Peter Doig (Rizzoli Classics): -compact edition-

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after newsletter promotion I don’t like finishing things. I like paintings that make you wonder if they’re finished In 1906 Vollard sent André Derain, who with Matisse was among the founders of Fauvism, to London. An exhibition of Claude Monet’s paintings of the city had recently been staged in Paris, and the dealer wanted Derain, whom he had just signed on, to try his hand at catching the shifting light over the Thames, its boats and embankments. Over three visits Derain produced a memorable body of work last seen together in 2006—at the Courtauld. Doig’s unfinished paintings, including some for the Courtauld, follow him around the world. “Some I started in New York, others in Trinidad. Often I’d do them in distemper paint, then roll them up and post them to myself, making sure they are fumigated so termites don’t eat through the canvas stretchers. I don’t like finishing things really. I like to have things on the go. Actually, I like paintings where you can question whether they’re finished.” Many of the Cézannes at Tate Modern’s current retrospective are like that, he says. “Some look like they were taken off the easel by someone else.” Sponsored by Morgan Stanley and supported by Kenneth C. Griffin and the Huo Family Foundation, with additional support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Peter Doig is the first exhibition by a contemporary artist to take place at The Courtauld since it reopened in November 2021 following its acclaimed redevelopment.

A major exhibition of new and recent works by Peter Doig – including paintings created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021 – is now open at The Courtauld Gallery. This volume is designed in close collaboration with the artist, with Doig specially creating the cover and various elements of the interior. Every facet of the painter’s singular vision is explored, from his earliest paintings of the early 1990s to the most recent series of works. A tall, bearded man in white shorts walks across a tropical beach, glaring at the viewer. He is dragging something behind him, something we can’t quite see, because it’s in deep shadow, but the walker has just come into an abstract wash of whitish-blue paint—late-afternoon sunlight breaking through overhead palm trees—and his features are clearly visible. There is something troubling about this bearded man. The painting, although startlingly beautiful in its velvety, deep-viridian play of light and shadow, makes us uneasy. There’s a story here, one that may not end well, but we don’t know what it is. Calvin Tomkins. "The Mythical Stories in Peter Doig's Paintings." newyorker.com. December 11, 2017. Max Hollein. Modern and Contemporary Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2019, ill. p. 177 (color).Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? In this lavish new volume devoted to his entire career-which includes paintings, drawings, and reference material, such as found photographs-art historians Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert mine the artist’s rich and varied work. Doig’s landscapes have been inspired by the many places the artist has lived-England, Canada, Trinidad. So, too, does memory, or the idea of memory, inform much of his production. That questioning surfaces in Two Trees, one of his best recent paintings. It’s another Trinidadian picture, originally commissioned by the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum to sit alongside its works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, most notably Hunters in the Snow. Like that famous scene, Doig’s painting is dominated by bare-limbed trees, but it goes way beyond the Flemish master’s vision, having been inspired by a view from his window in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Three nocturnal figures stand before the sea, silhouetted by a setting moon like escapees from a Munch fjord. Featuring 12 paintings and 19 works on paper, the exhibition includes a group of major canvases created since the artist’s move from Trinidad to London in 2021, presenting an exciting new chapter in the career of one of the most celebrated and important painters working today.

Catherine Lampert. Peter Doig. Exh. cat., Michael Werner. New York, 2018, unpaginated, no. 6, ill. (color). The high prices have brought new problems. Doig paintings are so costly to insure that museums have to think twice about showing them. He’s had major exhibitions at the Tate, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Louisiana Museum, in Denmark, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but nothing so far at MOMA, the Met, or other big museums in this country. This is a ravishing exhibition – it arrives at Kettle’s Yard from Mima in Middlesbrough, and will go on to the Holburne Museum, Bath. Arranged chronologically, the show’s atmosphere of tranquillity – even of contemplation – is never spoiled by the curators telling us more than we need to know. The focus, always, is on the work, which is just as well because there is so much to see. The biggest survey of the potter for two decades, 25% of the more than 100 items in it come from private collections, something that makes it completely unmissable in my eyes. In the summer, he went to Canada, where he could stay with his parents and get well-paying jobs painting houses. In 1986, he and Kennedy spent Christmas with his parents at their home in Grafton, a small town on Lake Ontario, four hours west of Montreal. Kennedy had recently lost her job in London at Bodymap, a cutting-edge fashion house that went bankrupt, and a recession in the U.K. meant that new jobs were scarce. She was offered a position with a Montreal fashion firm called Le Château, so they decided to stay. They got married that fall, in the living room of his parents’ house. For the next couple of years, they lived in Montreal. Doig found work painting sets for films—just painting at first, and then designing them. He enjoyed this, but realized that film work was all-consuming, and not what he wanted to do. Eventually, he began spending more time at his parents’ house in Grafton, where he had a painting studio in the barn. “I was quite desperately searching, making things that seemed random,” he said.The daughter of an architect, Mogadassi met Doig when she came to work for his New York dealer, Gavin Brown, in 2010; she is now an independent curator who also works for the Michael Werner Gallery, which has exclusively represented Doig worldwide since 2012. In addition to the end of his marriage, Doig has had to cope with the recent death of his father, to whom he was very close, and with a protracted lawsuit, in which he had to prove that he had not painted a work that was attributed to him. Although the ensuing trial kept him away from his studio for months at a time, the paintings he has done in the past two years are among the most powerful and disturbing of his career. “Now, with all that trauma behind him, he’s freed up,” Mogadassi said to me. “He’s at an age when he doesn’t have anything to lose.” Rain in the Port of Spain (White Oak), 2015 Peter Doig has been the subject of scores of exhibitions throughout his career, including a major traveling survey in 2008 at Tate Britain, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Richard Shiff is a renowned art historian and critic. Catherine Lampert is an independent curator and writer based in England. Andrew L. Shea. "Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery." newcriterion.com. October 17, 2017, ill. (color). He has long admired the collection of The Courtauld Gallery and the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists who are at its heart have been a touchstone for Doig’s own painting and printmaking over the course of his career. Visitors will be able to consider Doig’s contemporary works in the light of paintings by earlier artists in The Courtauld’s collection that are important for him, such as those by Cézanne, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh.