Search results for ""author painters"
Pennsylvania State University Press A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France
Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth.While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value.Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.
£75.56
Five Continents Editions Carlos Luna
Carlos Luna, one of the foremost contemporary Cuban award-winning painters is part of a generation of Cuban artists who embrace their strong heritage and traditions but have reinvented themselves along the way. Thrumming with the spirit of Afro-Cuban tradition, Luna's works range from jacquard tapestries, works on metal sheets, and Talavera ceramic plates to mixed media on wood and largescale oil paintings. This monograph illustrates Luna's blend of influences from living and working in Cuba until 1991, then in Mexico for thirteen years, and now in Miami, since 2002. This book, lavishly illustrated, will take the reader through the artist's amazing world of bright colours and will show, by a selection of plates and details, some unpublished works as well as his renowned masterpieces. Carlos makes visible the invisible, conveying messages and lessons from his past to offer to the present and future. His work is not on the surface, it is filled with subtle embedded messages. One must know the issues to decode. Often these messages are hidden in plain sight, lessons to be learned through reflection. His towering centerpiece, El Gran Mambo, a massive six-panel painting, which stood on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in 2008, serves as a focal point for 2015's Green Machine: The Art of Carlos Luna at The Frost Art Museum in Carlos's adopted home of Miami. Text in English and French.
£45.00
Skyhorse Publishing The Guardian of Mercy: How an Extraordinary Painting by Caravaggio Changed an Ordinary Life Today
A Profound New Look at the Italian Master and His Lasting Legacy Now celebrated as one of the great painters of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio fled Rome in 1606 to escape retribution for killing a man in a brawl. Three years later he was in Naples, where he painted The Seven Acts of Mercy. A year later he died at the age of thirty-eight under mysterious circumstances. Exploring Caravaggio's singular masterwork, in The Guardian of Mercy Terence Ward offers an incredible narrative journey into the heart of his artistry and his metamorphosis from fugitive to visionary.Ward's guide in this journey is a contemporary artist whose own life was transformed by the painting, a simple man named Angelo who shows him where it still hangs in a small church in Naples and whose story helps him see its many layers. As Ward unfolds the structure of the painting, he explains each of the seven mercies and its influence on Caravaggio's troubled existence. Caravaggio encountered the whole range of Naples's vertical social layers, from the lowest ranks of poverty to lofty gilded aristocratic circles, and Ward reveals the old city behind today's metropolis. Fusing elements of history, biography, memoir, travelogue, and journalism, his narrative maps the movement from estrangement to grace, as we witness Caravaggio's bruised life was gradually redeemed by art.
£14.34
Taschen GmbH El Greco
To his contemporaries in late 16th-century Venice, El Greco (1541–1614) was a contrary fellow, an innate artist blessed with extraordinary talent, but stubborn in the pursuit of his own path. Throughout his career, as he progressed from Crete to Venice, to Rome and ultimately Toledo, Spain, “The Greek” stood apart from his peers, merging different Western art traditions to create a unique pictorial language. El Greco’s single-minded style rejected naturalism and rejected accessibility. Works such as The Disrobing of Christ (1577–79), The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–88), and The Vision of St John (1608–14) reveal elongated, twisted figures; unreal colors; and an experimental rendering of space — all resistant to easy viewing and intent, instead, on an art of epic grandeur and intellectual beauty. Frequently regarded with suspicion and criticism during his lifetime, El Greco was revived by a troop of ardent modern admirers, including Pablo Picasso, Roger Fry, and Der Blaue Reiter pioneer Franz Marc. Today, the artist belongs to the privileged group of great old master painters, as much an anomaly of his age, as a reference point across the centuries. This essential introduction from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 explores the influences and the ingredients of El Greco’s radical and singular vision, from the symbolic world of Byzantine icons and the humanistic values of the Renaissance to the nascent beginnings of conceptual practice.
£17.88
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.
