© Yale Center for British Art. Photo credit: Yale Center for British Art
(b Hastings, Sussex, 10 Sept. 1929). British painter and art historian. He is probably best known as an eminent scholar of 20th-century art, particularly for his standard book Cubism: A History and an Analysis, 1907–1914 (1959; rev. edns. 1968 and 1988), but he has also made a reputation as an abstract painter. He taught history of art at the Courtauld Institute 1962–81 and in 1976–7 he was Slade professor at Cambridge University.
He began painting seriously in the late 1950s (his first one-man exhibition was in 1962) and gradually devoted more of his time to it. In 1971 he started to teach at the Royal College of Art and in 1981–6 (having given up his post at the Courtauld Institute) was senior tutor there. His abstracts are typically large in format, with broad expanses of glowing colour; he sees them as ‘basically reflective or contemplative’.
Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)
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