triptych by the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon, depicting artist Lucian Freud. It was sold in November 2013 for US$142.4 million, which at the time was the highest price attained at auction for a work of art when not factoring in inflation. That record was surpassed in May 2015 by Version O of Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger series.
Head VI is an oil-on-canvas painting by Irish-born figurative artist Francis Bacon, the last of six panels making up his "1949 Head" series. It shows a bust view of a single figure, modeled on Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X. Bacon applies forceful, expressive brush strokes, and places the figure within a glass cage structure, behind curtain-like drapery. This gives the effect of a man trapped and suffocated by his surroundings, screaming into an airless void. But with an inverted pathos is derived from the ambiguity of the pope's horrifying expression—whose distorted face either screams of untethered hatred towards the viewer or pleads for help from the glass cage—the question of what he is screaming about is left to the audience.
Portrait of George Dyer Talking is an oil painting on canvas executed in 1966 by the British painter Francis Bacon. It is a portrait of his lover George Dyer made at the height of Bacon's creative power. It depicts Dyer sitting on a revolving office stool in a luridly coloured room. His body and face are contorted, and his legs are tightly crossed. His head appears to be framed within a window or door. Above him is a naked hanging lightbulb, a favourite motif of Bacon's. The work contains a number of spatial ambiguities, not least that Dyer's body seems to be positioned both in the fore- and background.
Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho is a 1967 oil-on-canvas painting by the Irish-born English figurative artist Francis Bacon, housed in the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Described by art critic John Russell as one of Bacon's finest works, it depicts Isabel Rawsthorne, the painter, designer and occasional model for artists such as André Derain, Alberto Giacometti and Picasso.
Erica Brausen, was an art dealer and gallerist who established the Hanover Gallery in London in 1948. She was an early champion of several influential contemporary artists, most notably Francis Bacon.
Head III is an oil painting by Francis Bacon, one of series of works made in 1949 for his first one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, in London. As with the other six paintings in the series, it focuses on the disembodied head of male figure, who looks out with a penetrating gaze, but is fixed against an isolating, flat, nondescript background, while also enfolded by hazy horizontal foreground curtain-like folds which seems to function like a surrounding cage.
Jill Lloyd is a writer and curator specializing in twentieth-century art, with particular expertise for German and Austrian art. She has organised many critically acclaimed exhibitions for leading museums and has published widely, including her book German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity, which was awarded the first National Art Book Prize.