Search results for ""Author Painters"
Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc The Art of Painting in Acrylic (Collector's Series): Master techniques for painting stunning works of art in acrylic-step by step
The Art of Painting in Acrylic features a range of techniques and valuable instruction for working with this classic medium. This comprehensive guide offers a fresh, modern approach to painting in acrylic. Beginning with detailed information for using acrylic tools and materials, The Art of Painting in Acrylic introduces artists to the basics, including paints and brushes, supports, mediums, and other essential information for working with this fast-drying paint. In addition to learning about basic color theory, painting techniques, and how to work with acrylic paint and textures, aspiring artists will enjoy putting their painting skills to use by practicing the step-by-step demonstrations designed to instruct and entertain. Professional acrylic painters provide easy-to-follow, comprehensive instruction and inspiration, enabling readers to learn techniques for mastering this lightweight, versatile, and easy-to-use medium. In-depth lessons cover a variety of subject matter ranging from still lifes and portraits to landscapes and animals. Along the way, aspiring artists will discover helpful tips and tricks for rendering a variety of textures, setting up compelling compositions, achieving accurate proportions, and more. With its breadth of content and detail, The Art of Painting in Acrylic is a must-have resource for any artist's reference library. Includes: Color Theory, Basic Drawing, Painting Techniques, Still Lifes & Flowers, Landscapes, Seascapes, Portraits, and Animals/Pet Portraits.
£14.99
Oxford University Press Inc The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic
An engaging look at the founder of one of the most important philosophical schools of ancient Greece. The ancient philosopher Diogenes--nicknamed "The Dog" and decried by Plato as a "Socrates gone mad"--was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his infamously eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian era. In this book, Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of an atypical philosopher whose life left an indelible mark on the Western collective imagination and whose philosophy courses through various schools of thought well beyond antiquity. Roubineau sifts through the many legends and apocryphal stories that surround the life of Diogenes. Was he, the son of a banker, a counterfeiter in his hometown of Sinope? Did he really meet Alexander the Great? Was he truly an apologist for incest, patricide, and anthropophagy? And how did he actually die? To answer these questions, Roubineau retraces the known facts of Diogenes' existence. Beyond the rehashed clichés, this book inspires us to rediscover Diogenes' philosophical legacy--whether it be the challenge to the established order, the detachment from materialism, the choice of a return to nature, or the formulation of a cosmopolitan ideal strongly rooted in the belief that virtue is better revealed in action than in theory.
£16.53
Scarecrow Press Take Hold Upon the Future: Letters on Writers and Writing, 1938-1946
An uninhibited human document, this book reveals the inner workings of two very different minds struggling to meet the high standards of authorship they had set for themselves. Each served as a mentor to the other. Everson, known later as Brother Antoninus, a poet of the Beat Generation, comments trenchantly on Powell's novels (not published until the late 1970s) and Powell persuades Everson to reconsider words and images in his poems and give them titles. The letters include many insights on music as the two writers grow and develop emotionally and intellectually. Robinson Jeffers is the leitmotif for the book: Powell had written the first critical study of the poet and Jeffer's poems inspired Everson. Other writers appear-M.F.K. Fisher, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, and Archibald MacLeish, to name a few. Also sculptors Gordon Newell and Clayton James; painters Morris Graves amd Dillwyn Parrish; publishers James Laughlin and Ward Richie. Everson's draft board sent him to a conscientious objectors camp i Oregon, where he founded The Fine Arts at Waldport. The enforced separation of his internment, 1943-46, led to the dissolution of his marriage. Powell's unprecedented leap from junior librarian at UCLA to university librarian took place during these years, and his progress as a writer of columns, book reviews, and books is revealed.
£134.61
Unicorn Publishing Group A Journey Painted in Clay
Of all the ceramic processes, Maiolica truly requires a painter’s touch. Combining a confident sensitivity of brushwork and a vision of what might be once the subtle blends of oxides fuse with the tin glaze in the firing, it is both a rewarding and unforgiving art form. A Journey Painted in Clay celebrates the ceramic work of Agalis Manessi through its various forms of expression over a career spanning fifty years. Inspired by many historical and contemporary sources, her work is a fusion of her Mediterranean heritage and annual travels across Europe between Greece and London. Ideas are drawn from the experience of viewing subjects in churches, museums and galleries and observations directly from life. Animated vessels express a gentle humour that is offset by the suggestive poise of their condensed forms, camouflaged within the painted surface. Following in the tradition of English Delft, portrait dishes are softly coiled, with painted images built up of composite features worked up from notebook sketches. Modelled animals and figures take on a more enigmatic nature, communicating a silent yet eloquent poise. With a foreword from Jenni Lomax, curator and former director of Camden Arts Centre, and contributions from Megan Brooks, Tanya Harrod, Mina Holland, Marina Papasotiriou, Michael Petry and Liz Rideal.
£22.50
Dynasty Press Ltd The Steep
Jim Nordon (31 and divorced) has problems. Disliking suburbia, he aims to recuperate as much as possible from the 21st century by renting an apartment on the top floor of Victoria Mansions, an Edwardian building in Southampton Row due for demolition in the coming year. A supposedly successful career in local government means he has denied himself his ambition to become a portrait painter. These problems, if not insuperable, are worsened by the fact that he has to write a report, if possible anonymously, on reducing costs in his own work place. Finally there is the problem of sex. He gains periodic sexual satisfaction from a convenient relationship, but he hires a young girl as PA to help with his report and falls in love with her. This relationship becomes the centre of his life. Although it is a happy love affair, it breaks down when the earlier relationship intervenes. On a Sunday morning after returning to his Manchester home he climbs a hill called The Steep. There he discovers his past. The episode determines him in his decision to change his life. A novel of perceptive characterisation and rich descriptions, written sensitively and poetically with touches of humour, explicit in its treatment of sex, it focuses on love and death and the universal need to confront the steeps that occur in life when choosing between creativity and expediency.
£9.36
Orion Publishing Co Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting
An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston.Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible and revealing analysis of his work.With more than 850 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions.Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.
£54.00
Rizzoli International Publications The Art of David Webb: Jewelry and Culture
The Art of David Webb celebrates the designer s dedication to artistry over more than seven decades. When David Webb came to New York at the age of 17, he was captivated by the museums, architecture, and fashions of the day. By the time he opened shop in 1948, the city had become his muse. In his only published article, Why Not Hang Gems?, of 1963, he wrote that jewelry deserved to be regarded as art and collected by museums. That conviction fuels The Art of David Webb. Here is jewelry shown as art in more than 120 images all specially photographed for this book that speak to the variety of artistic and cultural periods that inspired David Webb and the company he founded. Examples include Webb s enameled and diamond Mondrian Bracelet, an homage to Piet Mondrian s Broadway Boogie Woogie and Yves Saint Laurent s 1960s sheath dress with its famed color blocking; a gemstone-rich dragon brooch taken from a Scythian animal pommel; and a scored rock crystal and diamond bracelet that updates art deco classics. Throughout, work by photographers, painters, sculptors, architects, couturiers, and photographers form a visual dialogue with the sumptuous David Webb jewelry. The imaginative pairings, in-depth descriptive captions, and elegantly designed publication are resounding proof that jewelry is both art and culture.
