Michael Sadleir

Michael Sadleir (25 December 1888 – 13 December 1957) was a British publisher, novelist, and book collector.

Michael Sadleir was born in Oxford, the son of Sir Michael Ernest Sadler and Mary Ann Harvey. He later adopted the older variant of his surname to differentiate himself from his father, a historian, educationist, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. The name change was precipitated by the scandal that followed the publication of Sadleir's novel Fanny by Gaslight, with some of the ensuing abuse being mistakenly directed at Sadleir's father.

Sadleir was educated at Rugby School and was a contemporary of Rupert Brooke and Geoffrey Keynes. He then attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history and won the 1912 Stanhope prize. Before the First World War, Sadleir and his father were keen collectors of contemporary art, and purchased works by young English artists such as Stanley Spencer and Mark Gertler. They were amongst the first collectors (and certainly the first English collectors) of the paintings of the Russian-born German Expressionist artist Wassily Kandinsky. In 1913, both Sadleir and his father travelled to Germany to meet Kandinsky in Munich. This visit led to Sadleir translating into English Kandinsky's seminal written work on expressionism, Concerning the Spiritual In Art in 1914. This was one of the first coherent arguments for abstract art in the English language and its effects were profound. Extracts from it were published in the Vorticist literary magazine BLAST in 1914, and it had a major impact on the development of abstract art in Britain and North America right up until the 1960s. Sadleir's translation is still in print, and it remains one of the most commonly used versions of Kandinsky's book in the English language.

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