Matthew Collings

Matthew Collings (born 1955) is a British art critic, writer and broadcaster.

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 and Family. For many weeks Collings was the object of an internationally coordinated police search.^[1]

Collings trained at Byam Shaw School of Art, and Goldsmith's College, and still practises as an artist. He edited Artscribe 1983-7. Collings was a producer and presenter on the BBC The Late Show 1989-95. In the early 1990s, he brought Martin Kippenberger 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, Georgia O'Keeffe and Willem de Kooning, as well as broader historical subjects such as Hitler's "Degenerate art" 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, 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:

"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."^[2]

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 TV programme on the Turner Prize. 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.^[3]

In October 2007, with Emma Biggs, Collings curated and wrote a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Picasso'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".^[4] 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. In October 2010, he wrote and presented a BBC2 series called Renaissance Revolution, in which he discussed three Renaissance paintings: Raphael's Madonna del Prato; Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights; and Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ.^[5]

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, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000
• Art Crazy Nation, Worldwide, 2001
• Sarah Lucas, Tate Publishing, 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

References

1. ^ Collings, Matthew (1997). Blimey! - From Bohemia to Britpop: London Art World from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. London: 21 Publishing. ISBN 978-1901785005. 
2. ^ Collings, Matthew. "The bottom line". New Statesman, 24 November 2003.
3. ^ Marshall, Richard. "An Interview With Matthew Collings". 3 AM Magazine, 2002. Retrieved on May 09, 2008.
4. ^ This is Civilisation
5. ^ Renaissance Revolution. Presenter & Writer: Matthew Collings. BBC. BBC Two. 2010-10.

External links

• Contains images and updated information on Collings and Biggs' work
• Interview with Matthew Collings
• Journalisted - Articles by Matthew Collings

Persondata
Name	Collings, Matthew
Alternative names
Short description	Art Critic/Historian, TV/Radio Arts Presenter
Date of birth	1955
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death