Martin Gayford

From October to December 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a home in Arles with Vincent van Gogh. This was, without doubt, the most celebrated cohabitation in art history: never, before or since have two such towering artistic talents been penned up in so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history. Predictably, the results were explosive. The dénouement of their life together has entered into folklore. Two months after Gauguin arrived in Arles,...

A record of a decade of private conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, David Hockney reveals via reflection, anecdote, passion and humour the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface.

"One of our leading art critics and writers, Martin Gayford, recounts his travels and meetings with the world's greatest artists. In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, critic Martin Gayford has traveled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayford's journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and outcomes, which he makes as...

The making of pictures has a history going back perhaps 100,000 years to an African shell used as a paint palette. Two-thirds of it is irrevocably lost, since the earliest images known to us are from about 40,000 years ago. But what a 40,000 years, explored here by David Hockney and Martin Gayford in a brilliantly original book. They privilege no medium, or period, or style, but instead, in 16 chapters, discuss how and why pictures have been made,...

Yellow jasper lips at the Met -- 1. An afternoon in Florence -- 2. A flood and a chimera -- 3. Immersed in the Bargello -- 4. A sense of place -- 5. The case of the Duccio Madonna -- 6. In the Met Cafâe -- 7. Princely collections -- 8. An artistic "Education sentimentale" -- 9. Lost in the Louvre -- 10. Crows and the power of art -- 11. Heaven and Hell in the Prado -- 12. Hieronymus Bosch and the hell of looking at art with other people -- 13. Titian...

"Degas and the Nude" is the first book in a generation to explore the artist's treatment of the nude from his early years in the 1850s and 1860s, through his triumphs in the 1880s and 1890s, all the way to his last decades when the theme dominated his artistic production in all media. With essays by leading American and French critics, it provides a new interpretation of Degas' evolving conception of the nude, situating it in the subject's broader...