Martin Harrison | |
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Born | 1945 (age 77–78) Coventry, Warwickshire, England |
Occupation(s) | art historian, curator, editor |
Years active | 1973–present |
Notable work |
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Martin Harrison (born 1945) is a British art historian, author and curator, noted for his work on photography, on the medium of stained glass and its history, and as an authority on the work of the painter Francis Bacon.
In the 1960s, Harrison worked as a photographer's assistant at Vogue. [1] Harrison was a founding trustee of the English Stained Glass Museum, located at Ely Cathedral, and curator of its collection from 1975 to 1980. He has curated exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London, and others in Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Germany, where he co-curated a Bacon exhibition in 2006 at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. He contributed an essay to the catalogue of the Bacon centennial retrospective exhibition shown in 2008–2009 at Tate Britain, the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. [2]
Harrison's 1998 book Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965 is a broad survey, also discussing fashion photography; its title is a reference to Jonathan Aitken's 1967 book The Young Meteors, [3] , and popularized the term, now commonly applied to that group of photographers. [4] [5] [6]
Harrison encouraged Lillian Bassman to republish her fashion photography years after she had given up in disgust. [7] [8] He also edited Early Color, a collection of the photography of Saul Leiter, [9] and prepared the work of Ron Traeger for exhibition. [1]
Harrison is one of the foremost authorities on the work of painter Francis Bacon, and played an instrumental role in the development of the field of Francis Bacon studies, having produced the catalogue raisonné of Bacon's works. Harrison has authored several books about the British artist's work, [10] and on Bacon’s life and his milieu, beginning with Points of Reference in 1999. In 2016, following ten years of research, [11] Harrison completed the catalogue raisonneé of Bacon’s paintings, published in five volumes by The Estate of Francis Bacon. Harrison has edited and curated several volumes of essays and criticism on Bacon, [2] and since 2019 has been editor of the Francis Bacon Studies series, established that year with the release of Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology, [12] and Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, [13] published by the Estate in association with Thames & Hudson.
Harrison's writings on Bacon emphasize the importance to the artist's work of cinema and the photographs, often torn from magazines, that Bacon collected and referred to when working. [14] Peter Conrad praised ‘the careful investigation and deft criticism’ of his In Camera: Francis Bacon, concluding that it was "an opulent, paradoxically beautiful book". [15]
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.
Roger Mayne was an English photographer, best known for his documentation of the children of Southam Street, London.
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith, known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is a Jamaican-born English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster. He has been highly prolific in these fields, writing or editing over a hundred books, his subjects gradually shifting around the late 1960s from mostly literature to mostly art.
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.
Julian Otto Trevelyan was an English artist and poet.
John Deakin was an English photographer, best known for his work centred on members of Francis Bacon's Soho inner circle. Bacon based a number of famous paintings on photographs he commissioned from Deakin, including Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta Moraes on a Bed and Three Studies of Lucian Freud.
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion is a 1944 triptych painted by the Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon. The canvasses are based on the Eumenides—or Furies—of Aeschylus's Oresteia, and depict three writhing anthropomorphic creatures set against a flat burnt orange background. It was executed in oil paint and pastel on Sundeala fibre board and completed within two weeks. The triptych summarises themes explored in Bacon's previous work, including his examination of Picasso's biomorphs and his interpretations of the Crucifixion and the Greek Furies. Bacon did not realise his original intention to paint a large crucifixion scene and place the figures at the foot of the cross.
Figure in a landscape is a 1945 painting by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. Based on a photograph of Eric Hall dozing on a seat in Hyde Park, also the basis of another painting, Figure in a landscape (1945), which was bought by Diana Watson and later in 1950 by the Tate Gallery.
Christopher Bucklow is a British artist and art-historian. His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in numerous public collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (SFMoMA), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art among others. He has received residencies at The British Museum, London, the Banff Center for the Arts, Alberta, and The Centre for Studies in British Romanticism, Grasmere. Bucklow is best known for his ongoing photographic series Guests (1993–present) and his improvisational paintings from the series To Reach Inside A Vault (2006–present). He is the author of numerous books and essays including The Sea of Time and Space, "This is Personal: Blake and Mental Fight" in Blake & Sons, Lifestyles and Mysticism in Contemporary Art, What is in the Dwat: The Universe of Guston’s Final Decade, and the co-author of Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology.
Saul Leiter was an American photographer and painter whose early work in the 1940s and 1950s was an important contribution to what came to be recognized as the New York school of photography.
Brian Clarke is a British painter, architectural artist and printmaker, known for his large-scale stained glass and mosaic projects, symbolist paintings, set designs, and collaborations with major figures in Modern and contemporary architecture.
Lillian Gertrude Browse was a British art dealer and art historian. She was a partner in two London galleries, first Roland, Browse and Delbanco and then Browse & Darby. During the Second World War she organised exhibitions at the National Gallery, whose collections had been removed to the country for safety. She wrote a number of monographs on twentieth-century artists, including important works on Walter Sickert and Sir William Nicholson. She was nicknamed "The Duchess of Cork Street", and used that name as the title of her autobiography.
Graham Scott Finlayson (1932–1999) was an English photojournalist who first worked for the Daily Mail and the Guardian, and later freelanced.
John Bulmer is a photographer, notable for his early use of colour in photojournalism, and a filmmaker.
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.
Head I is a relatively small oil and tempera on hardboard painting by the Irish-born British figurative artist Francis Bacon. Completed in 1948, it is the first in a series of six heads, the remainder of which were painted the following year in preparation for a November 1949 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London. Like the others in the series, it shows a screaming figure alone in a room, and focuses on the open mouth. The work shows a skull which has disintegrated on itself and is largely a formless blob of flesh. The entire upper half has disappeared, leaving only the jaw, mouth and teeth and one ear still intact. It is the first of Bacon's paintings to feature gold background railings or bars; later to become a prominent feature of his 1950s work, especially in the papal portraits where they would often appear as enclosing or cages around the figures. It is not known what influences were behind the image; most likely they were multiple – press or war photography, and critic Denis Farr detects the influence of Matthias Grünewald.
Arthur Graham Reynolds,, was an English art historian who was Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable, for whose works he wrote the catalogue raisonné. Reynolds's approach exemplified traditional scholarship and connoisseurship and he was fiercely opposed to the New Art History of the 1970s.
Mimi Mollica is an Italian photographer, based in London. His work concerns "social issues and topics related to identity, environment, migration and macroscopic human transitions."
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.
Head V is a 1949 painting by Irish-born British artist Francis Bacon, one of series of works made in 1949 for his first one-man exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, in London. It measures 82 by 66 centimetres and is held in a private collection.
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: CS1 maint: date and year (link)Martin Harrison, Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965 (London: Cape, 1998; ISBN 0-224-05129-6).