William Roberts: An English Cubist

Artist: William Roberts 
Author: Andrew Gibbon Williams 
Publisher: Lund Humphries 
Date: 2004 
Condition: A first edition hardback with the original unclipped dust wrapper over the black boards, there is a little fading to the spine edges of the cover. Internally very clean and apparently little read

Roberts was a very significant figure in the British avant-garde in the years before WWI, and then reinvented his style in the 20s and onwards. However, somehow, he feels like he got left out of the conversations later in the century about who had done what and when. 

He clearly felt this too, and produced a number of pamphlets and catalogues, designed by himself, over the years, highlighting topics such as the retrospective hijacking of Vorticism by Wyndham Lewis. 

His work has a very strong observational element which he transmits into his work with such understanding and subtlety that it is easy to miss the nuances, but this monograph helped to start the process of righting this, bringing out much of what we had simply taken for granted. Extensively illustrated and informative, this is a useful book on an artist who should be seen as one of the great British painters of the c20th