Fiona MacCarthy

Byron - Life and Legend is a breakthrough in reinterpreting Byron's life and poetry for a new generation, showing him as a formative figure in European romanticism, as Byron described himself, 'the Napoleon of Rhyme'. MacCarthy brings a fresh eye to Byron's short but brilliant life, from his embattled relations with his mother, his early travels in the Mediterranean and the East, his relationships with adolescent boys, to the tragicomedy of his marriage, his incestuous love for his half-sister and the clamorous attention of his female fans.

Life and Legend

Byron

The Last Pre-Raphaelite

Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus

Life of Walter Gropius

Offers a biography of the noted nineteenth century author, social activist, and designer, discusses his personal life and connections with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and looks at his designs

A Life for Our Time

William Morris

In 1958 the year in which Krushchev came to power in Russia, the year after Eden's resignation over Suez, two years after John Osborne's Look Back in Anger the last of the debutantes, myself among them, went to the Palace to curtsey to the Queen. MacCarthy and her fellow 'debs', or 'gels' were taking part in a remarkable remnant of the rituals of aristocratic power. The system had been in operation almost unchanged since the 18th century. It was a female rite of passage, an elaborate initiation ceremony marking the emergence of the virgin out of the schoolroom and into society at the now marriageable age of seventeen. With their imitation grown-up laughter and affectation of knowingness, the girls were somewhere between teenagers and clones of the Queen herself. Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist and 'debs' delight', made estimates on the virginity level of the debutantes; MacCarthy remembers party seasons that stretched for months, among the great houses of London and the Home Counties, and riotous dances on country estates in Nothumberland and the Scottish Highlands. Last Curtsey is a remarkable portrait of England in the past half century, filtered through some of its most colourful and eccentric inhabitants.

The End of the Debutantes

Last Curtsey

Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Walter Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the vision and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Approaching the Bauhaus founder from all angles, she offers a poignant personal story, one that reexamines the urges that drove Euro-American modernism as a whole.

The Man who Built the Bauhaus

Gropius

Eric Gill was perhaps the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving.'A wonderfully detailed account of his personality - so vivid, you feel you know just what it would have been like to visit him at one of his patriarchal communes . . . A Dominican, dining with the Gills, once thought he saw a nimbus shining around Eric's head. Despite the sexual improprieties it unearths, MacCarthy's authoritative biography allows you to understand how someone might have thought that.' John Carey, Sunday Times

Eric Gill

Fiona MacCarthy makes a breakthrough in interpreting Byron's life and poetry drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive. She brings a fresh eye to his early years: his childhood in Scotland, embattled relations with his mother, the effect of his deformed foot on his development. She traces his early travels in the Mediterranean and the East, throwing light on his relationships with adolescent boys - a hidden subject in earlier biographies. While paying due attention to the compelling tragicomedy of Byron's marriage, his incestuous love for his half-sister Augusta and the clamorous attention of his female fans, she gives a new importance to his close male friendships, in particular that with his publisher John Murray. She tells the full story of their famous disagreement, ending as a rift between them as Byron's poetry became more recklessly controversial. Byron was a celebrity in his own lifetime, becoming a 'superstar' in 1812, after the publication of Childe Harold. The Byron legend grew to unprecedented proportions after his death in the Greek War of Independence at the age of thirty-six. The problem for a biographer is sifting the truth from the sentimental, the self-serving and the spurious. Fiona MacCarthy has overcome this to produce an immaculately researched biography, which is also her refreshing personal view.

