Books by Martin Gayford

Lucian Freud's Sketchbooks

by Sarah Howgate, Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford

Previously unpublished drawings from the private sketchbooks of the pre-eminent British painter offer a new perspective on the artist’s personality and artistic genius

This revelatory publication features a selection of beautifully reproduced images from the sketchbooks of Lucian Freud (1922–2011), one of the world’s greatest realist painters. Most of the sketches – which include works in pencil, pastel, and watercolor from across the artist’s long career – are published here for the first time. These fascinating images extend our understanding of Freud’s work and demonstrate the scrutiny he brought to his subjects.

The sketchbooks, now in the archive of the National Portrait Gallery, London, include portraits of Freud’s family members, friends, and lovers. Designs for book covers, images of his beloved dogs and horses, landscapes, and interiors appear among nudes, still lifes, and several sketches that relate to major works. Around and between the drawings are Freud’s annotations and jottings – appointments, racing tips, notes, musings – which, with startling immediacy, provide a glimpse into the working life of one of the 20th century’s most important artists. The book includes an insightful essay by Martin Gayford, who sat for portraits by Freud and knew him well, and an illustrated chronology of the artist’s life.

Published in association with the National Portrait Gallery, London

Exhibition Schedule:
National Portrait Gallery, London
(06/11/16–09/06/16)

Venice: City of Pictures

by Martin Gayford

A visual journey through five centuries of the city known for centuries as, “La Serenissima”―a unique and compelling story for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art.
Enchanting, captivating, precious―Venice is one of the most cherished cities in the world. For centuries it was the heart of a global maritime power and a crossroads for diverse cultures. Today the city attracts millions of visitors each year, enticed by its irresistible beauty. Art lovers are drawn here by the paintings, prints, drawings, and films made by generations of artists who have captured its magical allure. It is through images―both of the city and the art created there―that Venice’s identity has been forged and spread so powerfully.
Venice was a major center of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. The achievements of the Bellini brothers, Vittore Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese are a key part of this story. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a specialty of native artists such as Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: William Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin, and many more.
Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner, and others enrich this tale. Nor is the story over. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world.
In this elegant volume, Martin Gayford takes us on a visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known as “La Serenissima,” the “Most Serene.” 186 color illustrations

How Painting Happens

by Martin Gayford

In the words of the late Gillian Ayres, this is a book about "what can be done with painting." Drawing on decades of conversations with practicing painters, acclaimed author Martin Gayford offers intimate insight into the practice, meaning, and potential of this timeless medium.
As a way of making images, pigment applied to any surface from cave wall to canvas, painting has been around for tens of thousands of years. Yet it has proved capable of endless renewal. Now in the third decade of the twenty-first century it is once more at the forefront of contemporary art. How Painting Happens will consider how and why this is so, examining this perennial medium through the eyes of its exponents past and present.
Martin Gayford will draw on interviews carried out over more than two decades with, among many others, Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Georg Baselitz, Frank Bowling, Richard Estes, Lucian Freud, Katharina Fritsch, Rebecca Horn, Shirazeh Houshiary, Lee Ufan, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Frank Stella, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Luc Tuymans, and Zeng Fanzhi.
These diverse artists talk about how they work, the different routes by which they came to be painters, their contemporaries, and predecessors. With painters' insight they discuss such previous exponents of the brush as Titian, El Greco, Edward Hopper, Suzanne Valadon, Petrus Christus, Van Gogh, Degas, Klee, and Delacroix.
Altogether, this book will present a fresh, multidimensional perspective on the medium―so ancient and yet simultaneously so modern, and still capable of doing things no other art form can. 120 illustrations / 100 in color

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

by Martin Gayford

One of the most original, enjoyable, and informative publications about art in our time: the history of a portrait by a major artist as seen from the sitter’s point of view. Lucian Freud, perhaps the world's leading portrait painter, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. Gayford describes the process chronologically, from the day he arrived for the first sitting through to his meeting with the couple who bought the finished painting, and he vividly conveys what it is like to be on the inside of the process of creating a work of art.

As Freud completes his portrait of Gayford, so the art critic produces his own portrait of the artist, giving a rare insight into Freud’s working practice. Through their wide-ranging conversations, the reader learns not only about Freud’s choice of models, lighting, setting, pose, and colors, but also about his likes and dislikes, his encounters and experiences, and the ways in which he approaches his relationship with each portrait subject. Gayford records Freud’s observations on the work of Michelangelo, Vermeer, Titian, Chardin, Goya, van Gogh, Mondrian, and his great contemporary Francis Bacon. The book is full of revealing anecdotes about the people Freud has met in the course of his long career, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Greta Garbo, and his grandfather Sigmund Freud.

Illustrated with photographs of Freud at work and an etching that Freud did of Gayford after the painting was completed, the book also features other paintings by Freud from the 1940s to the present, as well as images by artists discussed by Freud with Gayford. 50 color and 14 black-and-white illustrations

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

by Martin Gayford

“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” ―ARTnews Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master―both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation at restaurants, in taxis, and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon were friends and contemporaries, as were writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden.

