William Crozier

William Crozier was born in Glasgow in 1930 and educated at the Glasgow School of Art. He spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London, where he quickly gained a reputation as the 1950s equivalent of a Young British Artist through the early success and notoriety of his exhibitions of assemblages and paintings. This is the first major monograph on his work. Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, throughout his life Crozier has allied himself and his work consciously with European art and thought. Early in his career he developed a highly personalized vision of nature, which in the 1960s and 1970s incorporated skeletal figures, making 'art that is as a razor slash' which ran counter to the prevailing tastes in abstraction and Pop-art imagery of the time. Crozier has exhibited widely in London, Glasgow, Dublin and Continental Europe. From the 1980s, when he set up studios in Ireland and the UK, his painting of the landscape has blossomed with an extraordinary radiance and confidence. Then, as now, his landscapes and still-lifes use sumptuous colour to engineer the emotional intensity of the paintings. He remains concerned with developing the language of figurative painting. This book is the first to give substantial critical attention to an artist well known within the UK and Irish art worlds, and gives new insights into the still under-written history of figurative painting in Britain. It provides a detailed survey of Crozier's wide-ranging work over the last fifty years, placing it within wider European traditions as well as relating it to developments in Irish, Scottish and English art. Crozier is a formidable colourist, and the critical texts are accompanied by extensive reproductions of the artist's work in colour. The book will be widely welcomed by collectors and devotees of the artist's work, students of modern art, and art lovers in general.