Apollo Panel: Drawn From Life: Biography in British art history
Thursday 19 January 2023
4:00 - 5:00 pm
Chair:
Samuel Reilly, Assistant Editor, Apollo
Panel:
Peter Parker, Author, contributor to Apollo
Florence Evans Art Historian, Curator, Art Dealer
Listen to the recording
Recent years have seen a proliferation of biographies published and monographical exhibitions staged on modern British artists. These have come both as a means of reassessing well-known figures such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon or Walter Sickert, and of returning attention to forgotten figures such as the Vorticist Helen Saunders.
To an extent, this reflects a global trend towards the return of the biographical method in art history. But is there something in modern British art – with its neo-romantic tendencies and continued celebration of the figurative in the face of abstraction – that is peculiarly open to being read through the lives of its artists? How does it change our appreciation of the course of modern British art to think and write of Sickert, rather than the Camden Town Group, or Hepworth and not the St Ives School? How far does an emphasis on personality risk entrenching particular ways of looking at the work of artists like Freud or Bacon – and how far can it enable the possibility of broadening out the story of modern British art to encompass neglected voices?
Florrie Evans is an art historian, curator and art dealer with twenty years’ experience in the commercial art world. She recently launched her own dealership, Florence Evans Fine Art, advising and selling to a range of private collectors, as well as to public institutions including The National Trust. Florrie has curated independently over the years, with a forthcoming project on female artists of the East London Group. She appeared in the BBC4 series ‘A Stitch in Time’ as an expert in historic portraiture and costume, with presenter Amber Butchart. Florrie began her career as a specialist at Christie’s in British Art and Old Master Paintings, later becoming Director of The Weiss Gallery, and Managing Director of The Fine Art Society in London. She is a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford University, and The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Peter Parker is the author of two books about the First World War, The Old Lie and The Last Veteran; biographies of J.R. Ackerley and Christopher Isherwood; Housman Country; and A Little Book of Latin for Gardeners. He edited (and wrote much of) A Reader’s Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel and A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers and is an advisory editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has written about people, books, art, architecture and gardening for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, is a regular contributor to Apollo, and is currently compiling an anthology for Penguin of queer life in London from 1945 to 1967.