Matthew Collings
Encyclopedia

Life and career

In one of his books on art, Collings states that, in his early teenage years, he ran away to Canada. This act was preceded by a period of hanging around in a house in Oakley Street, Chelsea, whose residents included members of various rock bands including Mighty Baby
Mighty Baby
Mighty Baby were formed in 1968 from the ashes of The Action. They released two albums, Mighty Baby and A Jug Of Love . Their debut, a collection of psychedelic rock, appeared on the tiny Head record label in the UK, and on Chess in the United States...

 and Family
Family (band)
Family were an English rock band that formed in late 1966 and disbanded in October 1973. Their style has been characterised as progressive rock, although their sound often explored other genres, incorporating elements of styles like as folk, psychedelia, acid, jazz fusion and rock and roll...

. For many weeks Collings was the object of an internationally coordinated police search.

Collings trained at Byam Shaw School of Art, and Goldsmith's College, and still practises as an artist. He edited Artscribe
Artscribe
Artscribe , titled Artscribe International from 1985, is a defunct British contemporary art magazine. It was notable for its commitment in the late 1970s and early 1980s to abstract art, and for giving popular art critic Matthew Collings his first break into contemporary art.-Founding and early...

 1983-7. Collings was a producer and presenter on the BBC The Late Show 1989-95. In the early 1990s, he brought Martin Kippenberger
Martin Kippenberger
Martin Kippenberger was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona....

  into the BBC studios to create an installation, and he interviewed Georg Herold while this Cologne-based conceptual artist painted a large canvas with beluga caviar.

Collings also wrote and presented documentary films for the BBC on individual artists, such as Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...

, Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...

 and Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....

, as well as broader historical subjects such as Hitler's "Degenerate art
Degenerate art
Degenerate art is the English translation of the German entartete Kunst, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were...

" exhibition, art looted in the Second World War by Germany and Russia, Situationism, Spain's post-Franco art world and the rise of the Cologne art scene.

After leaving the BBC, Collings wrote and presented the Channel 4 TV series This is Modern Art
This is Modern Art
This Is Modern Art was a six-part TV series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings. It was broadcast in 1998 on Channel 4.The series won several awards including a BAFTA...

, which won him a Bafta (1998) among other awards. He was originally identified as a proponent of Britart, however more recently his sympathies have become ambiguous or even hostile to it. He wrote in the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....

:

"A new popular audience is obsessed by contemporary art. But I think they are being sold something that isn't really there: an all-in package of spirituality, depth and profundity. I am afraid the official institutions of contemporary art are just lying about this stuff."


Collings wrote and presented a Channel 4 series in 2003 about the "painterly" stream of Old Master painting, called Matt's Old Masters. A book by the same title accompanied the series. Further Channel 4 series by Collings included Impressionism: Revenge of the Nice (2004) and The Me Generations: Self Portraits, (2005).

For some years Collings presented the Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...

 TV programme on the Turner Prize
Turner Prize
The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...

. He has described himself as "an apologist for contemporary art", although in the same interview he confessed that this is more a popular assumption about him than his own idea.

In October 2007, with Emma Biggs
Emma Biggs
Emma Biggs is a London-based mosaic artist and author of a number of standard textbooks on contemporary mosaic practice. Having recently completed a large public art project -- "Made in England" -- based on the visual culture and ideology of the pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent , her work has...

, Collings curated and wrote a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

's late works at the HN Gallery in London. The paintings were from the 1960s series of Painter and Model and Déjeuner sur l’herbe reworkings. According to the catalogue essay the exhibition aimed to draw attention to Picasso's achievement as a manipulator of form rather than the popular myth of Picasso as a showman or lover or sensationalist genius.

That year, Collings presented the Channel 4 TV series "This is Civilisation". In 2009 he appeared on the BBC2 programme "School of Saatchi" a reality TV show for newly trained UK artists. He lectures at City and Guilds of London Art School
City and Guilds of London Art School
The City and Guilds of London Art School is an art college in London, England, United Kingdom. It is one of the country's longest established art colleges, and offers courses ranging from Foundation, through B.A. degree, Postgraduate Diploma and M.A...

. In October 2010, he wrote and presented a BBC2 series called Renaissance Revolution, in which he discussed three Renaissance paintings: Raphael
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

's Madonna del Prato
Madonna del Prato (Raphael)
The Madonna with the Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist is a 1506 painting by Raphael, now held in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna...

; Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a triptych painted by the early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch , housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1939. Dating from between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was about 40 or 50 years old, it is his best-known and most ambitious work...

; and Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its...

's The Baptism of Christ
The Baptism of Christ (Piero della Francesca)
The Baptism of Christ is a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, finished around 1448-1450. It is housed in the National Gallery, London....

.

Collings' abstract paintings are created in collaboration with mosaicist, Emma Biggs.

Books

  • Blimey! - From Bohemia to Britpop: London Art World from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, 21 Publishing, 1997
  • It Hurts - New York Art from Warhol to Now, 21 Publishing, 2000
  • This is Modern Art
    This is Modern Art
    This Is Modern Art was a six-part TV series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings. It was broadcast in 1998 on Channel 4.The series won several awards including a BAFTA...

    , Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000
  • Art Crazy Nation, Worldwide, 2001
  • Sarah Lucas, Tate Publishing
    Tate Publishing Ltd
    Tate Publishing is a publisher of visual arts books, associated with the Tate Gallery in London, England. It was established in 1911; nowadays it is a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd, an independent company wholly owned by the Trustees of Tate, and is based at Tate Britain, Millbank, London...

    , 2002
  • Matt's Old Masters - Titian, Rubens, Velazquez and Hogarth, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003
  • Criticism (with Matthew Arnatt), Rachmaninoff's, 2004
  • Ron Arad interviewed by Matthew Collings, Phaidon, 2004
  • This is Civilisation, 21 Publishing, 2008

External links

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