Sir Christopher Frayling
Related: British art - art criticism
Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone (2005) - Christopher Frayling [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Science Fiction Poster Art (2004) - Christopher Frayling, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Biography
Sir Christopher John Frayling (born December 25, 1946) is a British educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture.
He read history at Churchill College, Cambridge and gained a PhD in the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
He taught history at Bath University and in 1979 was appointed Professor of Cultural History at London's post-graduate art and design school, the Royal College of Art. Since 1996 he has been Rector in charge of the College.
His is the Chairman of Arts Council England, Chairman of the Design Council, Chairman of the Royal Mint Advisory Committee, and a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Christopher Frayling was awarded a knighthood in 2001 for "Services to Art and Design Education".
He has had a wide output as a writer and critic on subjects ranging from vampires to westerns. He has written and presented television series such as The Art of Persuasion on advertising and Strange Landscape on the Middle Ages.
He has conducted a series of radio and television interviews with figures from the world of film, including Audrey Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, Ken Adam, Francis Ford Coppola and Clint Eastwood. He has also written and presented several television series, including The Face of Tutankhamun and Nightmare: Birth of Horror.
He is especially known for his study of spaghetti westerns and specifically director Sergio Leone. He has written a very popular biography of Leone, Something To Do With Death (2000); helped run the Los Angeles-based Gene Autry Museum's exhibit on Leone in the summer of 2005; and has appeared in numerous documentaries about Leone and his films, particularly the DVD documentaries of Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Frayling [Aug 2006]
Evangelist for design, enthusiast for cinema
The new chairman of the Arts Council may be demonised as a committee fetishist and a devotee of spaghetti westerns, but his real asset to the body could lie in his being at heart a rather traditional cultural historian
You can't accuse the rector of the Royal College of Art, who is taking on one of the most important cultural jobs in Britain, of narrowness of taste or interests. Christopher Frayling is a one-man department of cultural history.
The new chairman of the Arts Council has made TV series about the semiotics of advertising, the Egyptomania inspired by Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, and the rise of horror fiction. Frayling's buoyant broadcasting persona has taken his particular brand of erudition a long way from the lecture rooms where he began teaching history in the 1970s, becoming the Royal College of Art's first professor of cultural history in 1979. Yet Frayling's populism seems to come naturally. --Jonathan Jones, Friday December 12, 2003, The Guardian via Whttp://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,11711,1105283,00.html">http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,11711,1105283,00.html
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