William Morris (1834–1896) was an artist, craftsman, designer, poet, polymath, and visionary thinker. Well known for advocating that objects of beauty be accessible to all, Morris had a tremendous impact on the British Socialist movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Garden City movement, as well as on successive generations of artists and thinkers in Britain and beyond. In this fascinating book, Fiona MacCarthy examines Morris’s vision of a society in which art could flourish, and how this idea resonated over the ensuing century. Anarchy and Beauty takes the reader through Morris’s fascinating career, from the establishment of his decorative arts shop (later Morris & Co.), to his radical sexual politics and libertarianism, and the publication in 1890 of his novel News from Nowhere, which envisions a utopian socialist society. MacCarthy then looks at the numerous artists and movements that bear the influence of Morris’s ideas: Arts and Crafts and the Garden City, which took hold in both Europe and the United States; artists’ communities that sprung up during the interwar years; and the 1951 Festival of Britain, whose mission was to bring the highest standards of design within the reach of everyone.

William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960

Anarchy & Beauty

In the spring of 1902, when the back-to-the-land movement was at its height, an exodus began to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. East End London workmen - jewellers, silversmiths, enamellers, cavers, modellers, blacksmiths, cabinet-makers, book-binders and printers - fled from the rushed and crowded life of the big city to a rural idyll of craftsmanship and husbandry which was, at the time, all good socialists' dream. This extraordinary idealistic movement was to have a lasting impact not only on the lives of the 150 London immigrants and their leader, the architect, Charles Robert Ashbee, but also on the nature of the little town they occupied. The Guild of Handicraft had been formed in Whitechapel in 1888. It blended an attitude to art, design and manufacture with a view of how society might be changed for the better. This book traces its fortunes and misfortunes, hilarious and grave, and the many eccentrics, idealists and men of letters and the arts who were involved, including William Morris, Roger Fry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Edward Carpenter, Holman Hunt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Lowes Dickinson and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Set in the heart of the Cotswolds, Fiona MacCarthy's account of this attempt to resolve the dilemma faced by artists and craftsmen working in a mass-produced society, documents one delightful and intriguing experiment in utopian social history.

C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds

The Simple Life

Allen Jones

The Ma�tresse series by the British Pop artist Allen Jones has its origins in a painting that Jones created in 1976 for a film poster for Barbet Schroeder's eponymous and controversially debated film about a seductive, leather-clad dominatrix.In the years until 2015, the Ma�tresse motif developed -- in various executions and in play with poses, colours, and space -- into a self-contained group of works within Jones's oeuvre.This catalogue brings together large-format works on canvas, drawings, studies on paper, a newly created silkscreen series, a sculptural work, as well as archival material.English and German text.

Maîtresse

A gorgeous new edition of Fiona MacCarthy's ground-breaking biography of the artist-craftsman, typographer, and lettercutter, master wood-engraver, and sculptor: Eric Gill. 'Fascinating on the work and fair to the man; a brilliant biography.' Independent 'Scrupulous and sensitive . . . A wise and foolish English eccentric in full glory.' Observer 'Full of insight and interest . . . A considerable addition to modern biography.' Times Eric Gill was the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving. He was a devoted family man and key figure in three Catholic art and craft communities: yet he also believed in complete sexual freedom. In her controversial, landmark biography, originally published in 1989, celebrated biographer Fiona MacCarthy delves into the complex, dark, and contradictory sides of the man and the artist for the first time - and the result is his definitive portrait.

British Council

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Sir Stanley Spencer

Mexico City Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo

Fine arts museums (San Francisco, Calif.)

Finding inspiration in his quiet village on the river Thames, early 20th-century painter Stanley Spencer drew on his familiar world to arrive at an art of epic grandeur--though often homely and weird. Biographer Fiona MacCarthy investigates Spencer's life, sets his work in its cultural context, and emphasizes the links between his life and his paintings--and sheds new light on this sensitive and enigmatic artist. 85 color and 30 b&w illustrations. .

An English Vision

Stanley Spencer

The Simple Life (1981) was Fiona MacCarthy's first book, written while she was the Guardian's design correspondent (and before her acclaimed lives of Eric Gill, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones.) It tells of a venturesome effort to enact an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds. The leader of this endeavour was progressive-minded architect Charles Robert Ashbee, who in 1888 founded the Guild of Handicraft in Whitechapel, specialising in metalworking, jewellery and furniture and informed by the desire to improve society. In 1902 Ashbee and his East London comrades removed the Guild to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, hoping to construct a socialistic rural idyll. MacCarthy explores the impact of the experiment on the lives of the group and on the little town they occupied - tracing the Guild's fortunes and misfortunes, hilarious and grave, and the many fellow idealists and artists who were involved (among them William Morris, Roger Fry, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.)

