Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Artists are the most discriminating and demanding group within a gallery’s public. They contribute a critical perspective to a collection which as the Artist’s Eye exhibitions at the National Gallery have shown can be shared in a stimulating way with a wide audience. With this end in view we have invited Maud Sulter to make a selection from the Tate collections to form the first in an occasional series of exhibitions chosen by artists. In selecting work by women artists produced between 1850 and 1940 Maud Sulter has brought a contemporary perspective to historic paintings from the Victorian and Edwardian eras seeing them in a continuum with modernist works. In her essay she reclaims for the present not just the body of work itself but the voice with which to speak about it. As an artist and poet she has written a polemical commentary which is both allusive and metaphorical. She has augmented her thematic reading of the works with biographical information on the artists’ lives and careers. A collection is a history of sorts partial and provisional. The Tate Gallery’s collections of British and Modern art have been acquired for the nation over the last hundred years and continue to grow. Maud Sulter has drawn attention to the absences as well as the presences within the collections. Her enterprise will generate further research and debate into the cultural values which underwrite these works and the strategies behind them. We would like to thank Maud Sulter for contributing such a fresh and challenging reading of the works selected. Her personal insight into these paintings and her grouping of them makes for a display which can be enjoyed on many levels. Scholars and art lovers will find familiar and less familiar paintings enriched with new meaning and value. (LL)