First retrospective of this artist's work in many years. John Bellany accompanies an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh from 17 November 2012 - 27 January 2013. John Bellany, born 1942, helped change the course of painting in Scotland. His intensely felt paintings of fisherfolk and their precarious life at sea were a direct challenge to the much diluted Scottish colorist tradition and its landscapes and still lifes. The sheer size and raw emotion of Bellany's canvases, their depictions of a way of life that the artist knew from growing up in a Port Seton fishing family - and their elevation of that life onto a symbolic level - were at odds with the decorative, drawing-room pictures of much contemporary Scottish painting in the 1960s. This book will mark John Bellany's seventieth birthday and will accompany the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of John Bellany's work since the National Galleries of Scotland organized the retrospective in 1986. The fully illustrated catalogue will illustrate paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints from all the key periods of the artist's career.

About the Author
Keith Hartley is Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. He has written widely on modern and contemporary Scottish art, including 'Scottish Art Since 1900,The Vigorous Imagination', 'Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural' and, in 1986, 'John Bellany'. He is an expert on modern German art, curating exhibitions and writing catalogue essays on 'The Romantic Spirit in German Art', 'Otto Dix', 'Gerhard Richter', 'Anselm Kiefer' and 'Vienna 1908-1918'. He has also written on modern American artists, including Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha and Robert Mapplethorpe.


Book Information
ISBN 9781906270520
Author Keith Hartley
Format Hardback
Page Count 96
Imprint National Galleries of Scotland
Publisher National Galleries of Scotland