5th June, 6.30pm
Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LE
Come and hear Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, in conversation with Adrian Clark, co-author of Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso.
Francesca Wade is the author of the acclaimed Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, the proposal for which won her the Biographers’ Club’s Tony Lothian Prize (now the Elizabeth Buccleuch Prize) in 2015. Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife explores Stein’s self-mythologising, her determination to achieve renown for her avant-garde writing, and her partner Alice B Toklas’s fraught stewardship of Stein’s posthumous legacy. During her researches, Wade discovered previously unseen interviews Toklas conducted in the 1950s that shed new light on the origins of Stein’s radical writing and of their relationship.
Irascible, written with Richard Calvocoressi and with a foreword by David Hockney, tells the story of pioneering collector of Cubist art. Douglas Cooper was one of the most important – and divisive – figures in the international art world of the 20th century. The book focuses attention on Cooper’s colourful life and significant accomplishments: among them his financing and directorship of the Mayor Gallery in London as a young man in the 1930s, when he became close to artists such as Francis Bacon, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Max Ernst; his job as a senior Monuments Man in charge of tracking down Nazi-looted art in Switzerland; and his legendary feuds with leading figures and institutions in the British art world. Adrian Clark has published extensively on various British artists and is the author of a biography of John Rothenstein, director (1938–64) of the Tate Gallery and Cooper’s bête noire.
Booking will be at the Hatchards Events page.
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