Philip Vann

Philip Vann is a writer on the visual arts and a freelance exhibition curator. He is the author of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century (Sansom & Co, 2004) and texts for numerous books and catalogues on British, Irish and international painters and sculptors.

Since being Assistant Exhibition Organiser of the British Council-funded show ‘New Frontiers of Naïve Art in Europe’ (Royal Festival Hall, London, 1984), he has written a good deal about naïve, Outsider, self-taught and children’s art from Britain and around the world, as well as central and eastern European folk art. He has long been fascinated by the ways leading Modernist artists often find themselves enriched and inspired by art beyond the mainstream – for example, work by great self-taught painters such as Henri Rousseau, Louis Vivin, Alfred Wallis and Madge Gill.