Alan Davie in Hertford

This ground-breaking publication provides a new view of the great Scottish artist Alan Davie (1920-2014), whose intensely physical gestural painting stood the staid post-war British art world on its head. In advance of a new Davie gallery in Hertford, the visually spectacular book argues that far from being an essentially historical figure, defined by the abstract expressionist era of the Fifties and early Sixties when he enjoyed his greatest fame, Davie was a prophetic artist whose preoccupations with universal creativity and self-realisation are more relevant today than they’ve ever been. Lavishly illustrated with rare archive photographs and little-seen paintings, Alan Davie in Hertford demonstrates that Davie’s visionary art was far more closely bound up with physical places than is generally supposed, not least the quiet market town of Hertford, where he lived for 60 years. A catalogue of 40 works intended as the new gallery’s core collection, provides a “rich and fabulous” survey of Davie’s work, from student works of the Thirties to some of his very last paintings.