Description

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

‘Beautifully written… A book I have always hoped someone would write’ Nigel Slater

Jim Ede was a man of remarkable energy and vision: a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. As Laura Freeman shows in this captivating biography, the lives of Ede and the artists he championed 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.

At Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. Art ca be found there wherever you look – in a pebble, feather or seedhead. His approach has shown generations of visitors that learning to look can be a whole new way of life.

‘A beautiful, original biography… Freeman’s writing has Ede’s flair, grace and insight’ Financial Times

‘A cabinet of curiosities… The story of a life and of a century’ London Review of Books

Publisher Review

A captivating biography * House & Garden * 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 * Beautifully written… A book I have always hoped someone would write. — Nigel Slater 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 Laura Freeman has more than done her subject justice. It is a complicated story, lucidly told and neatly illustrated * Spectator *