Frances Spalding is an art historian, biographer and critic, through her books, catalogue essays, public lectures, journalism, appearances at literary and arts festivals and in the media, she has done much to promote British art, and to demonstrate the validity of biography as an art historical method. Her books include British Art since 1900; a centenary history of the Tate (written shortly before its divide into Tate Britain and Tate Modern); lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant and Gwen Raverat, the grand-daughter of Charles Darwin, also a critical biography of the poet Stevie Smith. She writes essays on contemporary artists for exhibition catalogues, teaches art history at Newcastle University, chaired for four years the University’s wide-ranging and high-profile Pubic Lecture Programme, and recently organised the conference ‘Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore: Radical Innovation in the North East.’
Her ‘John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art’ (OUP; 2009) brought to public attention their reclaiming for British art a sense of place, national identity and belonging. It was also the first book to give full attention to the editor and librettist Myfanwy Piper who collaborated with Benjamin Britten on three of his operas. Spalding’s most recent book is ‘Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped (Lund Humphries; 2012)’, an artist whose rereading of the urban and industrial environment developed an aesthetic of the everyday.
Recent cataclogue essays can be found in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s ‘A Crisis of Brilliance’ and for recent exhbitions held by Eileen Hogan and by Jane Jospeh.