Timothy Hyman is a British figurative painter, art writer and curator. He has 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 has written extensively on art and film, has been a regular contributor to Times Literary Supplement and has curated exhibitions at the Tate, ICA and Hayward galleries. Hyman is a portraitist, but is best known for his narrative renditions of London. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Beckmann and Bonnard, as well as Lorenzetti and Brueghel, he explores his personal relationship, both real and mythological, with the city where he lives and works. He employs 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. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art between 1963 and 1967. Since 1980 he has had nine London solo exhibitions. His earliest publications were on film and on literature. 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, India, and completed several extensive British Council lecture tours. Timothy Hyman has been 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 has been married to the author Judith Ravenscroft. He lives in North London. Hyman has written 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 Hodgkin R.B. Kitaj and the Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar Since 1990, he has been a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and has written on a variety of subjects including: Ernst Ludwig KirchnerHenry Darger and German Romanticism. Hyman has also written extensively on film, including articles on Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky and Derek Jarman In 1998, his monograph on Bonnard was published by Thames and Hudson, and, in the same year, his book on Bhupen Khakhar was published in India. In 2003 his widely admired monograph Sienese Painting centred on Ambrogio Lorenzetti and other artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, and was described in the TLS as 'an unimprovable union of exceptionally acute looking, magical prose, and authoritative scholarship'. In 2016 Thames and 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.' According to Linda Nochlin it 'constructs a new and convincing scenario for the history of twentieth century painting...wonderfully concrete in detail and wide-ranging in scope.' Hyman and Roger Malbert curated the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition Carnivalesque in 2000. In 2001, along with the cultural historian Patrick Wright, Hyman was lead curator for the acclaimed Stanley Spencer retrospective at Tate Britain. He also co-curated the major exhibition British Vision at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, in 2007-8. Hyman is also well known for his lectures that investigate the tangents and marginalia of art history. He has been a visiting lecturer in art at the Slade School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art, Central St. Martins and The Royal College of Art for many years as well as lecturing at The Working Men's College, The Tate, the National Gallery, London and MOMA in New York.
