Page 5 - Art First: Kate McCrickard: New Romantics

By then Eileen Cooper had broken through a glass ceiling,
becoming the first woman to be appointed an Officer of the
Royal Academy since its inception in 1768. She was elected
Keeper of Schools, and to mark the occasion in 2011 Art First
presented her exhibition, Showing Off, accompanied by
a catalogue with two essays, one by Jeanette Winterson,
which was a transcript from her speech at the Royal Academy
Dinner announcing Eileen Cooper’s appointment, and the
other by Kate McCrickard, which remains one of the liveliest

and most insightful essays yet written on Cooper’s work.*

Kate had already written the monograph on William
Kentridge for Tate’s Modern Art Series, published in 2010,
and has since written a great deal more, not only about
Kentridge but on a number of other artists as catalogue
essays or as articles for significant print publications listed
in the biography section of this catalogue.

In 2016 Kate’s second exhibition at Art First, Belleville, took
place, this time dominated by small canvases, with new
colour monotypes for her Drinkers series. By now her world
was expanding rapidly and work was being presented at
print fairs in New York by Julian Page, and at art fairs in South
Africa and the UK by Art First. Her work entered the collec -
tions of the British Museum, the New York Public Library, the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is now held in the
Metropolitan Museum in New York. She has two large studios,
one in Paris and one in the country, both making the works
in this catalogue possible.

A simple story then, of abiding friendships, of women work -
ing in the arts, of keeping the faith, and moving forward in
a much-changed world. Onwards! 3

*See: www.artfirst.co.uk/eileen_cooper/eileen-cooper-11.pdf