To mark the anniversary of the death of Eric Craven Gregory (6 October 1887 – 9 February 1959), Lund Humphries’ joint Managing Director (from 1930) and Chairman (from 1945) who was always known as ‘Peter’ Gregory, author Valerie Holman reflects on the significant achievements of this important patron of the arts, under whose guidance Lund Humphries became one of the most accomplished printers and publishers of illustrated art and design books.
Valerie Holman is co-author of The Sculpture of F.E. McWilliam (Lund Humphries 2012), and wrote a short history of Lund Humphries for our 75th anniversary. She is currently researching a book on Peter Gregory.
Your head is coated by a thick soup of black and green paint. A roughly smeared handprint of grey-blue smoke tarnishes your jaw while sharp flecks of orange, pale yellow and white sting your cheeks and eyes. A wave of red threatens to permeate the scene as you look up, enraged, at the dandified artist […]
Valerie Holman rounds off a year of Lund Humphries anniversary celebrations with a selection of the company’s highlights and successes of the past 75 years. To celebrate 75 years of art publishing, every month this year a Lund Humphries author has focused on a single ‘landmark’ publication from the firm’s long list, bringing to light the stories behind […]
To coincide with of the publication of Jonathan Black’s new book and a display of printed works at Osborne Samuel, David Boyd Haycock discusses C.R.W. Nevinson’s single-minded pursuit of artistic renown and how his printed works in particular were a vital promotional tool. It has long been my impression that the thing C.R.W. Nevinson wanted most […]
Benedict Read discusses the two books written by his father Herbert Read on the artist Ben Nicholson in 1948 and 1956 and the wider impact of Lund Humphries’ monographs in this period. The Lund Humphries monographs started with Henry Moore in 1944. This set a format of listing works, plentiful illustrations, an artist’s own writings […]
We are sad to report the death last week-end of Andrew Causey, author of three Lund Humphries books and a highly regarded historian of modern British art. Andrew was one of our most meticulous, professional, courteous and unassuming authors. His writing on art was poised, precise, often challenging and always hugely enlightening. His book on […]
Andrew Causey describes Paul Nash’s extensive involvement in preparing the book on his work which was in the end published posthumously by Lund Humphries in 1948. Paul Nash had been preparing for at least two years before his death in 1946 material for the book which Lund Humphries would publish in due course. He collected black-and-white prints […]
In May 1939, nearly 75 years ago, the celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright visited London and gave four lectures at the RIBA. The meetings were hailed at the time as ‘perhaps the most remarkable events of recent architectural affairs in England. No architectural speaker in London has ever in living memory gathered such audiences.’ With great […]
Had enough of the great British heat wave already? Cool off at one of this summer’s great British art shows… Like Wimbledon and the Proms, the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, now in its 245th year, has long since gained the status of a British institution. Which is not to say that all of the 1000 plus […]
How best to summarise the achievement of Paul Nash? There is so much. We think we know him from those iconic paintings of the desolation of the First World War, or the famous Surrealist Landscape from a Dream in the Tate, or his more recognisably English landscapes, or the Second World War painting Totes Meer. But […]
You can’t help feeling that English painter Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) was always somewhat outside the main action. He described his boyhood and youth as ‘quiet and unexciting’, and unlike his contemporary Paul Nash he didn’t fight or serve as a war artist in either of the world wars. He remained on the edge of the group of intellectual Hampstead-based abstractionists in the […]
When Barbara Hepworth died in a studio fire in St Ives in May 1975, it seemed to mark the end of a particular moment in Modern British Art. Michael Bird writes eloquently at the end of The St Ives Artists about ‘the Poetry of Departures’: Bryan Wynter and Roger Hilton had died earlier that year, […]
It is shaping up to be quite a spring for British artist Jeremy Gardiner (b.1957). His new exhibition Exploring the Elemental opens at Paisnel Gallery, London tomorrow evening. Then on Sunday 9 February he discusses his work at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, before hanging his comprehensive retrospective exhibition Unfolding Landscape at Kings Place Gallery […]