The World New Made : Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century

A celebration of the richness of figurative painting over the last 100 years and a passionate critique of the accepted history of art in the 20th century. Figurative painting is due a reappraisal. In this passionately argued volume the distinguished writer and artist Timothy Hyman cuts a new path through the tangle of twentieth-century art.The World New Made explores the work of more than fifty individual painters, presenting a collective ‘Resistance’ who together offer a human-centred alternative to the dominance of the Abstract or the Conceptual in conventional narratives of modern art. Structured not as a survey but as in-depth studies of more than 130 specific artworks, this lavishly illustrated book brings these often marginalized artists centre-stage: not just Alice Neel and Balthus, Max Beckmann and Frida Kahlo, but also Marsden Hartley and Charlotte Salomon, Bhupen Khakhar and Jacob Lawrence.A rich cast is brought to life, partly through their own writings.As the author argues, ‘All across the world, isolated artists found new idioms for human-centred painting in the midst of modern life.’