Campus author - Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art

Wednesday, 03 March 2010

Dr Anna Gruetzner Robins - Reader in History of Art

Oxford University Press

9780199261697

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) was a major European artist and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whose statements on art from the 1880s to the 1930s have been used by artists and writers for more than fifty years.

Dr Anna Gruetzner Robins' collection offers new insight into Sickert as an artist and provides valuable information about other British artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a combination of over 400 entries, (including excerpts of letters Sickert wrote to newspapers and examples of his critiques in a wide range of journals), and extensive footnotes and annotations, this book is a definitive source of reference for those interested in this prolific artist and critic's journalistic career.

The collection has recently been named as Quentin Blake's favourite book. Blake, who is best known for his illustrations of Roald Dahl's children's books but is also an author in his own right, chose his six favourite books for The Week magazine as part of their regular ‘Best books...chosen by...' feature. He said that: ‘This is an extraordinarily rich kind of bedside book; it's almost as though you were ­listening to this intelligent and extremely articulate painter. Sickert is undervalued, no doubt because many of his opinions are "wrong" according to contemp­orary critical orthodoxy, but all the more interesting for that.'

Published in 2003, Robins' work received widespread acclaim from a wide range of critics. The Times Literary Supplement praised the collection for it's unveiling of previously unseen material and described it as ‘the most comprehensive selection of Sickert's criticism to date', whilst the Irish Times found it to be ‘immensely enjoyable' and a ‘real labour of love...offering a great deal of new insight into Sickert as artist, polemicist and man-about-town. Brilliantly annotated, it's also great fun.'