£63.00
Simon & Schuster The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes
In this “thought-provoking blend of history, biography, women’s studies, and travelogue” (Library Journal) Mia Kankimäki recounts her enchanting travels in Japan, Kenya, and Italy while retracing the steps of ten remarkable female pioneers from history.What can a forty-something childless woman do? Bored with her life and feeling stuck, Mia Kankimäki leaves her job, sells her apartment, and decides to travel the world, following the paths of the female explorers and artists from history who have long inspired her. She flies to Tanzania and then to Kenya to see where Karen Blixen—of Out of Africa fame—lived in the 1920s. In Japan, Mia attempts to cure her depression while researching Yayoi Kusama, the contemporary artist who has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital for decades. In Italy, Mia spends her days looking for the works of forgotten Renaissance women painters of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and finally finds her heroines in the portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Atremisia Gentileschi. If these women could make it in the world hundreds of years ago, why can’t Mia? The Women I Think About at Night is “an astute, entertaining…[and] insightful” (Publishers Weekly) exploration of the lost women adventurers of history who defied expectations in order to see—and change—the world.
£9.99
David R. Godine Publisher Inc George Rickey: A Life in Balance
The first biography of George Rickey, one of the greatest kinetic sculptors of the 20th century. His moving blades, squares, triangles, and circles can be found in museums and public spaces around the world, from bucolic landscapes to the streets of New York City. Now, here is the story of his life, his times, and his vision of balance that created something new―sculpture that is defined by movement.Before his death in 2002, George Rickey created more than 3,000 moving sculptures, including hundreds of major outdoor installations. His “useless machines,” as he called them, achieved complete rotation, used multiple variations of the pendulum, and delighted viewers with the joyride effects of conical movement. George Rickey: A Life in Balance follows the life of a renowned artist―first a painter, then a sculptor―who found inspiration all around him―as a child visiting the Singer Sewing Machine factory managed by his father, in his adventurous youth in the London and Paris art studios of the 1920s, as an engineer in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and later as a pioneer in academic art programs around the United States when he embarked on the sculpture he became famous for.But this is not only the story of a single artist’s creativity and achievement but of Rickey’s life in the larger context of the twentieth century: from Depression-era America to the upheaval of World War II, from the rise of New York as the world’s art capital at mid-century to the tumultuous 1960s, when Rickey emerged as an international figure rubbing elbows with Alexander Calder, David Smith, Christo, and many others. It is also the story of an exceptional marriage and of Rickey’s charismatic, devoted wife, Edith Leighton, who managed her husband’s career and reputation in the high-powered art circles of New York, Berlin, and Los Angeles.Belinda Rathbone (author of The Boston Raphael and Walker Evans: A Biography) has captured the spirit of an artist and his world in this deeply researched and engrossing biography. George Rickey: A Life in Balance is for any reader fascinated by the lives of artists, the creation of enduring art, or twentieth century modernism. Includes 30 photographs that document Rickey’s life and work.
£26.09
Cornell University Press The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s
In The Reagan Moment, the ideas, events, strategies, trends, and movements that shaped the 1980s are revealed to have had lasting effects on international relations: The United States went from a creditor to a debtor nation; democracy crested in East Asia and returned to Latin America; the People's Republic of China moved to privatize, decentralize, and open its economy; Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda; and relations between Washington and Moscow thawed en route to the Soviet Union's dissolution. The Reagan Moment places US foreign relations into global context by examining the economic, international, and ideational relationships that bound Washington to the wider world. Editors Jonathan R. Hunt and Simon Miles bring together a cohort of scholars with fresh insights from untapped and declassified global sources to recast Reagan's pivotal years in power. Contributors: Seth Anziska, James Cameron, Elizabeth Charles, Susan Colbourn, Michael De Groot, Stephanie Freeman, Christopher Fuller, Flavia Gasbarri, Mathias Haeussler, William Inboden, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Elisabeth Mariko Leake, Melvyn P. Leffler, Evan D. McCormick, Jennifer Miller, David Painter, Robert Rakove, William Michael Schmidli, Sarah Snyder, Lauren Frances Turek, James Wilson
£100.80
University of California Press Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays
A landmark in the publication of twentieth-century American poetry, this first volume of the long-awaited collected poetry, non-critical prose, and plays of Robert Duncan gathers all of Duncan's books and magazine publications up to and including "Letters: Poems 1953-1956". Deftly edited, it thoroughly documents the first phase of Duncan's distinguished life in writing, making it possible to trace the poet's development as he approaches the brilliant work of his middle period. This volume includes the celebrated works "Medieval Scenes" and "The Venice Poem", all of Duncan's long unavailable major ventures into drama, his extensive "imitations" of Gertrude Stein, and the remarkable poems written in "Majorca" as responses to a series of collaged paste-ups by Duncan's life-long partner, the painter Jess. Books appear in chronological order of publication, with uncollected periodical and other publications arranged chronologically, following each book. The introduction includes a biographical commentary on Duncan's early life and works, and clears an initial path through the textual complexities of his early writing. Notes offer brief commentaries on each book and on many of the poems. The volume to follow, "The Collected Later Poetry and Plays", will include "The Opening of the Field" (1960), "Roots and Branches" (1964), "Bending the Bow" (1968), "Ground Work" (1984), and "Ground Work II" (1987).
