National Year of Reading – Interview with Michael Bird

What was the first non-fiction/arts book you remember reading, and what was its impact on you? 

The first non-fiction book that completely swept me into its story – I would have been six or seven, I think – was King Alfred the Great in the original ‘Ladybird’ series. Today, the text feels very dated – stirring, chauvinistic stuff, the English doggedly noble in defeat, the dastardly Danes eventually vanquished – though as a model of pace and episode in historical storytelling it stays with me. But it was the illustrations that set me dreaming. The whole atmosphere and texture of Anglo-Saxon England felt so real – I knew that, if I could only dream a bit harder, I would actually be there. This experience – being immersed in two eras at the same time – was very powerful and mysterious. It’s something I still get from visual art – when I look at a painting from, say, the 1950s, I’m in the 1950s. I can smell the streets and hear what people are saying, imagine the kinds of places they’re going home to. I guess that a lot of people get this experience from music, and maybe we’re all time-travellers at heart. 

What’s the latest art/design/other book you’ve read?  

I usually have at least two or three books on the go – though it’s often slow going (I started re-reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow for the fourth time weeks ago). I recently enjoyed Vincenzo Latronico’s short novel Perfection – a beautifully and mercilessly observed satire in which a twenty-something hipster couple try to make an Insta-perfect life in Berlin, a city I’ve come to know well since my younger son moved there in 2017. And another short new novel, Ben Lerner’s Transcription – a kind of psychological mirror-maze, in which truth slides in and out of focus. I’ve also been re-reading Mel Gooding’s selection from Patrick Heron’s writings. Heron insisted that painting should be free of narrative or literary subject-matter, yet he was himself such a natural writer. His essay on Bonnard, written when Heron was twenty-seven, takes you deep into the process of painting as something at once open and intimate, the sense of looking and making as acts of love. 

What is your favourite Lund Humphries book, and why?  

I keep coming back to Insiders Outsiders, an essay collection edited by Monica Bohm-Duchen about the incalculable contribution to British postwar culture made by émigrés and refugees of the Nazi era. Naum Gabo, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Ernst Gombrich; the gallerists Erica Brausen and Annely Juda … it’s a long, long list. The terrible paradox is that, before the Nazi ascendency, German intellectual and cultural life was considerably more sophisticated and more pro-Semitic than was the case in Britain. No defence against populist extremism, it turned out. 

What is currently on your to-read list, and why does it appeal to you? 

First in line is the second half of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, which starts with Stepanova clearing out her late Aunt Galya’s apartment and discovering that its vast cargo of hoarded ephemera – photos, diaries, magazines, newspaper clippings – has miraculously survived intact through the serial cataclysms endured by Russians in the twentieth century. It’s a historical and personal odyssey told through objects and their stories – exactly the book I was looking for when I picked it up. But – since I think a lot anyway about the meanings that ordinary objects accumulate – I reached saturation point and had to take a break! 

If you were starting a star-studded (art/architecture) book club, who, from any era, would you like to invite?  

It would have to be people who I think would actually take time to finish the book before they came along – which probably rules out Patrick Heron, say, or Sandra Blow. And it would include people who understand art from inside (even if they’re not primarily artists) rather than just having opinions. I’d invite D.H. Lawrence to stir things up, Walter Benjamin to show us the mystery in the ordinary, Simon Schama to impart intelligibility and structure, and Mary Kelly, because I loved the personal angle she brought to quite abstruse philosophical concepts in her interview for the National Sound Archives’ ‘Artists Lives’ series. If the five of us could agree on a special guest list, I’d like to invite Vanessa Bell to talk on the visual dimension in her sister’s novels, or David Hockney on what he found in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. 

Michael Bird is an independent art historian. His books for Lund Humphries include The St Ives Artists: New Edition (2023), Matt Rugg: The Many Languages of Sculpture (2023), Sandra Blow (2005), Bryan Wynter (2010), Lynn Chadwick (2014), George Fullard: Sculpture and Survival (2017) and Studio Voices: Art and Life in 20th-Century Britain (2018). Forthcoming from Lund Humphries is Karl Weschke and Cornwall's Lost Modernism (2027) by Matt Retallick with a Foreword by Michael Bird.
Michael also writes for children; his Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories: A Children’s History of Art, first published by Laurence King Publishing in 2016, has been translated into seventeen languages.