Ways of Life

Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

Laura Freeman

$29.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Vintage
18 October 2025

Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus; Biography: arts & entertainment; Social & cultural history

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

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

'The beautiful, revelatory biography we have been waiting for. I loved it' EDMUND DE WAAL

'This book is the legacy Jim Ede might have wished for' OBSERVER

The lives of Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists 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. The artists Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alfred Wallis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska were not a set like the Bloomsbury Set or Ravilious and his friends. But Jim Ede recognised in each of the artists he championed something common and kindred, some quality of light and life and line.

Jim Ede is the figure who unites them. His vision continues to influence the way we understand art and modern living. He was a man of extraordinary energies- a collector, dealer, fixer, critic and, above all, friend to artists. For Ede, works of art were friends and art could be found wherever you looked - in a pebble, feather or seedhead. Art lived and a life without art, beauty, friendship and creativity was a life not worth living. Art was not for galleries alone and it certainly wasn't only for the rich. At Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, he opened his home and his collection to all comers. He showed generations of visitors that learning to look could be a whole new way of life.

By: Laura Freeman
Imprint: Vintage
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 35mm
Weight: 500g
ISBN: 9781529932317
ISBN 10: 1529932319
Pages: 496
Publication Date: 18 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Laura Freeman is chief art critic of The Times. She has written for the Spectator, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, TLS, Apollo and World of Interiors. Her first book The Reading Cure, a memoir about hunger and happiness, addiction, obsession and recovery, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2018. She studied history of art at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Reviews for Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

A triumph... It's exactly the right tone of thoughtful, critical affection... The witty sentences are fine things, illuminating and illumined, conveying the way light is bounced around Kettle's Yard as it shines from candlesticks and picture frames * Prospect * Beautifully written... A book I have always hoped someone would write. -- Nigel Slater