£42.00
Dorling Kindersley Ltd The Met Vincent van Gogh: He Saw the World in Vibrant Colours
See the world through Vincent van Gogh's eyes and be inspired to produce your own masterpieces.Have you ever wondered exactly what your favourite artists were looking at to make them draw, sculpt, or paint the way they did? In this charming illustrated series, created in full collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see what they saw, and be inspired to create your own artworks, too. In the pages of this book, What the Artist Saw: Vincent van Gogh, meet famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Step into his life and learn what led him to paint his eye-catching self portraits. See the landscapes that inspired his famous Wheat Fields. Have a go at painting your own sunflowers! Follow the artists' stories and find intriguing facts about their environments and key masterpieces. Then see what you can see and make your own art. Take a closer look at nature with Georgia O'Keeffe. Try crafting a story in fabric like Faith Ringgold, or carve a woodblock print at home with Hokusai. Every book in this series is one to treasure and keep - the perfect gift for budding artists to explore exhibitions with, then continue their own artistic journeys. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
£9.99
Guggenheim Museum Publications,U.S. Giacometti
This comprehensive survey of the work of the Swiss-born modern master Alberto Giacometti offers a fresh and incisive account of his entire creative output. Published on the occasion of Giacometti’s first major museum presentation in the U.S. in over a decade, the volume brings together nearly 200 sculptures, paintings and drawings to trace the artist’s wide-ranging and hugely innovative engagement with the human form across various mediums. While Giacometti may be best known for his distinct figurative sculptures that emerged after World War II, including a series of elongated standing women, striding men and expressive busts, this volume devotes equal attention to the artist’s early and midcareer development. It explores his lesser-known engagement with Cubism and Surrealism as well as African, Oceanic and Cycladic art, which preceded his shift to figuration, while also highlighting his remarkable talents as a draftsman and painter alongside his sculptural oeuvre. Of particular focus is Giacometti’s studio practice, which is examined through rarely seen plaster sculptures that highlight the artist’s working process, in addition to ephemera and historical photographs documenting his relationship with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – which hosted the artist’s first U.S. exhibition, in 1955 – and with New York City.
£45.00
Taschen GmbH Bourgery. Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery
We owe a great debt to Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery (1797–1849) for his Atlas of Anatomy, which was not only a massive event in medical history, but also remains one of the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated anatomical treatises ever published. Bourgery began work on his magnificent atlas in 1830 in cooperation with illustrator Nicolas Henri Jacob (1782–1871), a student of the French painter Jacques Louis David. The first volumes were published the following year, but completion of the treatise required nearly two decades of dedication; Bourgery lived just long enough to finish his labor of love, but the last of the treatise’s eight volumes was not published in its entirety until five years after his death. The eight volumes of Bourgery’s treatise cover descriptive anatomy, surgical anatomy and techniques (exploring in detail nearly all the major operations that were performed during the first half of the 19th century), general anatomy and embryology, and microscopic anatomy. Jacob’s spectacular hand-colored lithographs are remarkable for their clarity, color, and aesthetic appeal, reflecting a combination of direct laboratory observation and illustrative research. Unsurpassed to this day, the images offer exceptional anatomical insight, not only for those in the medical field but also for artists, students, and anyone interested in the workings and wonder of the human body.
£60.00
Taschen GmbH Bourgery. Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery
We owe a great debt to Jean Baptiste Marc Bourgery (1797–1849) for his Atlas of Anatomy, which was not only a massive event in medical history, but also remains one of the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated anatomical treatises ever published. Bourgery began work on his magnificent atlas in 1830 in cooperation with illustrator Nicolas Henri Jacob (1782–1871), a student of the French painter Jacques Louis David. The first volumes were published the following year, but completion of the treatise required nearly two decades of dedication; Bourgery lived just long enough to finish his labor of love, but the last of the treatise’s eight volumes was not published in its entirety until five years after his death. The eight volumes of Bourgery’s treatise cover descriptive anatomy, surgical anatomy and techniques (exploring in detail nearly all the major operations that were performed during the first half of the 19th century), general anatomy and embryology, and microscopic anatomy. Jacob’s spectacular hand-colored lithographs are remarkable for their clarity, color, and aesthetic appeal, reflecting a combination of direct laboratory observation and illustrative research. Unsurpassed to this day, the images offer exceptional anatomical insight, not only for those in the medical field but also for artists, students, and anyone interested in the workings and wonder of the human body.
£20.00
National Gallery Company Ltd One Hundred Great Paintings
The National Gallery in London houses one of the richest collections of Western European paintings in the world, ranging from the 13th to the 20th century. In this beautiful book, one hundred of the greatest works from the collection, each by a different artist, are presented in chronological order, and accompanied by a lively, informative text and full-page color reproductions. From the earliest—a remnant of an Italian altarpiece dating from around 1265—to the most recent—Paul Cézanne’s great Bathers, of about 1894–1905—each painting has been carefully chosen for the unique significance it holds; whether representing a particular artist, place or time, or simply for its beauty and the pleasure it provides to the viewer. The painters featured here include some of the most famous names in European art—Duccio, Giotto, Dürer, Holbein, van Eyck, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Goya, Caravaggio, Claude, Poussin, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Constable, Turner, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Rousseau, and Van Gogh—and some of the most iconic paintings in the world—The Wilton Diptych, The Arnolfini Portrait, The Ambassadors, and Sunflowers. These selected highlights introduce some of the most inspiring paintings ever made. The reader can dip in to explore individual paintings, or read from cover to cover for a full survey.Published by the National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press
£24.99
Harvard University Press Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia
Cross-cultural encounters in Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought the potential for bafflement, hostility, and admiration. The court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and were forced to make sense of one another. By looking at these interactions, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere.Both individual agents and objects such as texts and paintings helped mediate encounters between courts, which possessed rules and conventions that required decipherment and translation, whether in words or in pictures. Sanjay Subrahmanyam gives special attention to the depiction of South Asian empires in European visual representations, finding a complex history of cultural exchange: the Mughal paintings that influenced Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch painters had themselves been earlier influenced by Dutch naturalism. Courtly Encounters provides a rich array of images from Europe, the Islamic world, India, and Southeast Asia as aids for understanding the reciprocal nature of cross-cultural exchanges. It also looks closely at how insults and strategic use of martyrdom figured in courtly encounters.As he sifts through the historical record, Subrahmanyam finds little evidence for the cultural incommensurability many ethnohistorians have insisted on. Most often, he discovers negotiated ways of understanding one another that led to mutual improvisation, borrowing, and eventually change.
£32.36
Signal Books Ltd Sails & Winds: A Cultural History of Valencia
The towns of Valencia's long coast and privileged climate, in particular Benidorm, southern Europe's skyscraper capital, are famous beach tourism destinations. Country of fire, fireworks and long meals (often featuring the renowned paella), Valencia is a Mediterranean land where people know how to enjoy life. This book tells the story of today's Spanish provinces of Valencia, Castello and Alacant (Alicante), with their profound Moorish legacy. The Moors designed the intricate system of irrigation that still nourishes Valencia's prosperous horta (market garden). They brought, too, the silk, paper and orange industries. The area is rich in monuments, many from its golden fifteenth century, when the capital became the wealthiest city on the Western Mediterranean. Sails & Winds discusses Sagunt's Roman theatre and castle; Gandia, home to the ill-reputed Borja (or Borgia) family of popes; Elx, embraced by 200,000 palms; and Alcoi, anarchist stronghold. Michael Eaude discusses Valencia's art, literature and architecture: the painters Ribera and light-filled Sorolla; the great medieval poet of anguish Ausias March. Santiago Calatrava's architecture, conjuring the sensation of soaring flight from steel, has given Valencia city its new trophy buildings. Despite the continuing holiday boom, there are still deserted beaches, sinister and beautiful marshland, orange groves and a depopulated mountainous interior. Sails & Winds seeks to explain this contradictory and divided land, its identity pulled between the Spanish state and Catalonia.
