Arturo Di Stefano

by John Berger, Michael Hofmann, Christopher Lloyd

Arturo Di Stefano is an anomaly in the modern art world: a figurative painter when the prevailing orthodoxy favors neo-conceptualism and other non-figurative movements. His work -- drawing on literary sources as diverse as The Odyssey and The Waste Land -- engages in a dialogue with the past while remaining utterly contemporary in its methods and achievements. From mythological subjects to unpeopled London cityscapes, the world he presents through his art is one of unusually haunting power, perhaps demonstrated to best effect in his penetratingly intense portraits. Arcades and corridors stretching off into the distance recur over and again in his work, emblems of an obsessive need to imbue the most apparently empty of scenes with an immanent -- and enigmatic -- narrative quality: the narrowing perspectives and repetitious forms are redolent with suggestions of exile and home. This, the first monograph on one of the most unusual and compelling artists working in London today, offers previously unpublished images and statements from Di Stefano, displaying the full range of his utterly original creative spirit.

120 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2002

About the author

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a college text.

Later he was self exiled to continental Europe, living between the french Alps in summer and the suburbs of Paris in winter. Since then, his production has increased considerably, including a variety of genres, from novel to social essay, or poetry. One of the most common themes that appears on his books is the dialectics established between modernity and memory and loss,

Another of his most remarkable works has been the trilogy titled Into Their Labours, that includes the books Pig Earth (1979), Once In Europa (1983) Lilac And Flag (1990). With those books, Berger makes a meditation about the way of the peasant, that changes one poverty for another in the city. This theme is also observed in his novel King, but there his focus is more in the rural diaspora and the bitter side of the urban way of life.