Search results for ""royal academy of arts""

The artistic accomplishments of James Northcote (1746–1831) have tended to be overshadowed by his role as a biographer of Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, with whom Northcote apprenticed for five years. Here, Mark Ledbury constructs a very different image of Northcote: that of a prolific member of the Royal Academy and an active participant in the cultural and political circles of the Romantic era, as well as a portrait and history painter in his own right. This book pays particular attention to Northcote’s One Hundred Fables (1828), a masterpiece of wood engraving, and the unconventional, collaged manuscripts for the volume, now at the Yale Center for British Art. Along with another series of collages now at The Morgan Library & Museum and a second volume of fables published posthumously in 1833, these collages and printed works constitute the most ambitious project of the artist’s later years. An underappreciated and courageously eccentric masterpiece, the Fables were an early experiment in what is now a familiar multimedia practice and are extensively published here for the first time. Idiosyncratic, personal, and visionary, the Fables serve as a lens through which to examine Northcote’s long, complex, and fruitful artistic career.Distributed for the Yale Center for British ArtExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(10/02/14–12/14/14)

Read more less

LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM MB BERGER PRIZE FOR BRITISH ART HISTORY 2022 A major survey of Dame Laura Knight, first female Royal Academician and popular British artist of the 20th century. Laura Knight (1877–1970) was one of the most famous and popular English artists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1965. In the following decades, her realist style of painting fell out of fashion and her work become largely overlooked. Anew generation has rediscovered her work, finding a contemporary resonance in her depictions of women at work, of people from marginalized communities and her contributions as a war artist. This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanied a major exhibition at MK Gallery, provides an overview of Knight’s illustrious career: from her training at Nottingham Art School at the age of 13 and her time in North Yorkshire and Cornwall, to her visits to traveller communities and a segregated American hospital. It also features her circus, ballet and theatre scenes, paintings of women during the war and her late paintings of nature. The selection of over 160 works combines celebrated paintings with less known graphic and design works, including ceramics, jewellery and costumes that reflect the artist’s enduring interest in the everyday activities of people from all walks of life.

Read more less

‘A dazzling anthology uniting the written word with the visual’ STEPHEN FRYINCLUDES NEW STORIES BY RUSSELL TOVEY AND BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE SOPHIE WARD, AND ARTWORK BY TRACEY EMIN, EXCLUSIVE TO THIS EDITION This vibrant collection brings together twenty original short stories by giants of the form alongside exciting new voices, including two new stories by Russell Tovey and Sophie Ward. Simon Oldfield, curator and editor, combines the best in contemporary short fiction with remarkable illustrations by Tracey Emin and other artists from the Royal Academy of Arts. Illuminating, beautiful, haunting and always interesting, A Short Affair brings you the very best in short story writing.Writers include: Russell Tovey, Elizabeth Day, Bethan Roberts, Nikesh Shukla, Claire Fuller, Ben Okri, Anne O'Brien, A. L. Kennedy, Anna Stewart, Craig Burnett, Douglas W. Milliken, Will Self, Jarred McGinnis, Barney Walsh, Rebecca F. John, Joanna Campbell, Emily Bullock, Cherise Saywell, Lionel Shriver and Sophie WardArtists include: Tracey Emin, Kay Harwood, Gabriella Boyd, Jonathan Trayte, Luey Graves, Marco Palmieri, John Robertson, Coco Crampton, Fani Parali, Murray O'Grady, Pio Abad, Eddie Peake, Declan Jenkins, Mary Ramsden, Carla Busuttil, Jessy Jetpacks, Nick Goss, Tim Ellis, Adam Shield and Humphrey Ocean 'Pin Drop is a wonderful and rare conception. It provides us with a special opportunity to celebrate the short story on its own unique terms. The perfect antidote to the soundbite culture' WILLIAM BOYD

Read more less

Eddy Kamuanga s large-scale figurative paintings display a wealth of historical understanding in a sophisticated interplay of strikingly coloured forms juxtaposed on grey negative space. Kamuanga s work taps into the rich, yet complex colonial history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, (DRC). His politically nuanced and culturally sensitive work explores the seismic shifts in economic, political and cultural identity in the DRC since colonization. Increasingly globalized in outlook, many in the DRC today are rejecting their ancestral heritage in favour of modernity, a conflict that fuels Kamuanga s work. The DRC is the world s largest exporter of coltan, a mineral critical to the production of computer chips and mobile phones. In all Kamuanga s works, the skin of each figure is embedded with integrated circuits, referring to the harsh conditions experienced by workers who mine coltan by hand. Eddy Kamuanga has been recognized internationally as one of the most interesting, young, contemporary African talents of today and his reputation is fast growing worldwide. His work has been shown across Africa, notably at Zeitz MOCAA, South Africa, and has been included in exhibitions in Europe and the United States, at institutions such as the Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, (CA); the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, (NH); the Saatchi Gallery; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga is represented by October Gallery, London, UK.