£15.99
Phaidon Press Ltd Magritte
The paintings of the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967) have exerted an extraordinary fascination, particularly since the enormous increase in awareness and popularity of his work during the 1960s. Magritte shows us a world of silence and isolation in which familiar objects are altered or juxtaposed in ‘impossible’ combinations in order to create a sense of disorientation and the absurd. Many of his most memorable paintings date from his three prolific years 1927–30, when he lived near Paris and was in close touch with the writer André Breton and other French Surrealists.In his pre-war painting, stylistic concerns were of secondary importance to Magritte, whose main interest was in ideas or propositions about the world; for example, many of his paintings explore the relation between objects and words or between the image of an object and the object itself. He deliberately cultivated a cold, unemotive, ‘style-less’ style. This quality renders the images of violence and macabre sexuality in some of his works all the more disturbing. His own ‘impressionist’ and vache (ugly, crude) pictures of the 1940s have been rediscovered in the last few years by a younger generation of painters and critics keenly responsive to the later work of other masters of parody and allusion such as Picabia and de Chirico.Richard Calvocoressi's highly successful introduction to Magritte was first published in 1979 and revised and enlarged by the addition of notes to the colour plates and many black-and-white illustrations.
£7.60
The University of Chicago Press Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
Michael Fried's often controversial art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains 27 pieces, including the introduction to the catalogue for "Three American Painters," the text of his book "Morris Louis," and "Art and Objecthood." Originally published between 1962 and 1977, the essays continue to generate debate today. These are uncompromising writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture. Ranging from brief reviews to extended essays, and including major critiques of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, these writings establish a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the viability of Clement Greenberg's account of the infralogic of modernism, the status of figuration after Pollock, the centrality of the problem of shape, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, and the relationship between work and beholder. In a number of essays Fried contrasts the modernist enterprise with minimalist or literalist art, and, taking a position that remains provocative to this day, he argues that minimalism is essentially a genre of theatre, hence artistically self-defeating. For this volume Fried has also provided an extensive introductory essay in which he discusses how he became an art critic, clarifies his intentions in his art criticism, and draws crucial distinctions between his art criticism and the art history he also wrote.
£36.00
Luath Press Ltd Scotland's Waterloo
I saw the field of battle… It still exhibits a most striking picture of desolation all the neighbouring houses being broken down by cannon-shot and shells. There was one sweet little chateau in particular called Hougomont which was the object of several desperate assaults and was at length burned to the ground… There was an immense carnage on this spot and the stench of the dead bodies is still frightfully sensible. WALTER SCOTTWhy was the Battle of Waterloo so significant for Scottish history? How has the conflict been represented in Scottish art and literature? What did the Scots who witnessed the battle and its aftermath have to say about it at the time?The Battle of Waterloo represented a seismic shift in the tectonic plates of national identity for Scotland. In art and political rhetoric, the Scots became the poster boys of the British Empire at Waterloo. Ostensibly fighting alongside England against France, the battle also arguably saw Scotland move away from the Auld Alliance towards identification with the United Kingdom. Scotland’s Waterloo concentrates on how the battle was perceived at the time, showcasing the different ways that illustrious Scots documented and responded to the battle in its immediate aftermath. Owen Dudley Edwards starts with the painters and their patrons, before moving on to the fascinating eyewitness accounts of Scottish soldiers and doctors. He finally introduces the voices of two of the most famous Scottish writers who experienced the horrific aftermath of the battle first-hand, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.
£9.99
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Portrait of a Duchess
The scandalous women of the SOCIETY OF SIRENS are back with an explosive secret…their ranks include a duchess in disguiseOnce upon a time she married in secret…An activist painter of radicals and harlots, Cornelia Ludgate dismisses love and marriage as threats to freedom. But when an inheritance gives her the chance to fund the cause of women’s rights—on the condition she must wed—she is forced to reveal a secret: she’s already married. To a man she hasn’t seen for twenty years. Oh…and her husband is a duke.A horse breeder with a clandestine taste for revolution, Rafe Goodwood never expected to become a duke. But now that the title is his, he is plotting to shock the ruling class with ambitions of reform—and reveal the infamous Cornelia is his duchess. That just presents one problem: he must not fall in love with her—again.Now they must resist the temptation to rekindle an affair...Although determined not to sacrifice her principles for passion, Cornelia is still drawn to the man whose very being threatens her independence. Hurt too many times, Rafe can’t risk love again—especially with the woman who once shattered his heart. But a conspiracy to upend the inequalities of the aristocracy bring Cornelia and Rafe closer, forcing them to finally decide what—and who—they hold dear.
£9.68
University of Texas Press Michael Ray Charles: A Retrospective
Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2021 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American ArtMichael Ray Charles is the most comprehensive presentation yet of the work of an artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s for works that engaged American stereotypes of African Americans. With a background in advertising and an archivist’s inquisitiveness, Charles developed an artistic practice that made startling use of found images and offered critiques of the narratives they fostered. Immersing readers in the imagination of this daring painter, Michael Ray Charles celebrates and contextualizes a singular, major figure in the art world.Art historian Cherise Smith collaborated with the artist to curate nearly one hundred color plates documenting nearly thirty years of visual art. These plates are framed by an interview with the artist and by Smith’s own deep interpretive essay on Charles’s work. Smith explores topics ranging from the controversy resulting from Charles’s provocative appropriations of stereotypical racial material to his techniques of sampling from popular culture, and from his commentaries on African American men and sports to his work with director Spike Lee on Bamboozled. Both clear-eyed and complex, this retrospective demonstrates the significant role that Michael Ray Charles’s work has played in defining what art is today.
£48.60
Johns Hopkins University Press The Empire of the Dead
In the spare and deliberate stories in The Empire of the Dead, through situations both comic and bluntly melancholy, the future remains open for people - but at an indeterminate cost. Daily, characters weigh their indecision against the consequences of choice. Through a series of five linked stories, we meet Bern, a New York City architect yearning for a return to "first principles" - the "initial euphoria, the falling-in-love" that led him to consider a life devoted to sheltering others. In his ministrations to colleagues and friends, his memories of magical building feats now in the past, he learns the limits and the expansiveness of joy and need. In another tale, we meet a young painter in a Gulf Coast refinery town struggling to differentiate beauty from affliction. His sister's encounter with the singer Janis Joplin causes him to reconsider the nature of saintliness. And in the novella "The Magnitudes," a planetarium director, grieving over the unexpected loss of his parents, must learn how much of the universe - both the real sky beyond his reach and the firmament cast upon the planetarium dome - he can control. Like the other characters in Tracy Daugherty's masterful collection, he moves through spaces at once sacred and spoiled, within cities, deserts, and other strange environments, reckoning, taking soundings, trying to find firm footing in the world.
