William Gear

An important player on the stage of International Modernism, William Gear deserves a major study which examines the best of his output from all decades and which attempts to sum up and assess the range of his achievement. Andrew Lambirth’s monograph promises to do that. William Gear (1915-97) was an abstract painter with an international reputation, Scottish by birth but broadly European in sensibility, and one of only two British artists to be part of the CoBrA Group. (CoBrA was Europe’s answer to American Abstract Expressionism – a short-lived but explosive expressionist movement.) Living in Paris in the late 1940s, Gear was part of the post-war surge towards abstraction, but returned to live in the UK in 1950. He shot to fame with his controversial Autumn Landscape, painted for the Festival of Britain in 1951, and became one of the leading innovators of the 1950s art world. In 1958 he was appointed director of the Towner Art Gallery, a post he held until 1964, arranging exhibitions and buying contemporary art for the Towner’s permanent collection with great flair and shrewdness. In 1964 he moved to Birmingham to become Head of Fine Art at Birmingham College of Art and Crafts, retiring in 1975, and living in the city for the rest of his life. One of the pioneers of silkscreen printing in Britain, he also made lithographs and monoprints, and designed wallpaper and textiles, but he is best known as a painter. Although he lived mostly in England, his reputation ironically stands higher in Europe than it does here. Published to celebrate the centenary of Gear’s birth. This book aims to stimulate a reassessment of his work and to show the full range of his achievement. Contains much previously unseen material (particularly works on paper, one of the great resources of Gear’s practice) and demonstrates how throughout a long career his art drew inspiration from natural appearances but transformed them into abstract imagery of great resonance and rhythmic presence.