Read more less

Jean Fautrier (1989-1964) was a major 20th century artist. Trained at the Royal Academy of Arts and influenced by J.M.W. Turner, he was quickly noticed by the collector Jeanne Castel in 1923. At first, his style was figurative and played on contrasts of light. He expertly harnessed the essence of reality in order to transfigure it, redefining the genres of landscape painting, still lifes and nudes (especially in his series of dark works) during the inter-war period. A few years later, his approach underwent a radical shift and became much more abstract. He launched the “Informalist” art movement, playing with pictorial materials and combining different substances to create visions of an extraordinary material quality. Close to the great intellectual figures of his time, including Jean Paulhan, Paul Éluard, Francis Ponge, René Char and André Malraux, Fautrier never ceased producing remarkably powerful and politically resonant works, as is attested by his major series Otages (1943-1945), Objets (1947-1948) and Partisans (1956). In 1960, he was awarded the first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. Boasting an exceptionally exhaustive iconography, this first ever comprehensive annotated catalogue of Jean Fautrier’s paintings includes the technique, origin, exhibitions and bibliography for each work. It is supplemented with a detailed biography, technical analyses and authoritative scientific texts, as well as transcriptions of interviews and radio broadcasts from Fautrier’s time. Text in English and French.

Read more less

‘I always thought I would get into painting, but I got waylaid by rock ’n’ roll. Finally, I thought, “Now’s the time.” As soon as I was in a situation where I could be alone and paint without any interruptions, I just couldn’t stop.’ – Chrissie Hynde ‘These paintings wake me up, show me life, make me want to get up and do something.’ – Brian Eno ‘The fact that Chrissie is a great musician underpins her painting in a variety of ways... She learns by doing and in the process her work becomes more distinctive and compelling, an expression of the life force within made visible.’ – Tim Marlow, Royal Academy of Arts In November 2015, Chrissie Hynde, the singer, songwriter and leader of The Pretenders, produced an oil painting of a ceramic vase. Fulfilling an intention that she would, one day, dedicate herself to painting, it would prove to be the starting point for Hynde’s first body of work, nearly ­­200 canvases in all. These paintings are shared for the first time in Adding The Blue. With Forewords by visionary musician and artist, Brian Eno, and The Royal Academy’s artistic Director, Tim Marlow, Adding The Blue is captioned throughout with Chrissie Hynde’s thoughts and reflections. Beginning with still life studies and culminating in vibrant abstract compositions, Chrissie Hynde’s Adding The Blue is a beautiful volume of paintings that are, in Eno’s words, ‘full of life, love and discovery’.

Read more less

A fascinating look at the partnership of artist James McNeill Whistler and his chief model, Joanna Hiffernan, and the iconic works of art resulting from their life together“[A] lavish volume. . . . Illuminating. . . . MacDonald’s deep research has . . . unearthed important new facts.”—Gioia Diliberto, Wall Street Journal In 1860 James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Joanna Hiffernan (1839–1886) met and began a significant professional and personal relationship. Hiffernan posed as a model for many of Whistler’s works, including his controversial Symphony in White paintings, a trilogy that fascinated and challenged viewers with its complex associations with sex and morality, class and fashion, academic and realist art, Victorian popular fiction, aestheticism and spiritualism. This luxuriously illustrated volume provides the first comprehensive account of Hiffernan’s partnership with Whistler throughout the 1860s and 1870s—a period when Whistler was forging a reputation as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. A series of essays discusses how Hiffernan and Whistler overturned artistic conventions and sheds light on their interactions with contemporaries, including Gustave Courbet, for whom she also modeled. Packed with new insights into the creation, marketing, and cultural context of Whistler’s iconic works, this study also traces their resonance for his fellow artists, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edgar Degas, John Singer Sargent, and Gustav Klimt. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, WashingtonExhibition Schedule:Royal Academy of Arts, London (February 23–May 23, 2022)National Gallery of Art, Washington (July 3–October 10, 2022)