£22.50
Silvana Giorgio Morandi: Works from the Antonio and Matilde Catanese Collection
The collection of works by Giorgio Morandi selected by Antonio and Matilde Catanese belongs to the tradition of great Milanese collectors who had a far-sighted view of the painter, acquiring his works in the 1930s and becoming among the first to contribute to his fame. The Morandi’s works in the Catanese collection are a microcosm of the artist’s oeuvre, thanks to the number of works, their chronological spread covering almost all the years of the artist’s activity, the techniques used to create them, their themes, their place in collecting history and, most importantly, their artistic importance, rendering the collection well suited for deciphering and understanding Morandi’s work. The group includes 15 paintings made between 1914 and 1959 and three watercolours representing the distinctive themes of his work indicated by anodyne titles: Still Life, Landscape, Flowers and, most importantly, a Self-Portrait dated 1914 by Morandi. Another integral part of the collection is the almost complete series of etchings, showing the collectors’ embrace of the technique that Morandi practised in parallel to painting and that cannot be separated from it. The works have been the subject of scientific investigations, preliminary to restoration and conservation, conducted by the University of Urbino, the results of which are presented here. Texts by: Cristina Bandera, Luca Cecchetto, Mariella Gnani, Buccolini Federica, Paolo Triolo, Sabrina Burattini, Laura Valentini. Text in English and Italian.
£32.40
Batsford Ltd Poetic Woods: Experimental Watercolour and Collage
Innovative techniques in painting woodlands from renowned artist Ann Blockley. Watercolourist Ann Blockley is known for her striking and intriguing paintings of natural landscapes. In this beautiful guide she explores woodlands in a variety of interpretations, from tangled groves and ancient trees to fiery leaves and springtime orchards. With simple instructions and easy-to-follow demonstrations throughout, the book draws inspiration from forest poetry, birdsong and folklore. There’s practical advice on working outside, experimenting with mixing colours (especially greens), playing with water effects, using salt and granulation, mark-making and spattering with found objects such as leaves and twigs, creating texture with gesso and working with collage. Other techniques include working with oak gall ink and charcoal, and how to incorporate words, text and photo transfer. The book is illustrated throughout with stunning examples of Blockley’s colourful, expressive work, including a case study of her own woodland garden. Also showcased are works by fellow artists from The Arborealist group, the Royal Institute, and the Pastel Society to inspire you further. Pushing the boundaries of watercolour and other mixed media, this delightful wander through the woods is the ideal companion for both beginners and the more experienced landscape painter who wishes to take their painting to the next level.
£22.50
Princeton University Press The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion
An illustrated guide to one of the most enduring masterworks of world literatureWritten in the eleventh century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of prose and poetry that is widely considered the world’s first novel. Melissa McCormick provides a unique companion to Murasaki’s tale that combines discussions of all fifty-four of its chapters with paintings and calligraphy from the Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums, the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist.In this book, the album’s colorful painting and calligraphy leaves are fully reproduced for the first time, followed by McCormick’s insightful essays that analyze the Genji story and the album’s unique combinations of word and image. This stunning compendium also includes English translations and Japanese transcriptions of the album’s calligraphy, enabling a holistic experience of the work for readers today. In an introduction to the volume, McCormick tells the fascinating stories of the individuals who created the Genji Album in the sixteenth century, from the famous court painter who executed the paintings and the aristocrats who brushed the calligraphy to the work’s warrior patrons and the poet-scholars who acted as their intermediaries.Beautifully illustrated, this book serves as an invaluable guide for readers interested in The Tale of Genji, Japanese literature, and the captivating visual world of Japan’s most celebrated work of fiction.
£36.00
Taschen GmbH Kirchner
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) is regarded as one of the key figures in 20th-century European art. A Modernist to his bones, he sent seismic waves through the art world with his hard-edged, intensely colored paintings and disseminated his ideas through Die Brücke art movement and the MUIM-Institut school of modernist painting, both of which he cofounded. Kirchner’s work reconciled past and present through an Expressionist prism, reflecting the latest avant-garde ideas in art, while exploring traditional academic approaches and subjects. His works tackled social, moral, and emotional questions with a fierce intensity. Distorted perspectives, rough lines, and unusual colors were mainstays of his practice, as well as a recurring interest in capturing the human form, whether in frenetic city vistas such as Berlin Street Scene (1913) or in his famously decadent studio. In this introductory book, we explore the stretch of Kirchner’s career through Germany and Switzerland, including his founding of Die Brücke, and his inclusion in the Nazis’ infamous “degenerate art” exhibition in 1937. Along the way, we’ll encounter vivid landscapes, stark nudes, intense urban settings, and, above all, a persistent emphasis on the emotional experience of painter and viewer.
£15.00
Hodder & Stoughton Imagination and a Pile of Junk: A Droll History of Inventors and Inventions
'In his whistle-stop tour of inventions large and small, the scientist Trevor Norton shares the Gershwins' view that invention is fundamentally comic.' The Sunday TimesTrevor Norton, who has been compared to Gerard Durrell and Bill Bryson, weaves an entertaining history with a seductive mix of eureka moments, disasters and dirty tricks. Although inventors were often scientists or engineers, many were not: Samuel Morse (Morse code) was a painter, Lazlow Biro (ballpoint) was a sculptor and hypnotist, and Logie Baird (TV) sold boot polish. The inventor of the automatic telephone switchboard was an undertaker who believed the operator was diverting his calls to rival morticians so he decided to make all telephone operators redundant. Inventors are mavericks indifferent to conventional wisdom so critics were dismissive of even their best ideas: radio had 'no future,' electric light was 'an idiotic idea' and X-rays were 'a hoax.' Even so, the state of New Jersey moved to ban X-ray opera glasses. The head of the General Post Office rejected telephones as unneccesary as there were 'plenty of small boys to run messages.'Inventomania is a magical place where eccentrics are always in season and their stories are usually unbelievable - but rest assured, nothing has been invented.
