My husband, Nick Wadley, who has died aged 82, was an art historian and artist or, as he would prefer to say when he was asked what he did, he wrote and drew.
Nick was born in Elstree, Hertfordshire, the youngest of four children of Kitty, an administrator at the Bank of England, and Wilfred Wadley, an accountant for the RAF. He went to Reed’s school, in Cobham, Surrey, and graduated in fine art at Kingston School of Art and in art history at the Courtauld Institute in London.
From 1962 Nick taught at Chelsea School of Art and in 1970 became head of art history. He took early retirement in 1985, although he continued to give lectures. His books included The Drawings of Van Gogh (1969), Cubism (1972), Cézanne and His Art (1975), Noa Noa, Gauguins’ Tahiti (1985), Impressionist & Post-Impressionist Drawing (1991) and The Drawings of Franciszka Themerson (1991).
Nick curated a number of exhibitions, including Kurt Schwitters in Exile (London, 1981), Franciszka Themerson Drawings (Aalborg, 1989) and The Secret Life of Clothes (Fukuoka, Japan, 1998). His own drawings were shown in exhibitions in London, Warsaw, Italy and Japan. He contributed essays to exhibition catalogues, books and journals.
Between 1996 and 2001, he made punning cartoons in collaboration with Sylvia Libedinsky, which were published in the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. He illustrated books by John Ashbery, UA Fanthorpe, Lisa Jardine, Madeleine Renouard, Robert Walser and Tom Whalen.
Drawing increasingly became more important. Most of the drawings he was making during the past 20 years started on paper and then some were transferred to the computer and were completed on screen. There are drawings of paradoxical situations: funny and worrying simultaneously. These found their way into his own books, some of which he published himself, as well as on to postcards in which, with considerable frequency, the author became visible in the drawn line.
Often the meaning of the words that appear with the drawings is replaced with something unanticipated, as if words could have another dimension or could be seen from a different angle, as in: “now + here is nowhere”. One of his colleagues once talked of “his lovely sense of humour, floating gently between innocence and irony”.
Among the books of his own drawings, some with poems, are Nick Wadley’s Guide to British Artists (2003), Man + Dog (2009), Man + Doctor (2012), Man + Table (2016) and Blue Owl (2014). Man + Book is due to be published next year.
Nick and I met at a party in 1980, and married in 2005. He is survived by me, and by Caroline and Chris, the children of his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and six grandchildren, Ben, Auberon, Bix, Millie, Ben and Matthew.
