Bob Dylan is one of America's most influential and important cultural figures. W ith over 500 songs, 46 albums and an astonishing 110 million record sales to his name , Dylan, now in his early seventies , is turning increasingly to a nother mode of artistic expression ; one that has occupied him throughout his life, but for which he is much less well known . Although Dylan has sketched and drawn since childhood and painted since the late 1960 s , only relatively recently has he begun to exhibit his artworks . The twelve works collected in this beautifully produced volume represent his latest foray into portraiture : an exploration of British 'types'. In an illuminat ing essay, curator and art historian John Elderfield explains the story behind these works and Dylan's approach to his art. Previously, Elderfield has acknowledged that while it may be unsettling when an artist does not adhere to the thing for which we have come to admire him most, Dylan has often asked his audience to get over the discomfort of his changing: ' And don't speak too soon / For the wheel's still in spin ... ' For Elderfield, Dylan's paintings, like his songs, are 'product s of the same extraordinary, inventive imagination, the same mind and eye, by the same story - telling artist, for whom showing and telling - the temporal and the spatial, the verbal and the visual - are not easily separated.'

Author Biography

John Elderfield studied Fine Art at Leeds University and Art History at the Courtauld Institute. He is Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he has organised numerous exhibitions over the past thirty years, ranging from Manet and the Execution of Maximilian and Henri Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913 - 17, to major retrospectives devoted to Kurt Schwitters, Pierre Bonnard and Willem de Kooning. His books include The Language of the Body: Drawings by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, and his essay 'Across the Borderline' was published in the catalogue for Dylan's The Brazil Series.