Read more less

Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin in 1917 and was murdered at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. While in exile in the south of France from 1940 until her deportation in 1943, she created some 1,325 small gouaches using only the three primary colors plus white. From these she gathered nearly 800 into a work that she titled Life? or Theater?: A Play with Music, which employs images, texts, and musical and cinematic references. The narrative, informed by Salomon's experiences as a talented, cultured, and assimilated German Jew, depicts a life lived in the shadow of Nazi persecution and a family history of suicide, but also reveals moments of intense happiness and hope. The tone of the gouaches becomes increasingly raw and urgent as Salomon is further enmeshed in grim personal as well as political events. The result is a deeply moving meditation on life, art, and death on the eve of the Holocaust. Salomon's art, discovered after the war in the south of France where she had left it for safekeeping, was first exhibited in 1961 and has gained steadily in reputation since then. A major exhibition focused on Life? or Theater? appeared at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1998, subsequently at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Jewish Museum in New York City. This book, lavishly illustrated with many color plates, is the first to analyze Salomon's work critically, historically, and aesthetically. It includes a chronology of Salomon's life and a list of exhibitions of Life? or Theater?. Featuring contributions from prominent art historians, literary and cultural critics, and historians, Reading Charlotte Salomon celebrates the genius and courage of a remarkable figure in twentieth-century art.

Read more less

Claude Monet (1840–1926) is one of the best-known and most beloved painters in the history of art, with myriad publications and exhibitions devoted to his oeuvre. And yet there remains a previously undiscovered aspect of his career: his surprisingly significant role as a draftsman. This book is the first to focus on Monet’s pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist’s life and work.Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, an artist who painted his subjects directly and whose rarely seen graphic works were marginal to his artistic process. In an effort to develop his public image, Monet denied the role of drawing in his working method. In actuality, Monet began his career as a caricaturist and as a teenager developed a passion for drawing that was never extinguished. He went on to master the medium of pastel and included seven in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.Citing recently discovered, unpublished documents that overturn the accepted image of the artist, The Unknown Monet reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist’s career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings. The book also shows how Monet exploited the print media to promote his art.The most important publication on Monet to appear in a generation, this illuminating volume is essential to anyone interested in his work, Impressionism, and nineteenth-century French culture.Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MassachusettsExhibition Schedule:Royal Academy of Arts, London (March 17 – June 10, 2007)Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 24 – September 16, 2007)

Read more less

Surveying the films, installations and performances of the superstar Icelandic artist Widely recognized as one of the most exciting and significant voices of contemporary art, Icelandic performance and multimedia artist Ragnar Kjartansson takes a loving yet critical look at Western culture. His longform video installations explore the dynamics of repetition, often through music, and develop into feats of endurance, both physical and emotional. The Guardian deemed his 2012 work The Visitors “the best artwork of the 21st century.” Combining quintessential videos such as Me and My Mother and Bliss with lesser-known paintings and sculptures, the retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents three new pieces made for the exhibition (including the title work with the plywood flames burning on the catalog cover) and captures the litany of senses Kjartansson has embraced without hesitation in his 20-year career. New work created for the anthology includes a painted plywood monument to “an epic waste of love and understanding” and a new performance piece titled Scaredman. The richly illustrated catalog includes personal contributions and dialogues in response to each of the artist's works on display by leading contemporary artists and scholars. Curator Tine Colstrup discusses A Lot of Sorrow with Marina Abramović, and reflects on Terrible, Terrible with Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina. The book proves itself an invaluable guide to Kjartansson’s examination of love, identity, melancholy, masculinity and power. Ragnar Kjartansson (born 1976), a native of Reykjavik, Iceland, studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm. He represented Iceland at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia in 2009 and participated in the 2013 Encyclopedic Palace of the World at the 55th Biennale di Venezia in 2013.