The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other works, telling photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud in his studio, and images by such great artists of the past as van Gogh and Titian who are discussed by Freud and Gayford.

Full of wry observations, the book reveals the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art. 63 illustrations, 57 in color

Rendez-vous with Art

by Philippe De Montebello, Martin Gayford

The fruits of a lifetime of experience by a cultural colossus, Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its history, distilled in conversations with an acclaimed critic Beginning with a fragment of yellow jasper―all that is left of the face of an Egyptian woman who lived 3,500 years ago―this book confronts the elusive questions: how, and why, do we look at art?

Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford talked in art galleries or churches or their own homes, and this book is structured around their journeys. But whether they were in the Louvre or the Prado, the Mauritshuis of the Palazzo Pitti, they reveal the pleasures of truly looking.

De Montebello shares the sense of excitement recorded by Goethe in his autobiography―"akin to the emotion experienced on entering a House of God"―but also reflects on why these secular temples might nevertheless be the "worst possible places to look at art." But in the end both men convey, with subtlety and brilliance, the delights and significance of their subject matter and some of the intense creations of human beings throughout our long history. 75 illustrations

Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters

by Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford’s masterful account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated by documentary photographs and the works themselves
The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s has never before been told before as a single narrative. R. B. Kitaj’s proposal, made in 1976, that there was a “substantial School of London” was essentially correct but it caused confusion because it implied that there was a movement or stylistic group at work, when in reality no one style could cover the likes of Francis Bacon and also Bridget Riley.
Modernists and Mavericks explores this period based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, often unpublished, with such artists as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. But Martin Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Giacometti, and (through the teaching passed down at the major art school) the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were bound by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and explored in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint. 100+ illustrations, 70 in color

Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters

by Martin Gayford

“A masterpiece, a major work of modern art history.” ―Wall Street Journal
“Absorbing and lavishly illustrated.” ―New Yorker
“If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it. You soon will be.” ―Financial Times
Now available in an attractive paperback, Modernists and Mavericks is Martin Gayford’s impressively researched and well-reviewed chronicle of postwar London painting.
Modernists and Mavericks explores the development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s based on an exceptionally deep well of firsthand interviews, with artists such as Victor Pasmore, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, Euan Uglow, Howard Hodgkin, Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres, Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Frank Bowling, Leon Kossoff, John Hoyland, and Patrick Caulfield. Gayford also teases out the thread weaving these individual lives together and demonstrates how and why, long after it was officially declared dead, painting lived and thrived in London. Simultaneously aware of the influences of Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, and the traditions of Western art, from Piero della Francesca to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the postwar painters were bound together by their confidence that this ancient medium could do fresh and marvelous things, and their urge to explore, in their diverse ways, the possibilities of paint. 100+ illustrations

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

by Martin Gayford

A self-portrait of this major artist, told through a wide-ranging series of interviews and conversations with Martin Gayford. David Hockney’s exuberant work is widely loved and widely praised, but he is also an incisive and original thinker on art. Based on a series of conversations between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, this book distills the essence of the artist’s lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface.

How does drawing make one “see things clearer and clearer and clearer still”? What significance do differing media, from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad, have for the images we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? And how can we fully enjoy the pleasures of just looking―at trees, or faces, or sunrises?

These conversations are punctuated by wise and witty observations by both artist and interviewer on many other artists―Vermeer, Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, and Monet among them―and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney spent so many years, and East Yorkshire, his birthplace, to which he has now returned. 100+ full-color illustrations

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

by Martin Gayford

“Sumptuously illustrated, this radiant volume encapsulates what it truly means to be a visual artist.” ―Booklist David Hockney’s exuberant work is highly praised and widely celebrated―he is perhaps the world’s most popular living painter. But he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art.

This new edition includes a revised introduction and five new chapters which cover Hockney’s production since 2011, including preparations for the Bigger Picture exhibition held at the Royal Academy in 2012 and the making of Hockney’s iPad drawings and plans for the show. A difficult period followed the exhibition’s huge success, marked first by a stroke, which left Hockney unable to speak for a long period, followed by the vandalism of the artist’s Totem tree-trunk, and the tragic suicide of his assistant shortly thereafter. Escaping the gloom, in spring 2013 Hockney moved back to L.A. A few months later, Martin Gayford visited Hockney in the L.A. studio, where the fully-recovered artist was hard at work on his Comédie humaine, a series of full-length portraits painted in the studio.

The conversations between Hockney and Gayford are punctuated by surprising and revealing observations on other artists―Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Picasso among them―and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of Yorkshire, Hockney’s birthplace, and California. 181 illustrations, 154 in color

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence

by Martin Gayford

From October to December of 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a yellow house in the south of France with Vincent van Gogh. They were the odd couple of the art world -- one calm, the other volatile -- and the denouement of their living arrangement was explosive. Making use of new evidence and Van Gogh’s voluminous correspondence, Martin Gayford describes not only how these two hallowed artists painted and exchanged ideas, but also the texture of their everyday lives. Gayford also makes a persuasive analysis of Van Gogh’s mental illness -- the probable bipolar affliction that led him to commit suicide at the age of thirty-seven. The Yellow House is a singular biographical work, as dramatic and vibrant as the work of these brilliant artists.

