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Out of the Cage: The Art of Isabel Rawsthorne

Carol Jacobi

£30.00

The first definitive illustrated biography of Isabel Rawsthorne, a key figure in mid 20th-century British art

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Overview

Isabel Rawsthorne’s painting career at the centre of the Parisian and London avantgardes was eclipsed by the many occasions on which her friends made her the subject of their art, notably Epstein, Derain, Giacometti, Picasso and Bacon. This pioneering painter exhibited from the early 1930s, was influential in the 1940s and well known in the 1960s, but in her later years Giacometti’s and Bacon’s blockbuster biographies made her famous as a muse. Rawsthorne’s work is now in major collections, and this beautifully illustrated book re-writes the pre- and post-war art history of which she was a part: it is traced through the upheavals of the 20th century and her singular relationships with some of its most fascinating figures.

A decade of research into the period, Rawsthorne’s art and archives, and the memories of friends, has revealed for the first time her role in a rebel group at Liverpool School of Art; success and tragedy in the 1930s when she was studio assistant to Jacob Epstein; her life-long collaborations with Alberto Giacometti; and, after the war, with Francis Bacon and with African Modernism in the 1960s, as well as her exceptional late work. It also tells the full story of her break from art during the second world war, when she worked for the government in black propaganda.

Reviews

'Jacobi ‘reimagine[s] what an artist biography – notably one of a woman artist whose work is largely forgotten – can be … Jacobi treats Rawsthorne’s art with the intellectual seriousness of purpose with which it was conceived. She does not “reduce” Rawsthorne’s art making to self-reflexive illustrations of her life; rather, she addresses the two as richly intertwined'
The Art Newspaper

'Highlights how talented women have often missed out on the recognition they deserved'
Observer

'I love this book! Brilliant biography of the…utterly fascinating artist Isabel Rawsthorne'
Jennifer Higgie, editor-in-chief, Frieze

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Product Information

Book Details

Format: Hardback

Size: 24.0 x 16.5 cm

Extent: 448 pp

Publication date: 18 February 2021

ISBN: 9780500971055

About the Author

Carol Jacobi is Curator of British Art at Tate Britain, and has published and broadcast widely on 19th- and 20th-century British art, most recently ‘Picasso’s portraits of Isabel Rawsthorne’ in the Burlington Magazine. She was curator of the major Tate exhibition Van Gogh and Britain.