Timothy HymanRA (17 April 1946 – 7 September 2024) was a British figurative painter, art writer and curator. He published monographs on both Sienese Painting and on Pierre Bonnard, as well as most recently The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century. He wrote extensively on art and film, was a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and curated exhibitions at the Tate, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Hayward galleries. Hyman was a portraitist but is best known for his narrative renditions of London. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Max Beckmann and Bonnard, as well as Lorenzetti and Brueghel, he explored his personal relationship, both real and mythological, with the city where he lived and worked. He employed vivid colours, shifting scale and perspectives, to create visionary works. He was elected an RA in 2011.
Life and career
Hyman was born in Hove, Sussex, in 1946, and was brought up in London. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art between 1963 and 1967. Since 1980, he had ten London solo exhibitions. His earliest publications were on film (8½ as an Anatomy of Melancholy, Sight and Sound, 1974) and on literature (The Modus Vivendi of John Cowper Powys, 1972). He began to publish articles on painting in the mid-seventies in The London Magazine, and was a contributing editor to Artscribe. In 1979, he curated the controversial exhibition Narrative Paintings at the ICA in London and the Arnolfini in Bristol. In 1980 and 1982, he was a Visiting Professor in Baroda, (Vadodara) India, and completed several extensive British Council lecture tours. Hyman was Artist-in-Residence at Lincoln Cathedral, Sandown Racecourse and, most recently, at Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2015). Since 1982, he had been married to the author Judith Ravenscroft. He lived in North London. He died on 7 September 2024.
Hyman wrote on the work of many artists including Pierre Bonnard and the painters of the Sienese School as well as more contemporary artists, such as Howard HodgkinR. B. Kitaj and the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar From 1990, he was a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and wrote on a variety of subjects including: Ernst Ludwig KirchnerHenry Darger and German Romanticism. Hyman also wrote extensively on film, including articles on Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Derek Jarman. In 1998, Hyman's monograph on Bonnard (judged by The New Criterion as "by far the best thing ever written about the painter") was published by Thames & Hudson, and, in the same year, his book on Bhupen Khakhar was published in India. In 2003 his widely admired monograph Sienese Painting (Thames & Hudson), centred on Ambrogio Lorenzetti and other artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, was described in the TLS by David Ekserdjian as "an unimprovable union of exceptionally acute looking, magical prose, and authoritative scholarship". In 2016, Thames & Hudson published The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century, described by Svetlana Alpers as "exhilarating to read"; and by Christopher Allen as "a delight, deeply but lightly erudite, intimate, written with exquisite intelligence."
Hyman and Roger Malbert curated the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition Carnivalesque in 2000.
Bhupen Khakhar, Chemould Publications and Mapin Publishing, 1998, ISBN81-85822-55-7
Carnivalesque Timothy Hyman, Roger Malbert & Malcolm Jones. Published by National Touring Exhibitions (Hayward Gallery); and University of California Press.2001 ISBN978-1-85332-209-9
↑"Henry Darger & Adolf Wölfli", The Times Literary Supplement, 30 October 1998.
↑"Philosophy & Reverie: the contemplative ironies of German Romantic Art", The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4769, August 1994
↑"8½ as an Anatomy of Melancholy", Sight & Sound magazine, Summer 1974. Reprinted in Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism (edited by Peter Bondanella). Oxford University Press. 1978. ISBN978-0-19-502273-5.
↑"Tarkovsky's Solaris". Film Quarterly, Spring 1976.
↑"Interview with Derek Jarman", The London Magazine, October 1980.
