Timothy Smith is a writer and independent researcher based in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia, with a background in arts management and the entertainment industry.
His discovery of Renato Fratini's unsigned romance covers in a Sydney charity shop in 2012 sparked what would become thirteen years of obsessive research—tracking down auction records from London to Istanbul, consulting archives in Rome and Sydney, and interviewing Fratini's surviving colleagues and family members. What began as a collector's curiosity became a mission to rescue a forgotten master from obscurity.
The Art of Renato Fratini is the result of that journey: the most comprehensive account of the artist's career, produced in close collaboration with the Fratini Estate, Professor Steve Chibnall, and collectors and scholars of mid-century visual culture worldwide.
This is his first book.
about the author
about the editor
Steve Chibnall is Professor of British Cinema and Visual Culture at De Montfort University, where he is also Director of Archives for the Cinema and Television History Research Centre. Since 1973, Steve has published widely on crime journalism, twentieth century popular culture, and the history of film production and commercial art in Britain. His outputs include fifteen authored or edited books (including Sim Branaghan’s British Film Posters), numerous academic articles, interviews for radio and television, sleeve notes for DVD releases and contributions to the Oxford Critical Bibliographies and Dictionary of National Biography. His last three books have been on three British mid-century creatives: the book illustrators Reginald Heade (co-author Stephen James Walker) and James McConnell, and the ill-fated film star, Belinda Lee.
Steve has also co-curated live events at venues including London’s Royal Albert Hall, Cinema Museum, Picturehouse and Regent Street Cinemas; and exhibitions at Brighton Pavilion Museum and Gallery and De Montfort University (‘Scandal ’63 Revisited: The Profumo Affair in Art and Artefact’, which was selected as ‘Exhibition of the Week by the Guardian).
Over the last decade, he has established a track record of acquiring archive donations for his university, beginning with the script collection of Hammer Films, and continuing with the archives of artists Andrew Logan and Peter Whitehead, the production files of Palace Pictures, and in 2022, the archive of Dame Zandra Rhodes.
Steve’s primary academic mission is to identify, research, and bring to public attention aspects of cultural production that have been unjustly ignored or neglected. As part of this work, Steve curates a large and significant private collection of film memorabilia, magazines, pulp fiction, original commercial artwork, and other artefacts associated with selected aspects of twentieth century popular culture.