Read more less

At the time of his death in 1820, Benjamin West was the most famous artist in the English-speaking world and celebrated throughout Europe. From humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he had become the first American artist to study in Italy, and within a few short years of his arrival in London had been instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts and been appointed history painter to King George III. However, West's posthumous reputation took a critical mauling, and today he remains one of the most neglected and misunderstood of Britain's great 18th-century artists. As Loyd Grossman asserts in his new book, West was in the vanguard that created neoclassicism and romanticism, and among the first painters to represent the exciting and inspirational qualities of contemporary events, as opposed to events from the biblical, classical or mythological past. Most significantly, his best-known painting, The Death of General Wolfe, was a thrilling, revolutionary work that played a role in changing the course of art. In a lively, immersing text that situates West in the midst of Enlightenment thinking about history and progress, Grossman explores both why Wolfe has exercised such a magnetic grip on our imaginations for almost 250 years, and how, with this artwork, West helped to lay the foundations of a modern attitude that has affected the way we live and think ever since. AUTHOR: Loyd Grossman, OBE is a broadcaster, historian and journalist. He has presented a wide range of TV programmes, fromThrough the Keyhole and MasterChef to Loyd on Location andHistory of British Sculpture. He is Chairman of the Heritage Alliance and the Churches Conservation Trust, Deputy Chairman of the Royal Drawing School and President of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (NADFAS). He was appointed OBE in 2003 and received a doctorate in the history of art from the University of Cambridge. SELLING POINTS: . The first book to assess the artist Benjamin West's contribution to ideas of modernity and progress with his history painting . Provides new insights into West's most famous painting, The Death of General Wolfe . Engagingly written by a well-known US-born, UK-based broadcaster and journalist 125 colour

Read more less

Nineteenth-Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Époque represents a comprehensive guide to the range of stylistically diverse genres of nineteenth-century European painting. Accessible and insightful, this exquisitely illustrated volume presents the historical context behind the century's essential artistic movements including Romantic Painting, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Realist Painting, Academic Painting, and Impressionist Painting. Influenced by an overwhelming wave of political, military and social change, nineteenth-century Europe represented an era more diverse in painterly subjects and styles than any before it. Indeed, it was a period that saw many European painters moving away from the strictures of the academy system, choosing instead to use their training to develop new techniques and traditions. A collection of independent stories, this book also outlines the unique progression between the different movements, exciting and enlightening the reader about the most magnificent period of art the world has ever known. Contents: Foreword; Dr. Vern G. Swanson; Introduction; Author's Note; STYLES: The Barbizon School; Romantic Painting; Orientalist Painting; The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Realist Painting; Academic Painting; Impressionist Painting; The Newlyn School; Post-Impressionist Painting; SUBJECTS: Landscape Painting; Venetian View Painting; Maritime Painting; Sporting Painting; Animal Painting; Genre Painting; Cardinal Painting; Costume Painting; British Neoclassical Revival Painting; Belle Époque Painting; Conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography. Featured works from museums and collections including: Louvre, Paris, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Wallace Collection, London, Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, The Tate Gallery, London, The Schaeffer Collection, New South Wales, The Royal Collection, The Royal Academy of Arts, England, The Musée D Orsay Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, England, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Stanhope Forbes, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA, Paisnel Gallery, London, National Gallery, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy, Museo de Arte, Ponte, Puerto Rico, Musée Marmottan, Paris, Musée D Orsay, Paris, Auguste Renoir, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among many others.

Read more less

A magnificent survey of the rich and varied arts in Latin America from 1492 to the end of the colonial era Essays by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Clara Bargellini, Dilys E. Blum, Elizabeth Hill Boone, Marcus Burke, Mitchell A. Codding, Thomas B. F. Cummins, Cristina Esteras Martín, M. Concepción García Sáiz, Ilona Katzew, Adrian Locke, Gridley McKim-Smith, Alfonso Ortiz Crespo, Jorge F. Rivas P., Nuno Senos, Edward J. Sullivan, and Marjorie Trusted. By the end of the 16th century, Europe, Africa, and Asia were connected to North and South America via a vast network of complex trade routes. This led, in turn, to dynamic cultural exchanges between these continents and a proliferation of diverse art forms in Latin America. This monumental book transcends geographic boundaries and explores the history of the confluence of styles, materials, and techniques among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas through the end of the colonial era––a period marked by the independence movements, the formation of national states, and the rise of academic art. Written by distinguished international scholars, essays cover a full range of topics, including city planning, iconography in painting and sculpture, East-West connections, the power of images, and the role of the artist. Beautifully illustrated with over 450 works—many published for the first time—this book presents a spectacular selection of decorative arts, textiles, silver, sculpture, painting, and furniture. Scholarly entries on some three hundred works highlight the various cultural influences and differences throughout this vast region. This groundbreaking book also includes an illustrated chronology, informative maps, and an exhaustive bibliography and is sure to set a new standard in the field of Latin American studies.Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, and the Los Angeles County Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Philadelphia Museum of Art (September 20 – December 31, 2006)Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City (February 3 – May 6, 2007)Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 10 – September 3, 2007)Royal Academy of Arts, London (Fall 2007)Royal Academy, London (Fall 2007)

