Charles Darwent is a writer and regular contributor to the Guardian, The Art Newspaper and Art Review and was The Independent on Sunday's chief art critic from 1999 to 2013. He appeared in the Netflix series Raiders of the Lost Art from 2014 to 2016. His biography Josef Albers - described by Tate Modern Director Frances Morris as 'lively, lucid, compelling and revealing' - was published by Thames & Hudson in 2018.
'I couldn’t believe the book hadn’t been written' - Robert Storr, art historian and ex-MoMA curator 'Charles Darwent’s Surrealists in New York shows that Surrealism, not Expressionism, was the European mode that was truly abstracted in New York ... Darwent’s book … tells the real story' - Literary Review 'It is a bold claim that the most influential abstract expressionist was an English geologist, but one he [Darwent] proves persuasively, using detail laced with drollness' - Sunday Times 'A very readable and accessible account of a hitherto unexplored area of mainstream art history ... an important book on two counts: for its welcome reassessment of Hayter, and for the light it sheds on the links between the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists. Certainly it subtly alters the landscape of modern American art. Darwent writes authoritatively, marshalling a wide range of entertaining anecdotes and quotations to sustain his thesis' - The Spectator 'Diverting' - World of Interiors