Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Laura Freeman author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:18th May '23

£30.00

Available for immediate dispatch.

Ways of Life cover

This first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art and explores a thrilling moment in the history of modernism

'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it'

EDMUND DE WAAL

'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for'
OBSERVER

The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists represent a thrilling tipping point in twentieth-century modernism: a new guard, a new way of making and seeing, and a new way of living with art. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line.

Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.

The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it -- Edmund de Waal
Freeman's attention falls on each particular of Ede's life and turns it over like a polished pebble in a jacket pocket. Along with his gallery, this book is the legacy he might have wished for * Observer *
Gorgeously written * The Times, *Books of the Year* *
If ever the spirit of a gallery is captured within hard covers, it is Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, in this beautiful, original biography of its founder... Freeman's writing has Ede's flair, grace and insight * Financial Times, *Best Books of 2023* *
An impassioned biography * The Times, *Top 50 Non-Fiction Books* *
An excellent biography of Jim Ede. Reading Laura Freeman's luminous study of the curator and collector, I can't help but picture the gallery and house he built- the haven of Kettle's Yard in Cambridge * Daily Telegraph *
Freeman has done a wonderful job here in conveying with absolute precision why Ede mattered and what made him different from his Bloomsbury contemporaries * Sunday Times *
A thorough and entertaining biography... Excellently paced * The Times *
Meticulously researched, sympathetically told, the book is infused with the spirit of Kettle's Yard * i *
Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty -- Ruth Scurr, author of Fatal Purity

ISBN: 9781787331907

Dimensions: 247mm x 178mm x 36mm

Weight: 1188g

400 pages