27 February 2026

Author Spotlight: Six Books on Art by Martin Gayford

From books on the history of art to conversations with leading contemporary artists, this selection of books by the acclaimed critic Martin Gayford will introduce you to the power and beauty of art.

Martin Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it - Andrew Marr

Dubbed a ‘latter-day Vasari’ by the Financial Times, Martin Gayford is one of Britain’s most prolific art critics. He has written acclaimed books on such artists as David Hockney, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, as well as compelling titles on painting as a craft and an emotional experience.

Explore six of his books, all of which offer fascinating studies of art and what it means, from conversations with Tracey Emin to the artistic wonders of Venice.

1. My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting

Tracey Emin talks about painting: what it is, why she does it, why it matters.

My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting is a vivid and intimate portrait of the artist’s life and work in her own words, in conversation with Gayford. Emin reflects on painting how she approaches it, why it matters to her, and how it connects to her life and how everything has changed since her cancer diagnosis. Offering a uniquely personal insight into her extraordinary life and career, Emin expresses herself in her characteristically frank, confessional style that is so familiar to anyone who has seen her paintings.

Discover My Heart is This.

2. Venice: City of Pictures

A major centre of art in the Renaissance where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm, Venice remains the site of important artistic events. From native artists like Canaletto and Guardi to visitors like Turner, Monet and Sargent, the city has been depicted in many diverse styles and moods. In Venice: A City of Pictures, Gayford – who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, covered every Biennale since 1990, and even had portraits of himself exhibited there on several occasions – takes us on a compelling visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known as 'La Serenissima'.

Discover Venice: A City of Pictures.

3. How Painting Happens (and why it matters)

Painting is a subject on which painters themselves are often the most incisive commentators. Martin Gayford has had conversations with many practising artists on how and why they paint; how they came to the practice; the influence of fellow painters; and how they find creative sustenance and inspiration in their art. Those conversations form the basis of How Painting Happens (and why it matters).

Drawing on a trove of conversations conducted over more than three decades with artists including Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig, Lucian Freud, Katharina Fritsch, David Hockney, Claudette Johnson, Lee Ufan, Paula Rego, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Frank Stella, Luc Tuymans, Zeng Fanzhi and many more, How Painting Happens crosses the centuries to give us a wealth of insights into the endlessly compelling phenomenon of painters and painting.

Discover How Painting Happens (and why it matters).

4. Modernists & Mavericks

Martin Gayford’s masterfully narrated account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s tells the story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences and artistic concerns among a number of acclaimed artists, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin. In teasing out the thread connecting these individual lives, Gayford demonstrates how painting thrived in London against the backdrop of Soho bohemia in the 1940s and 1950s and ‘Swinging London’ in the 1960s.

Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters offers a masterfully narrated account of this definitive period, drawing on extensive first-hand interviews with important witnesses and participants. Gayford demonstrates the ways the postwar painters were allied in their confidence that this ancient medium, in opposition to photography and other media, could do fresh and marvellous things.

Discover Modernists & Mavericks.

5. Man with a Blue Scarf

One of the best books about art, and the making of art, that I have ever read - Julian Barnes

Man with a Blue Scarf is the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist, and to be transformed into a work of art.

Lucian Freud (1922–2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of recent times, spent seven months painting Martin Gayford’s portrait. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master – both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also built up: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself.

Discover Man with a Blue Scarf.

6. A Bigger Message

A remarkable picture of Britain’s greatest living artist - Daily Telegraph

In this classic book, filled with anecdote, insight, passion and wit, David Hockney reveals the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface.

Compiled from a decade and a half of conversations with Martin Gayford, it reflects a period in which Hockney relocated from Los Angeles to his native East Yorkshire. Their exchanges communicate the immense delight and inspiration that Hockney finds in the changing seasons and natural splendours of this sparsely inhabited corner of England – a delight that is, in the words of Margaret Drabble, ‘an invitation to us all to look better, see better, enjoy more’.

Discover A Bigger Message.

Discover our full collection of art books by Martin Gayford.