Read more less

For more than forty years William Watson has occupied a unique place in the study and teaching of Chinese art in Great Britain. Professor Watson's publications cover a wide field, his command of Chinese, Japanese, Russian and western languages giving access to the fullest literature on his subjects. The colloquies he organized at the Percival David Foundation achieved international repute, with results that remain on record. At the Royal Academy of Arts he took a leading part in the Chinese archaeological exhibition of 1972 which reinstated cultural relations between Britain and China. Also at the Royal Academy he was the instigator and chief organizer of the Japanese exhibition of 1982, in which for the first time the art of the Tokugawa period was comprehensively presented outside of Japan as enshrining the national genius. The present two volumes collect Professor Watson's main smaller publications made in the course of museum and university careers. Many are specific studies of works in terms of cultural context, dating and historical significance. They contain mainly writing on Chinese, Japanese and Korean subjects, in particular the bronze art, ceramics and sculpture of the T'ang and earlier periods. Painting is treated in some closely defined topics. Contents: Preface The Lathe in Antiquity Ancient Khorezm The Seligman Gift A Grave Guardian from Ch'ang Sha A Bronze Mirror from Shao Hsing Recent Discoveries in Chinese Archaeology I & II A Buddhist Patron of the Refectory Chinese Lacquered Wine-cups The Earliest Buddhist Images of Korea Sung Bronzes A Dated Buddhist Image of the Northern Wei Period A Jade Hatstand An Inscribed Jade Cup from Samarqand A Chinese Bronze Bell of the Fifth Century BC A Chinese Bronze Figure of the Fourth Century BC The Kingdom of Tien and the Dong Son Culture Inner Asia and China in the pre-Han Period Overlay and p'ing-t'o in T'ang Silverwork On T'ang Soft-glazed Pottery The Thai-British Archaeological Expedition Chinese Ceramics from Neolithic to T'ang History and Technological History Traditions of Material Culture in the Territory of Ch'u The Chinese Contribution to Nomad Culture in the pre-Han and early Han Periods

Read more less

Bill Woodrow (b.1948) and Richard Deacon (b.1949) have been making sculpture together since 1990. This new book is the first to showcase the work made over this thirty-year period. They have created over sixty works altogether which they call 'shared sculptures', highlighting the important equality of authorship and responsibility at stake for both these artists.Their shared sculptures exist as five main bodies of work, which have been variously shown in exhibitions in Britain and abroad: 'Only the Lonely' (1993), 'monuments' (1999), 'Lead Astray' (2004), 'On the Rocks' (2008) and 'Don't Start' (2016). Their recent body of work, 'We Thought About It A Lot' (2021), has seen them working on paper to explore their ideas together. This new book provides a rich visual account of these works, showing new and original photographs of them individually and in their exhibition contexts. It also includes studio photographs, images of the preview cards that they have designed for exhibitions over the years and reproduces one of their earlier fax exchanges. The publication features an introductory essay by the art historian and curator Jon Wood and is released to coincide with the artists' latest two-person exhibition, 'We Thought About It A Lot, and other shared drawings' at Ikon, Birmingham, in autumn 2021.Bill Woodrow (b.1948) has exhibited internationally, representing Britain at biennales in Sydney (1982), Paris (1982, 1985) and São Paulo (1983). He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1986 and participated in Documenta 8 in 1987. He was elected a RoyalAcademician in 2002 and had a major retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2013. Richard Deacon (b.1949) has exhibited internationally throughout his career. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1987, elected to the Royal Academy in 1998 and to the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin in 2010. A large exhibition of his work was shown at Tate Britain in 2014, the same year as a selected edition of his writings was published. Dr Jon Wood (b.1970) is a writer and curator, specialising in modern and contemporary sculpture. Recent publications and exhibitions include: 'Sean Scully' (2020), 'Contemporary Sculpture: Artists' Writings and Interviews' (2020), 'Tony Cragg at the Boboli Gardens' (2019) and 'Sculpture and Film' (2018). He is a trustee of the Gabo Trust.