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by A.S.Byatt as 'one of the finest biographies ever published', this is Fiona MacCarthy's magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement. 'Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.' Independent 'Wonderfully ambitious ... The definitive Morris biography.' Sunday Times 'Delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail and mysteries respected.' Daily Telegraph 'Oh, the careful detail of this marvellous book! . . . A model of scholarly biography'. New Statesman Since his death in 1896, William Morris has been celebrated as a giant of the Victorian era. But his genius was so multifaceted and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time - possibly of all time - could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and ranked as a poet with Tennyson and Browning. In her definitive biography - insightful, comprehensive, addictively readable - the award-winning Fiona MacCarthy gives us a richly detailed portrait of Morris's complex character for the first time, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry, and books; his role as a poet, novelist and translator; on his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. It is a masterpiece of biographical art.

William Morris: A Life for Our Time

The Man Who Built the Bauhaus

Traces the life and career of the British sculptor, engraver, and typographer, and makes use of his own diaries to depict his complex personality

A Lover's Quest for Art and God

Gemma Curtin

Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern celebrates the career of one of the truly great figures of modern British design; featuring previously unpublished interviews and specially commissioned photography of his work. The book features essays by renowned commentators on Modern British design including Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum, London, and cultural historian and widely published writer on design, Fiona MacCarthy. Spanning more than half a century, Grange's career began in 1947 and establishing a private practice in 1956, initially as an interior and architectural designer, Grange eventually became known for his work in product design. Working with a range of high-profile clients including British Rail, Wilkinson Sword, and Manganese Bronze, Grange has since designed products as varied as the Anglepoise lamp, the black cab and high-speed inner city trains. In 1976 Grange became one of the founding partners of the famous design consultancy Pentagram, along with Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes and Mervyn Kultansky, where he worked with a number of high-profile clients including Kodak and Kenwood. More recently, Grange has collaborated with British fashion designer Margaret Howell to produce a collarless shirt, which combines Grange's practical design experience with Howell's quality and make.

Making Britain Modern

Kenneth Grange

* A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK * In this majestic biography of the charismatic founder of the Bauhaus, Fiona MacCarthy argues that Walter Gropius's visionary ideas still influence the way we live, work, and think today. 'A masterpiece' Edmund de Waal, bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes 'Moving and vivid' Rowan Moore, Observer Mention the Bauhaus and iconic design objects such as a Marianne Brandt teapot, an Anni Albers weaving or a Marcel Breuer chair come to mind. But the Bauhaus was more than an art school - it was the birth of a whole new philosophy of art. It stood for delight, experiment and creative freedom. From 1910 to 1930 Gropius was at the centre of European modern art and design, gathering around him talents that included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. Once Hitler came to power, Gropius's situation became untenable. The Nazis opposed everything the Bauhaus stood for, and Gropius had little choice but to leave Germany. His story is one of exile in a century of conflict. In this riveting book - illustrated with over 130 photographs and drawings - Fiona MacCarthy draws on new research to re-evaluate Gropius's work and life. She illuminates the world of an inspiring, energetic man and the events and people that shaped him - from his shattering experiences in World War One, to his turbulent marriage to the notorious Alma Mahler and the tragic early death of their daughter Manon, through his disorientating years in London, to his final peaceful and productive partnership with Ise Gropius and his late starring role in twentieth-century architecture and design in America. She challenges more recent views of Gropius as a doctrinaire modernist, exploring his intellectual and emotional life with psychological insight, wit and sympathy. This is biography at its finest and most vivid.

Fiona MacCarthy

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