£9.99
Harvard University Press Galileo’s Telescope: A European Story
Between 1608 and 1610 the canopy of the night sky changed forever, ripped open by an object created almost by accident: a cylinder with lenses at both ends. Galileo’s Telescope tells the story of how an ingenious optical device evolved from a toy-like curiosity into a precision scientific instrument, all in a few years. In transcending the limits of human vision, the telescope transformed humanity’s view of itself and knowledge of the cosmos.Galileo plays a leading—but by no means solo—part in this riveting tale. He shares the stage with mathematicians, astronomers, and theologians from Paolo Sarpi to Johannes Kepler and Cardinal Bellarmine, sovereigns such as Rudolph II and James I, as well as craftsmen, courtiers, poets, and painters. Starting in the Netherlands, where a spectacle-maker created a spyglass with the modest magnifying power of three, the telescope spread like technological wildfire to Venice, Rome, Prague, Paris, London, and ultimately India and China. Galileo’s celestial discoveries—hundreds of stars previously invisible to the naked eye, lunar mountains, and moons orbiting Jupiter—were announced to the world in his revolutionary treatise Sidereus Nuncius.Combining science, politics, religion, and the arts, Galileo’s Telescope rewrites the early history of a world-shattering innovation whose visual power ultimately came to embody meanings far beyond the science of the stars.
£27.86
Yale University Press Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet
A novel look at the relationship between Impressionist painting and photography and the forging of a national identity in France between 1850 and 1880 Between 1850 and 1880, Impressionist landscape painting and early forms of photography flourished within the arts in France. In the context of massive social and political change that also marked this era, painters and photographers composed competing visions of France as modern and industrialized or as rural and anti-modern. Impressionist France explores the resonances between landscape art and national identity as reflected in the paintings and photographs made during this period, examining and illustrating in particular the works of key artists such as Édouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray, the Bisson Frères, Édouard Manet, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, Charles Nègre, and Camille Pissarro. This ambitious premise focuses on the whole of France, exploring the relationship between landscape art and the notion of French nationhood across the country’s varied and spectacular landscapes in seven geographical sections and four scholarly essays, which provide new information regarding the production and impact of French Impressionism.Distributed for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art(10/19/13-02/09/14)Saint Louis Art Museum(03/16/14–07/06/14)
£25.00
Edinburgh University Press Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics
The first book by Helene Cixous on painting and the contemporary arts. This collection gathers most of Helene Cixous' short texts devoted to contemporary artists, such as the painter Nancy Spero, the photographer Andres Serrano, the visual artists Roni Horn and Ernest Pignon-Ernest, the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel and the choreographer Karine Saporta, among others. The artworks belong to different genres and media: photography, painting, installations, film, choreography and fashion design. Nevertheless, Helene Cixous' texts all deal with some of her privileged themes: exile, war, violence (against women) and exclusion, as well as love, memory, beauty and tenderness. Neither art criticism nor critical essays, Helene Cixous responds to these artworks as a poet, reading them as if they were poems. Written between 1985 and 2010, most of these essays are unpublished in English, or published only in rare catalogues or art books. Key Features *Combines poetic, theoretical and critical writing and Cixous' unique methodology *Addresses an important collection of contemporary artists, including Americans Nancy Spero and Roni Horn, the London artist Maria Chevska, the Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, the filmmaker Ruth Bekermann, the French choreographer Karine Saporta and the French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel. *Treats a range of media and genre: photography, painting, installations, film, choreography, fashion design
£85.00
Pace Publishing Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work
Justice and rebirth: a visual chronicle of the artist who fused Afro-Cuban visual culture with European modernism This chronological survey traces the Cuban painter and sculptor Wifredo Lam’s (1902–82) career from the late 1930s to the ’70s, spotlighting the radically syncretic visual language he developed in response to modernism’s Eurocentricity. Born to a Chinese father and Congolese Iberian mother, Lam placed heritage centrally in his work. Early in his career, he associated with major figures such as Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and he was struck by their integration of African iconography. Although he greatly respected these European artists, the dissonance between their aesthetic choices and cultural experience was not lost on him—especially given the racism and exploitation that characterized Cuban society under the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Lam spent the rest of his career endeavoring to decolonize modernist art. From his early Surrealist works to his later preference for geometric abstraction, African sculpture and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora consistently informed his practice. Published for an exhibition at Pace, The Imagination at Work includes paintings, works on paper and rarely seen bronze sculptures, as well as a biography of Lam’s life and career by the Latin American art scholar and curator Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann, who made curatorial contributions to the gallery’s exhibition. Essays by scholars Alexander Alberro, Kaira Cabañas, Samantha A. Noël and Alexandra Chang also feature.
£36.90
Enitharmon Press Derelict Air: From Collected Out
Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry gleaned from ephemera, correspondence, and notebooks housed at numerous archives in the USA and UK. From Dorn's first Beat poems in 1952, to visionary juvenalia from his study at Black Mountain, to the long poems that were central to the development of the British Poetry Revival, and to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, the transatlantic roots of Dorn's anti-capitalism are here fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote of Dorn that "No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political". Whereas Dorn's Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes in the diverse forms of the lyric, the pronouncement, the mock-epic, and the epigram. Recovering four lost books, Derelict Air significantly expands Dorn's oeuvre, including impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children's book, "confetti poems" meant to shower the 1968 DNC, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties "stock ticker". Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Edward Dorn's poetry is a must-have for any reader interested in post-War American modernism.
£15.00
ACC Art Books Nineteenth Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Epoque
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.
£134.10
Yale University Press Renoir: The Body, The Senses
A revelatory and wide-ranging exploration of Renoir’s extraordinary depictions of the nude and their important artistic legacy Best known as part of the influential vanguard of Impressionist artists that experimented with new painting techniques in the late 19th century, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was deeply inspired by classical traditions and returned again and again to the canonical subject of the nude. Tracing the entire arc of Renoir’s career, this volume examines the different approaches the artist employed in his various depictions of the subject—from his works that respond to Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne, to his late, and still controversial, depictions of bathers that inspired the next generation of artists. Eminent scholars not only look at the different ways that Renoir used the nude as a means of personal expression but also analyze Renoir’s art in terms of a modern feminist critique of the male gaze. Offering the first-ever comprehensive investigation of Renoir’s nudes, this beautifully illustrated study includes approximately 50 works, including paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculptures. The book also features an interview with the contemporary figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage that considers Renoir’s continuing influence and the historical significance of the female nude in art.Distributed for the Clark Art InstituteExhibition Schedule:Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (06/08/19–09/22/19)Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX (10/27/19–01/26/20)
£40.00
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Westside: A Novel
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year! “The Alienist meets The City & The City in this brilliant debut that mixes fantasy and mystery. Gilda Carr’s ‘tiny mysteries’ pack a giant punch." --David Morrell, New York Times bestselling author of Murder As a Fine ArtA young detective who specializes in “tiny mysteries” finds herself at the center of a massive conspiracy in this beguiling historical fantasy set on Manhattan’s Westside—a peculiar and dangerous neighborhood home to strange magic and stranger residents—that blends the vivid atmosphere of Caleb Carr with the imaginative power of Neil Gaiman.It’s 1921, and a thirteen-mile fence running the length of Broadway splits the island of Manhattan, separating the prosperous Eastside from the Westside—an overgrown wasteland whose hostility to modern technology gives it the flavor of old New York. Thousands have disappeared here, and the respectable have fled, leaving behind the killers, thieves, poets, painters, drunks, and those too poor or desperate to leave. It is a hellish landscape, and Gilda Carr proudly calls it home. Slightly built, but with a will of iron, Gilda follows in the footsteps of her late father, a police detective turned private eye. Unlike that larger-than-life man, Gilda solves tiny mysteries: the impossible puzzles that keep us awake at night; the small riddles that destroy us; the questions that spoil marriages, ruin friendships, and curdle joy. Those tiny cases distract her from her grief, and the one impossible question she knows she can’t answer: “How did my father die?” Yet on Gilda’s Westside, tiny mysteries end in blood—even the case of a missing white leather glove. Mrs. Copeland, a well-to-do Eastside housewife, hires Gilda to find it before her irascible merchant husband learns it is gone. When Gilda witnesses Mr. Copeland’s murder at a Westside pier, she finds herself sinking into a mire of bootlegging, smuggling, corruption—and an evil too dark to face.All she wants is to find one dainty ladies’ glove. She doesn’t want to know why this merchant was on the wrong side of town—or why he was murdered in cold blood. But as she begins to see the connection between his murder, her father’s death, and the darkness plaguing the Westside, she faces the hard truth: she must save her city or die with it.Introducing a truly remarkable female detective, Westside is a mystery steeped in the supernatural and shot through with gunfights, rotgut whiskey, and sizzling Dixieland jazz. Full of dazzling color, delightful twists, and truly thrilling action, it announces the arrival of a wonderful new talent.
