Search results for ""Author Paul Greenhalgh""

Published to accompany a major new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, this book examines the spectacular and controversial vision of art practice that raged across the Western world from the end of the 19th century: Art Nouveau.The role of nature is a key focus of the exhibition. The common theme of translating plants into patterns will be explored as a defining feature of the modern style. Art and objects will represent Art Nouveau from different countries, where it appeared characterised as flowing, tensile line, and dramatic movement, or by organic imagery combined with an informal geometry.Artists and designers include René Lalique, Edgar Degas, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris; Alphonse Mucha and Gabriel Dante Rossetti.

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"Full of surprises [and] evocative." The Spectator "Passionately written." Apollo "An extraordinary accomplishment." Edmund de Waal "Monumental." Times Literary Supplement "An epic reshaping of ceramic art." Crafts "An important book." The Arts Society Magazine In his major new history, Paul Greenhalgh tells the story of ceramics as a story of human civilisation, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day. As a core craft technology, pottery has underpinned domesticity, business, religion, recreation, architecture, and art for millennia. Indeed, the history of ceramics parallels the development of human society. This fascinating and very human history traces the story of ceramic art and industry from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans and the medieval world; Islamic ceramic cultures and their influence on the Italian Renaissance; Chinese and European porcelain production; modernity and Art Nouveau; the rise of the studio potter, Art Deco, International Style and Mid-Century Modern, and finally, the contemporary explosion of ceramic making and the postmodern potter. Interwoven in this journey through time and place is the story of the pots themselves, the culture of the ceramics, and their character and meaning. Ceramics have had a presence in virtually every country and historical period, and have worked as a commodity servicing every social class. They are omnipresent: a ubiquitous art. Ceramic culture is a clear, unique, definable thing, and has an internal logic that holds it together through millennia. Hence ceramics is the most peculiar and extraordinary of all the arts. At once cheap, expensive, elite, plebeian, high-tech, low-tech, exotic, eccentric, comic, tragic, spiritual, and secular, it has revealed itself to be as fluid as the mud it is made from. Ceramics are the very stuff of how civilized life was, and is, led. This then is the story of human society's most surprising core causes and effects.

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Complementary Contrasts: The Glass and Steel Sculptures of Albert Paley highlights the significance of glass in the work of the celebrated sculptor Albert Paley. Though best known for his large-scale metal sculptures, Paley has incorporated glass in many works for over a decade. After beginning his career as a jewelry maker, Paley soon transitioned to furniture and freestanding sculpture. In the 1970s, Paley delved into large, site-specific works that blurred the line between sculpture and architecture. Despite disparity in size, Paley’s collective artworks display a synergy of forms and philosophy, favoring natural curves and lines that defy their rigid materials. In 1999 Paley was invited to Pilchuck Glass School to collaborate with artist Dante Marioni. His experience utilizing fire to manipulate metal translated naturally into his glass design and allowed him to embrace the new material with ease. Since this initial introduction, Paley has collaborated with a number of glass artists and created over a hundred sculptures incorporating glass. The first book to focus on Paley’s glass and steel sculpture, Complementary Contrasts includes approximately forty new sculptures created at the Museum of Glass in collaboration with Seattle-based glass sculptor Martin Blank. These sculptures will be supported by earlier works from Paley’s personal collection. Thirty works on paper that illuminate Paley’s process of incorporating glass in his sculpture are also illustrated. Collectively, the objects in this publication demonstrate a culmination of Paley’s talents as a sculptor.

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This book reveals that Pablo Picasso wasn't simply a figurehead of the Modern Age. He grew up in the 19th century: the extraordinary mixture of values that was fin de siècle Europe penetrated deep into his personality, remaining with him through his life. While he was the quintessential Modern in so many ways, he was also a Victorian, and this duality explains the complexity of his genius. He was simultaneously looking forwards and backwards, and feeding off the efforts of others, before developing his own idioms for depicting the contemporary world.The young artist recognised that society was increasingly in a process of transformation, not in a transitory or temporary way, but permanently, under the inexorable pressures of modernisation. He realised that the emergence of Modern art through the last quarter of the century was a product of this transformation. Throughout his life, Picasso would feel the tension between modernity and the histories it replaced. He would also struggle with the role of the individual, and subjectivity, in this new environment.Each chapter shows how the young artist embraced successive styles at large in the art world of his time. By the age of 14 well capable of drawing in a highly competent Beaux Arts mode, he drew in a Classicist manner of redolent of Ingres, or early Degas. He then moved through various forms of Impressionism, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism, before arriving in his early twenties at his first wholly individual style, the Blue period, albeit that all these earlier sources were still evident. The Rose period followed, after which the artist began a truly seminal period of experimentation which culminated in the development of Cubism. By 1910, Cubism had become a fully mature vision, practiced by a wide range of artists. It was to provide the springboard for much Modern art across the disciplines, and it positioned Picasso as perhaps the single most important artist of the new century.

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