I do like painting

Julian Bell

  • William Coldstream by Bruce Laughton
    Yale, 368 pp, £30.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 300 10243 7

‘People of all generations just stood around, uncertain of what to do next . . . It sort of petered out.’ Bruce Laughton’s William Coldstream is an attempt, 17 years on, to gather up the tatters of a wake held at University College London. The unnamed participant touches on a more general diffidence about how to remember or appraise William Coldstream. He has a niche in accounts of the 1930s art world, as co-founder of the short-lived but influential ‘Euston Road School’, and a slot in curators’ surveys of ‘British figuration’. But in that category, his profile is now eclipsed behind more histrionic personalities such as Bacon or Freud and, more particularly, by the higher pitched, punchier art of his pupil Euan Uglow. A few portrait commissions remain on public view in contexts of fusty formality, but for the most part the Coldstreams are for the storeroom.

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