The City Art Depot has included Damian Skinner’s Theo Schoon: A Biography as one of its top 5 art books of 2018:
‘Probably the most important art book to be published this year is Damian Skinner’s Theo Schoon: A Biography, filling a long overdue gap in Aotearoa’s art history (full disclosure, I made my archives available and gave feedback on an early draft of the manuscript). Although Schoon was a genius (in a rare, legitimate use of the word) in his own right, his contributions to pushing traditional Māori arts to the forefront of Pākehā consciousness and as a mentor to younger artists, had a profound effect on the development on modernism in New Zealand and Australia. He was also, by most accounts, a cantankerous and divisive figure, permanently on the fringes of mainstream New Zealand society because of his relatively open homosexuality, exotic foreignness (East Indies flamboyance meets Dutch forthrightness), and obsessive pursuit of his art. Skinner has done a marvellous job of piecing together this carefully researched life.’
Read about all the titles in their top 5 here.
