Bill Jacklin

London: Phaidon, 1997. Hardcover. VG/VG. Charcoal boards with red stamped lettering. Illustrated dust jacket with gray and red lettering in mylar cover. 240 pp. Mainly color illustrations. "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 ostracized 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." "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."--Jacket.