Anglo(art)phile Hilton Als to organise series of contemporary shows at the Yale Center for British Art. By Victoria Stapley-Brown
“I became interested in British art when I got tired of American art,” the American writer and art critic Hilton Als said at a press event for the Yale Centre for British Art (YCBA) in New Haven, Connecticut on 2 August—dating this shift to 1999. Als will have the opportunity to share his interest in contemporary British art with an American audience through a three successive solo exhibitions he is organising at the Yale Centre for British Art over the next few years.
The first exhibition, due to open in spring 2018, will feature works by the painter Celia Paul, who befriended Als when he worked on the catalogue for her 2014 solo exhibition at Victoria Miro gallery in London. Als spoke affectionately of the India-born British artist, discussing her precocious talent—she successfully applied to the Slade School of Art in London at age 15—and the unfair way that her romantic relationship with the late painter Lucien Freud (her teacher at the Slade, with whom she had a son) overshadowed her early career. You see the influence of Paul’s work on Freud’s work at the time, not the other way round, Als said.
Image: Celia Paul, My Sisters in Mourning, 2015-16, © Celia Paul 2017, courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro. Photo: Prudence Cuming
