Raymond Mason

The paintings and sculptures of Raymond Mason never fail to attract a crowd. Often conceived on a large scale, his art - including paintings and drawings, colorful high and low reliefs and sculpture - has a universal appeal. He depicts busy street scenes and familiar landscapes, freezing moments from everyday life and creating dramatic and highly effective tableaux. His figures convey a powerful and very real emotion; their forceful gazes confront and challenge the viewer, demanding attention and response. Experimenting unceasingly with new sculptural forms, Mason explores the limits of realism and figuration itself. In a time without beliefs, his art is inspired by a thought "hungry for humanism, and for more".
Born in 1922, Mason has lived and worked in Paris since 1946. A friend of Giacometti, Balthus and Bacon he has established an international reputation chiefly through a number of monumental works in Paris, Montreal, New York, Washington, and his English home town of Birmingham. His retrospectives in Britain and France have attracted record-breaking crowds, but his place in contemporary art is only now beginning to be defined, not least because he has always bravely followed his own path in defiance of passing fashions.
This book brings together his major works for the first time, illustrated in over 190 superb photographs. Poet and critic Michael Edwards provides a masterly study of the artist and his oeuvre; his friendship with the artist allows him to consider Mason's working life in Britain and France, and to illuminate individual works with new and unusually searching analysis and interpretation. Essential reading for all those concerned with contemporary art, this important book is the definitive study of an artist whose work must surely rank among the most challenging and original of this century.

Michael Edwards has held a chair of comparative literature in Paris and is Professor of English at the University of Warwick.