A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen

by David Hockney, Martin Gayford

A picture, says David Hockney, is the only way that we can communicate what we see. Here, in a collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford, he explores the many ways that artists have pictured the world, sharing sparkling insights and ideas that will delight every art lover and art maker. Readers who thrilled to Hockney’s Secret Knowledge know that he has an uncanny ability to get into the minds of artists. In A History of Pictures he covers far more ground, getting at the roots of visual expression and technique through hundreds of images—from cave paintings to frames from movies—that are reproduced. It’s a joyful celebration of one of humanity’s oldest impulses.

Man with a Blue Scarf On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

by Martin Gayford

“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” ?ARTnews

Lucian Freud (1922–2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of his time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From Man with a Blue Scarf emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation in restaurants, taxis, and his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter who was a friend and contemporary of Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Bacon, as well as writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden.

Now for the first time as a compact paperback, this book is illustrated with works by Lucian Freud, telling photographs of Freud in his studio, and images by great artists of the past, such as Vincent van Gogh and Titian, who are discussed by Freud and Gayford.

Full of wry observations, the book reveals how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art.

The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

by Martin Gayford

One of our leading art critics and writers, Martin Gayford, recounts his travels and meetings with the world’s greatest artists.
In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, critic Martin Gayford has traveled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayford’s journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and outcomes, which he makes as much a part of the story as the final destination. In chapters that are by turns humorous, intriguing, and stimulating, Gayford takes us to places as varied as Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania; prehistoric caves in France; the museum island of Naoshima in Japan; the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas; and an exhibition of Roni Horn’s work in Iceland.
Interwoven with these tales are journeys to meet artists―Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, Marina Abramovic´ in Venice, Robert Rauschenberg in New York―and travels with artists, such as a trip to Beijing with Gilbert & George. These encounters not only provide fascinating insights into the way artists approach and think about their art, but reveal the importance of their personal environments.
A perceptive, amusing, and knowledgeable companion, in The Pursuit of Art Gayford takes readers on a tour of art that is immensely entertaining, informative, and eminently readable. 50 color illustrations

A Bigger Message Conversations with David Hockney

by Martin Gayford

"Sumptuously illustrated, this radiant volume encapsulates what it truly means to be a visual artist." --Booklist

David Hockney's exuberant work is highly praised and widely celebrated--he is perhaps the world's most popular living painter. But he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art.

This new edition includes a revised introduction and five new chapters which cover Hockney's production since 2011, including preparations for the Bigger Picture exhibition held at the Royal Academy in 2012 and the making of Hockney's iPad drawings and plans for the show. A difficult period followed the exhibition's huge success, marked first by a stroke, which left Hockney unable to speak for a long period, followed by the vandalism of the artist's Totem tree-trunk, and the tragic suicide of his assistant shortly thereafter. Escaping the gloom, in spring 2013 Hockney moved back to L.A. A few months later, Martin Gayford visited Hockney in the L.A. studio, where the fully-recovered artist was hard at work on his Comédie humaine, a series of full-length portraits painted in the studio.

The conversations between Hockney and Gayford are punctuated by surprising and revealing observations on other artists--Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Picasso among them--and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of Yorkshire, Hockney's birthplace, and California.

Lucian Freud

by Martin Gayford

A sumptuous single-volume edition of Phaidon's acclaimed overview of one of the greatest painters of our time

Larger-than-life British artist Lucian Freud enjoyed a career lasting over seven decades. He worked almost until the day he died, when he left a portrait of friend and studio assistant David Dawson unfinished.

Now available for the first time in one elegantly combined edition, this acclaimed celebration of Freud's work from the 1930s to his death in 2011 includes hundreds of paintings, drawings, sketches, and etchings - even personal photographs and illustrated private letters.

A comprehensive overview of his life and work in one luxurious volume, this book is a gorgeous addition to the shelves of art lovers everywhere. Created in collaboration with the Lucian Freud Archive and David Dawson, Director of the Archive, and edited by Mark Holborn.

Spring Cannot Be Cancelled David Hockney in Normandy

by David Hockney, Martin Gayford

David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural Normandy in this inspiring book which includes conversations with the artist and his latest artworks.

On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquility for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year earlier, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art.

Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s new Normandy drawings and paintings alongside works by Van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, color, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see . . . but about how to live.

Venice City of Pictures

by Martin Gayford

A visual journey through five centuries of the city known for centuries as, "La Serenissima"--a unique and compelling story for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art.

Venice was a major center of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. The achievements of the Bellini brothers, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese are a key part of this story. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin, and many more.

Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner, and others enrich this tale. Nor is the story over. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, and the arrival of pioneering modern art collector Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world, and it remains the site of important artistic events.

In this elegant volume, Gayford--who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, covered every Biennale since 1990, and even had portraits of himself exhibited there on several occasions--takes us on a visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known "La Serenissima," the Most Serene. It is a unique and compelling portrait of Venice that will delight lovers of the city and lovers of its art.