£9.99
Dorling Kindersley Ltd The Met Louise Bourgeois: She Saw the World as a Textured Tapestry
See the world through Louise Bourgeois' eyes and be inspired to produce your own masterpieces.Have you ever wondered exactly what your favourite artists were looking at to make them draw, sculpt, or paint the way they did? In this charming illustrated series of books to keep and collect, created in full collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see what they saw, and be inspired to create your own artworks, too. In What the Artist Saw: Louise Bourgeois, meet the famous French-American painter, printmaker and sculptor. Step into her life and learn what led her to explore her fears and emotions through her art. Learn all about her family and what inspired her to create her large spider sculptures. Have a go at producing your own art inspired by your dreams!In this series, follow the artists' stories and find intriguing facts about their environments and key masterpieces. Then see what you can see and make your own art. Take a closer look at landscapes, or even yourself, with Vincent van Gogh. Try crafting a story in fabric like Faith Ringgold, or carve a woodblock print at home with Hokusai. Every book in this series is one to treasure and keep - perfect for budding young artists to explore exhibitions with, then continue their own artistic journeys. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
£9.99
Wakefield Press The Dice Cup
The most important prose-poem collection of the 20th century, available in a trade publication for the first time Max Jacob’s role in French modernity was essential, and with this second volume of his work from Wakefield Press, it can now be fully and properly assessed. First published in 1917, The Dice Cup stands alongside Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Pierre Reverdy’s Prose Poems as one of the most important and foundational books of prose poetry. Jacob has been identified as a “cubist poet,” but this collection and its shifting style escape any such easy definition: dream accounts are rendered in playful prose that thumbs its nose at the fabular tradition of Baudelaire and Mallarmé and the Romantic disorder of Rimbaud, and subverts both poetic and narrative expectations in favor of dream logic, allusion, transformed autobiography and nonsensical parody. At once mystical and burlesque, the prose poems of Dice Cup are consciously constructed, yet as unstable and unfixed as both Jacob’s personality and our own. Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a French poet, painter, writer and critic. A key figure of bohemian Montmartre and the Cubist era, he rubbed shoulders with Apollinaire and Modigliani and was a lifelong friend to Picasso, Gris and Cocteau. Jacob converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1915. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, he died in a deportation camp of pneumonia. Rosanna Warren's critically acclaimed biography of Jacob was published in 2020.
£16.95
Vintage Publishing War and Turpentine
WINNER OF THE VONDEL PRIZE 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York TimesShortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain’s heaven; the iron foundry an inferno.During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents' bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.
£9.99
University of California Press Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis
This beautifully illustrated catalogue accompanies the first major museum retrospective of the painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979). Lewis was the sole African American artist of his generation who became committed to issues of abstraction at the start of his career and continued to explore them over its entire trajectory. His art derived inspiration from music (jazz and classical) and nature (seasonal change, plant forms, the sea). Also central to his work were the dramatic confrontations of the civil rights movement, in which he was an active participant among the New York art scene. Bridging the Harlem Renaissance, Abstract Expressionism, and beyond, Lewis is a crucial figure in American abstraction whose reinsertion into the discourse further opens the field for recognition of the contributions of artists of color. Bringing much-needed attention to Lewis's output and significance in the history of American art, Procession is a milestone in Lewis scholarship and a vital resource for future study of the artist and abstraction in his period. Published in association with Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Exhibition dates: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia: November 13, 2015-April 3, 2016 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth: June 4-August 21, 2016 Chicago Cultural Center: September 17, 2016-January 8, 2017
£41.40
Ebury Publishing Things You Can Do: How to Fight Climate Change and Reduce Waste
What if we could help to save our planet through small habit changes in our homes? Learn what you can do right now to live a greener life your carbon footprint with this inspiring, accessible, stunningly illustrated book based on Eduardo Garcia's popular New York Times column.Award-winning climate journalist Eduardo Garcia offers a deeply researched and user-friendly guide to the things we can do every day to fight climate change. Based on his popular New York Times column "One Thing You Can Do," this fully illustrated book proposes simple solutions for an overwhelming problem. No lectures here - just accessible and inspiring ideas to slash emissions and waste in our daily lives, with over 350 explanatory illustrations by talented painter Sara Boccaccini Meadows.In each chapter, Garcia digs into the issue, explaining how everyday choices lead to carbon emissions, then delivers a wealth of 'Things You Can Do' to make a positive impact, such as:- Eat a climate-friendly diet - Reduce food waste- Save energy at home- Adopt zero-waste practicesPrinted on environmentally-friendly paper and delivering a decisive hit of knowledge with every turn of the page, Things You Can Do is the book for people who want to know more - and do more - to save the planet.
