First bass

Summer reading for Dullbloggers? Stuart Sutcliffe: A Retrospective is available at Book Soup in L.A.

MG adds, July 2014–

Michael Bracewell reviewed the book and show Stuart Sutcliffe: A Retrospective for Frieze Magazine, and it’s well worth reading. Here’s a scrap:

“Since his death, and encouraged by the superior but romantically stylized biographical feature film Backbeat (1994), the assessment of Sutcliffe’s work as a visual artist has perhaps inevitably been contextualized almost solely by its position within the early career of the Beatles. The importance of this latest retrospective of his work, entitled ‘Stuart Sutcliffe: A Retrospective’, curated by Colin Fallows and Matthew H. Clough, and of the substantial accompanying publication, lies in their scholarly review of his art on a strictly art-historical basis. A concise and revealingly chosen selection of work, from charmingly vivacious juvenilia made when Sutcliffe was still a pupil at Prescot Grammar School, through to the last big ‘black’ paintings that he was working on at the time of his death, makes a potent and persuasive case for a major reassessment of the artist’s legacy.”]