Published in 1994
144 pages
Jane Hill is a freelance writer (since 1987), social historian, author and curator of (principally but not solely) C20th Modern British Art, contributing essays to group authored books. She authored The Art of Dora Carrington, 1994 (& still in print), and The Sculpture of Gertrude Hermes, 2011. Each publication was a long distance project, researched using primary source material and followed by major retrospectives. She was the proposer, selector, co-designer and curator of Carrington: the Exhibition, The Barbican Art Gallery, 1995 (consultant on Carrington, the Christopher Hampton feature film).
What is this book about?
At the age of thirty-eight Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. Lytton was the linchpin of a life in which friendships, making a home and her own artistic output jockeyed for attention. The association with Lytton Strachey and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty, have tended to overshadow Carrington’s contribution to modern painting, but Jane Hill’s important study goes a long way to redress the balance. The author takes a chronological viewpoint, looking at the art Carrington produced in each period and the influences upon it of personal relationships, places, and current events and trends. The immense range of her art – portraits, landscapes, glass paintings and decorative work – reveal Carrington as a significant artist of her period.