£16.99
Aarhus University Press Faaborg Museum and the Artists' Colony
Behind rolling hills, overlooking the fjord and the islands of Southern Funen, you will find Faaborg Museum. With its boldly coloured walls and decorative tile floors made from local clay, the building has quite literally sprung from Funen soil in a symbiosis of local nature and culture. Inside, visitors will find art by the ‘Funen Painters’, created during the period 1880 to 1928 when Faaborg was home to one of Denmark’s pre-eminent artists’ colonies. With their paintings of rural Funen, farmworkers and domestic scenes, the artists Peter Hansen, Fritz and Anna Syberg, Jens Birkholm and Johannes Larsen introduced new subject matter and new methods of painting in Danish art.Faaborg Museum was founded in 1910 by Mads Rasmussen, art patron and manufacturer of tinned goods and preserves. The museum was intended as a celebration of the art created in and around Faaborg. Together with the artists, he commissioned the architect Carl Petersen to create a building to house the museum’s collection – a building that is now acclaimed as a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture and embodies a rare union of art, architecture and design.Faaborg Museum and the Artists’ Colony presents the history of Faaborg Museum, its architecture, collection and artists to international audiences for the first time. Lavishly illustrated, the book features architectural photographs and plans as well as dozens of reproductions of the museum’s art.
£48.51
Thames & Hudson Ltd Turner
Few British artists have ever achieved such a wide range of style in oil painting, watercolour, drawing and engraving as J. M. W. Turner. He had a precocious gift that was developed over a lifetime of experiment and innovation. This classic book in the World of Art series traces the artist’s career – from youthful pictureseque views and watercolours of ‘Gothic’ ruins to the romantic landscape and historical compositions of his maturity, and the astonishing art of his later years. In these late paintings Turner’s tragic sense of life is stated most profoundly and the work was unintelligible to his contemporaries – but his reputation as the greatest British painter now rests on our understanding of these as pioneering explorations of abstraction, prefiguring the art of the 20th century. Graham Reynolds weaves together the artist’s biography with sensitive criticism of his work, through all phases of his career, in this classic work – first published in 1969 – that has long served as an outstanding introduction to Turner’s life and art. It has now been revised and updated by the curator of the Turner Bequest at Tate, David Blayney Brown, to reflect recent discoveries and interpretations, and the illustrations are in full colour for the first time. It will serve as the best available study of this perennially popular artist for a new generation of readers.
£14.95
Apollo Publishers The da Vinci Legacy: How an Elusive 16th-Century Artist Became a Global Pop Icon
For the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death comes an immersive journey through five centuries of history to define the Leonardo mystique and uncover how the elusive Renaissance artist became a global pop icon.Virtually everyone would agree that Leonardo da Vinci was the most important artist of the High Renaissance. It was Leonardo who singlehandedly created the defining features of Western art: a realism based on subtle shading; depth using atmospheric effects; and dramatic contrasts between light and dark.But how did Leonardo, a painter of very few works who died in obscurity in France, become the internationally renowned icon he is today, with the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper the most visited artworks in the world, attracting nearly a billion visitors each year, and Salvator Mundi selling as the most expensive artwork of all time, for nearly half a billion dollars?This extraordinary volume, lavishly illustrated with 130 color images, is the first book to unravel these mysteries by diving deep into the art, literature, science, and politics of Europe from the Renaissance through today. It gives illuminating context to both Leonardo and his accomplishments; explores why Leonardo’s fame vastly overshadowed that of his contemporaries and disciples; and ultimately reveals why despite finishing very few works, his celebrity has survived, even thrived, through five centuries of history.
£20.74
Princeton University Press Knowledge Lost: A New View of Early Modern Intellectual History
A compelling alternative account of the history of knowledge from the Renaissance to the EnlightenmentUntil now the history of knowledge has largely been about formal and documented accumulation, concentrating on systems, collections, academies, and institutions. The central narrative has been one of advancement, refinement, and expansion. Martin Mulsow tells a different story. Knowledge can be lost: manuscripts are burned, oral learning dies with its bearers, new ideas are suppressed by censors. Knowledge Lost is a history of efforts, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, to counter such loss. It describes how critics of ruling political and religious regimes developed tactics to preserve their views; how they buried their ideas in footnotes and allusions; how they circulated their tracts and treatises in handwritten copies; and how they commissioned younger scholars to spread their writings after death.Filled with exciting stories, Knowledge Lost follows the trail of precarious knowledge through a series of richly detailed episodes. It deals not with the major themes of metaphysics and epistemology, but rather with interpretations of the Bible, Orientalism, and such marginal zones as magic. And it focuses not on the usual major thinkers, but rather on forgotten or half-forgotten members of the “knowledge underclass,” such as Pietro della Vecchia, a libertine painter and intellectual; Charles-César Baudelot, an antiquarian and numismatist; and Johann Christoph Wolf, a pastor, Hebrew scholar, and witness to the persecution of heretics.Offering a fascinating new approach to the intellectual history of early modern Europe, Knowledge Lost is also an ambitious attempt to rethink the very concept of knowledge.
£31.50
Princeton University Press Futura-isms
A collection of fascinating quotations from the legendary artist and graffiti pioneerFutura is a living legend—a world-renowned painter, designer, and photographer who was a pioneer of graffiti art and New York City’s “subway school.” His radical abstract work in the street and on canvas established him as a central figure in an important art movement that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones, and Dondi White. Futura-isms is a collection of essential quotations from this fascinating artist. Gathered from four decades of interviews and panel discussions, this memorable selection illuminates Futura’s thoughts on legal and illegal art, his influences, fellow artists, and the past, present, and future. He also offers colorful memories of his adventurous life—growing up in New York City, serving in the Navy, touring with The Clash—and reflects on how his experiences have shaped his art.Select quotations from the book: “Graffiti was a way for me to exist. I wanted the world to know my name. I wanted to be somebody.” “The essence of what graffiti is . . . is creating this identity and taking it to the public.” “My whole life, I think, I’ve been a nomad.” “I was always at home in the subway system.” “People say, ‘Let’s play within the rules.’ I say, ‘No—let’s break the rules a little bit.’”
£12.99
DK The Met Georgia O'Keeffe: She saw the world in a flower
See the world through Georgia O'Keeffe's eyes and be inspired to produce your own masterpieces.Have you ever wondered exactly what your favorite artists were looking at to make them draw, sculpt, or paint the way they did? In this charming illustrated series of books to keep and collect, created in full collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see what they saw, and be inspired to create your own artworks, too. In What the Artist Saw: Georgia O'Keeffe, meet famous American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Step into her life and learn what led her to look closely at nature and paint her iconic paintings of flowers and bones. See the vast New Mexico landscapes that inspired her work. Have a go at producing your own close-up still-life artworks! Follow the artists' stories and find intriguing facts about their environments and key masterpieces. Then see what you can see and make your own art. Take a closer look at landscapes, or even yourself, with Vincent van Gogh. Try crafting a story in fabric like Faith Ringgold, or carve a woodblock print at home with Hokusai. Every book in this series is one to treasure and keep - perfect for budding young artists to explore exhibitions with, then continue their own artistic journeys. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
£14.04