Read more less

Humankind: Ruskin Spear is the first book on the painter Ruskin Spear RA (1911-1990) since a brief monograph in 1985. It uses Spear’s career to unlock the coded standards of the 20th-century art world and to look at class and culture in Britain and at notions of ‘vulgarity’. The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the changing preferences of the institutionalized avant-garde from the Second World War onwards; the battles fought within colleges of art as a generation of post-war students challenged the skills and commitment of their tutors; and the changing status of figurative art in the post-war period. Spear was committed to a form of social realism but the art he produced for left-wing and pacifist exhibitions and causes had a sophistication, authenticity and humour that flowed from his responses to bravura painting across a broad historical swathe of European art, and from the fact that he was painting what he knew. Spear’s geography revolved around the working class culture of Hammersmith in West London and the spectacle of pub and street life. This was a metropolitan life little known to, and largely unrecorded by, his contemporaries. Tracking Spear also illuminates the networks of friendship and power at the Royal College of Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts and within the post-war peace movement. As the tutor of the generation of Kitchen Sink and of future Pop artists at the Royal College of Art, and with friendships with figures as diverse as Sir Alfred Munnings and Francis Bacon, Spear’s interest in non-elite culture and marginal groups is of particular interest. Spear’s biting satirical pictures took as their subject matter political figures as diverse as Khrushchev and Enoch Powell, the art of Henry Moore and Reg Butler and, more generally, the structures of leisure and pleasure in 20th-century Britain. Humankind: Ruskin Spear has an obvious interest for art historians, but it also functions as a social history that brings alive aspects of British popular culture from tabloid journalism to the social mores of the public house and the snooker hall as well as the unexpected functions of official and unofficial portraiture. Written with general reader in mind, it has a powerful narrative that presents a remarkable rumbustious character and a diverse series of art and non-art worlds.

Read more less

With a career spanning more than five decades, Ian McKeever is one of Britain’s most senior artists working on the international stage. This publication documents the Henge paintings – a series started in 2017 and completed over the course of five years, inspired by prehistoric standing stones in the county of Wiltshire, England, and continuing the artist’s long-standing investigation into the languages and possibilities of abstract painting.Comprising thirty paintings along with numerous works on paper, the genesis of the series was a visit by McKeever to the world-famous neolithic site in the village of Avebury in 2016, where he took black and white photographs of the large stones that form three discrete circles: two smaller ones contained within the largest. Erected some 4500 years ago, Avebury is the largest stone circle in Britain, and forms part of what English Heritage asserts to be ‘a set of neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial sites that seemingly formed a vast sacred landscape.’Art historian and curator Paul Moorhouse, in his essay commissioned for the publication, describes how McKeever ‘framed each megalith in close-up, their edges visible at the extremity of the resulting images,’ explaining how ‘the experience of moving around Avebury and responding to the huge stones’ monumental presence made an abiding impression that resonated with deep-seated preoccupations.’ McKeever’s resulting body of work is an earnest and considered exploration into how paint can convey universal forces and properties such as mass, gravity and time, and how colour, texture and abstraction can converse with three-dimensional space, form and materiality.The relationship between painting and sculpture in McKeever’s work is discussed by means of an in-conversation between the artist and Dr Jon Wood. ‘My interest in alluding to early megalithic sites in titling the group of paintings Henge paintings,’ says McKeever, ‘was in touching that deeper sense of time, time’s weight, so to speak. How to imbue a painting with its own weight of time, forsake the immediacy of the here and now.’Designed and produced by Tim Harvey, the publication has been printed by Narayana Press in Odder, Denmark. It is published by Anomie, London, with support from Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen, and Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Connecticut. The publication accompanies exhibitions of selected works from the Henge paintings at both galleries in 2022.Ian McKeever was born 1946, Withernsea, Yorkshire, UK. He lives and works in Hartgrove, Dorset. McKeever has received numerous awards including the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin 1989/90 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2003. He has held several teaching positions including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. He has also published many texts on painting.Recent public solo exhibitions include Ian McKeever / Tony Cragg – Painting and Sculpture, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2020); Paintings 1992–2018, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK (2018); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Denmark (2015); Between Darkness and Light, National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (2015); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, Cologne, Germany (2014); and Hartgrove. Malerei und Fotografie, Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2012). McKeever’s work is represented in leading international public collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Vienna; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

Read more less