Bill Jacklin

Bill Jacklin is one of the most exciting and individual artists of the generation that first came to prominence in the 1960s. Born in London, where he made his early reputation, and now living in New York, he has seemed destined from the start to swim against the stream, neither following fashion nor reacting in knee-jerk fashion against it, but rather being driven by his own internal compulsions. In an era of Pop Art he chose to be an abstract artist, producing intricate patterns of grids and dots. When he had achieved success in this style, and everything seemed to be going his way, he felt irresistibly impelled to return to a type of realistic representation, and so found himself ostracised as a traitor to the cause of abstraction - something which, as a cause, he had never espoused in the first place. He was and is an obsessed painter, and something of a loner socially and artistically.

There is a deep inner consistency in Jacklin's work. The structural preocupations, the fascination with the way light falls across the surface of a paper or a canvas, the "flicker" as the eye travels across one of his works - all these are as evident in his most minimal, abstract work as his most intricately representational. It is significant that he came to full maturity not in London, but in New York, that city of soaring straight lines and grids. But a city of people also, and whether it is the meatpackers at lunch, the drifters on 42nd Street or the bathers on the beaches of Coney Island, they balance the geometry with a rich and wayward humanity.

This book, at once biographical and critical, is based on a detailed study of the work and many conversations with Jacklin, and provides the definitive mid-career survey of a distinctive and original figure in British and American art.

Includes colour and black-and-white illustrations.