John Minton: Dance Until the Stars Come Down
- Artist: John Minton
- Published: 2005
- Publisher: Lund Humphries, Aldershot
- Edition: Revised
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 24 cms
- Pages: 336
- Illustrations: 24 colour and 39 b&w
£40.00
Add to basketJohn Minton: Dance Until the Stars Come Down
John Minton (1917-57) was an artist, a Bohemian and, in his own lifetime, a myth. During the 1940s and early 1950s he become a central figure within Soho, an intimate friend of, among many others, Michael Ayrton, Robert Colquhoun, Lucian Freud and the poet W.S. Graham. He enjoyed early success as a painter and was associated in the 1940s with the English Neo-Romantics. By the early 1950s he had become the most admired and influential illustrator of his day.
Frances Spalding's sensitive account of Minton's life and work makes use of letters, articles and revue sketches by Minton himself, as well as many interviews with the artist's friends and acquaintances. She brings out the many conflicts within him, and shows how these were reflected in his art through its combination of romantic imagery and taut severities of style. His deep melancholy was for the most part kept hidden behind a euphoric generosity and a wild restlessness. But gradually, like his alcoholism, it became all-pervasive, and tragic and embittered he took his own life, aged thirty-nine.
This new edition incorporates a new preface by the author and a new appendix featuring lists of public collections, exhibitions, illustrated books and book jackets, and a select bibliography. It will be widely welcomed by art historians, curators, dealers and all those interested in this fascinating period in British art and culture.
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Authors Biography
Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing journalism and books while still a post-graduate. In the late 1970s and 1980s she wrote extensively on twentieth-century British art, at the same time developing an interest in biography. Her reputation was established with Roger Fry: Art and Life in 1980 and she went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant and Gwen Raverat, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series has been much used in schools, colleges and universities, and in the mid-1990s she was commissioned by Tate to write a centenary history of this national institution. In 2000 she joined Newcastle University where she is now Professor of Art History. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
