Humankind: Ruskin Spear

Humankind: Ruskin SpearCondition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780500971192 Year: 2022 Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd Description: Humankind: Ruskin Spear is the first book on the painter Ruskin Spear RA (1911 1990) since a brief monograph in 1985. It uses Spear's career to unlock the coded standards of the 20th century art world and to look at class and culture in Britain and at notions of 'vulgarity'. The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer

Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9780500971192
Year: 2022
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd


Description:
Humankind: Ruskin Spear is the first book on the painter Ruskin Spear RA (1911-1990) since a brief monograph in 1985. It uses Spear's career to unlock the coded standards of the 20th-century art world and to look at class and culture in Britain and at notions of 'vulgarity'.




The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the changing preferences of the institutionalized avant-garde from the Second World War onwards; the battles fought within colleges of art as a generation of post-war students challenged the skills and commitment of their tutors; and the changing status of figurative art in the post-war period. Spear was committed to a form of social realism but the art he produced for left-wing and pacifist exhibitions and causes had a sophistication, authenticity and humour that flowed from his responses to bravura painting across a broad historical swathe of European art, and from the fact that he was painting what he knew. Spear's geography revolved around the working class culture of Hammersmith in West London and the spectacle of pub and street life. This was a metropolitan life little known to, and largely unrecorded by, his contemporaries.




Tracking Spear also illuminates the networks of friendship and power at the Royal College of Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts and within the post-war peace movement. As the tutor of the generation of Kitchen Sink and of future Pop artists at the Royal College of Art, and with friendships with figures as diverse as Sir Alfred Munnings and Francis Bacon, Spear's interest in non-elite culture and marginal groups is of pa