Reposted: 25 Jul 2022, by Charles Saumarez Smith.
One of many things that I like about Art UK is the way that it documents the work of artists who – except, maybe, amongst other painters – have fallen out of fashion and are pretty invisible. Preserved in the storerooms of museums and private collections, these artists wait for historians to reconstruct their careers.
One of these is John Wonnacott, an artist who was well established in the 1980s and taught by Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews at the Slade School of Art in the early 1960s.
Representative of a form of figurative painting that has largely been forgotten, his style of painting had something of a revival during the 1980s, helped by the big exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1981, ‘A New Spirit in Painting’, organised by Nicholas Serota, Norman Rosenthal and Christos Joachamides, and by Tate’s ‘The Hard-Won Image: Traditional Method and Subject in Recent British Art’ in 1984.
Wonnacott was represented by Marlborough Fine Art, where he would have regular exhibitions of his work, enthusiastically reviewed in the Observer by William Feaver and in The Sunday Times by Marina Vaizey.
In 1988, he moved to Agnew’s, the biggest and grandest of Old Master galleries, which was attempting to establish itself in the contemporary art market, and his work was acquired not only by the Tate, but by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where Bill Lieberman, the chairman of the Twentieth Century Department, admired his work and acquired his Night Portrait with Blue Easel in 1993.
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Read full article by Charles Saumarez Smith HERE
Pre-order John Wonnacott’s biography by Charles Saumarez Smith HERE
