Gayford M. Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney

Martin Gayford’s masterfully narrated account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s tells the story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences and artistic concerns among a number of acclaimed artists, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin. In teasing out the thread connecting these individual lives, Gayford demonstrates how painting thrived in London against the backdrop of Soho bohemia in the 1940s and 1950s and ‘Swinging London’ in the 1960s.

Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters offers a masterfully narrated account of this definitive period, drawing on extensive first-hand interviews with important witnesses and participants. Gayford demonstrates the ways the postwar painters were allied in their confidence that this ancient medium, in opposition to photography and other media, could do fresh and marvellous things.