£153.00
Peeters Publishers Rembrandt and the Divine
Because Dutch seventeenth-century painting is primarily known for its naturalism, representing the divine posed particular problems for painters of religious stories, especially Rembrandt. Indeed, if seeing is believing, then the visible presence of angels – and finally the presence on earth of Christ as the divine Incarnation in the flesh – could confirm to the senses the presence of divine providence in the world. Angels also evoke a sense of wonder in all who behold them, those who are blessed to receive their visitation from a watchful, if invisible God. Like John Calvin, Rembrandt carefully read his Bible. Thus his angels, represented traditionally as winged creatures, actively participate in important religious events, particularly in Old Testament scenes, beginning with Abraham. In later biblical history, however, angelic appearances diminish; both God – and angels as His agents – intervene less directly to interact with humankind. In Rembrandt’s art, angels are active and visible, but sometimes they reveal their identity just as they disappear, flying away. Other Rembrandt religious images convey divine presence only through light rays from above. With the New Testament advent of Christ, however, angelic attendants chiefly magnify the divine nature of Jesus in the world. Following the theology of John Calvin that dominated Dutch spirituality, Rembrandt allows his pious viewers to behold those very angels or, like Mary Magdalene and the apostles, even to view the divine nature of the risen Christ.
£55.86
Koc University Press Youssouf Bey – The Charged Portraits of Fin–de–Siécle Pera
Yusuf Franko Kusa Bey (1856–1933), a high-ranking bureaucrat in fin-de-siècle Ottoman imperial administration, was also a talented caricaturist. Because of his duties in the Ottoman Foreign Ministry, and spending most of his life in Istanbul, he was both a member and an observer of high-society social circles in Pera [Beyoglu]. Ambassadors, ministers, diplomats, famous opera singers, painters, Pashas and Efendis, Madames and Monsieurs, were part of this social milieu, and most of them became eternally recorded through the ‘types and charges’ in Yusuf Franko’s caricature album. Including images of himself, he charged his subject materials, the people in his social network, with their particular qualities and transformed their portraits into witty caricatures that reflected contemporary scenes of social life and political debates in Pera. This book, which accompanies the facsimile of Yusuf Franko’s own caricature album, Youssouf, consists of three articles and an annotated appendix. While the articles analyze the majority of his caricatures from diverse perspectives (his family history and biography, the history of contemporary European caricature art and politics, and the social and spatial context in which he drew his caricatures), the appendix gives brief information about each caricature plate following the exact order in the facsimile. These extraordinary caricatures are published for the first time in their entirety since they were discovered in an antique rug dealer’s shop in Istanbul in 1957.
£48.00
Titan Books Ltd Dark Things I Adore
A searing psychological thriller of trauma, dark academia, complicity, and revenge, revealing the horrors that happen in the dark, the girls who become cautionary tales, and the guilty who go unpunished. Until now. "A smart, dark, feminist revenge thriller" pHEAT MAGAZINE Barnes & Noble Thriller of the month Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay. 1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed. 2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web. Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.
£8.99
Yale University Press On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age
A sweeping exploration of the shaping role of animal skins in written culture and human imagination over three millennia “Richly detailed and illustrated. . . . An engaging exploration of book history.”—Kirkus Reviews For centuries, premodern societies recorded and preserved much of their written cultures on parchment: the rendered skins of sheep, cows, goats, camels, deer, gazelles, and other creatures. These remains make up a significant portion of the era’s surviving historical record. In a study spanning three millennia and twenty languages, Bruce Holsinger explores this animal archive as it shaped the inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world, from the leather rolls of ancient Egypt to the Acts of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Holsinger discusses the making of parchment past and present, the nature of the medium as a biomolecular record of faunal life and environmental history, the knotty question of “uterine vellum,” and the imaginative role of parchment in the works of St. Augustine, William Shakespeare, and a range of Jewish rabbinic writers of the medieval era. Closely informed by the handicraft of contemporary makers, painters, and sculptors, the book draws on a vast array of sources—codices and scrolls, documents and ephemera, works of craft and art—that speak to the vitality of parchment across epochs and continents. At the center of On Parchment is the vexed relationship of human beings to the myriad slaughtered beasts whose remains make up this vast record: a relationship of dominion and compassion, of brutality and empathy.
£30.00
University of California Press California Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820–1930
Following the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848), lands that had for centuries belonged to New Spain, and later to Mexico, were transformed into the thirty-first state in the United States. This process was facilitated by visual artists, who forged distinct pictorial motifs and symbols to establish the state's new identity. This collective cultural inheritance of the Spanish and Mexican periods forms a central current of California history but has been only sparingly studied by cultural and art historians. California Mexicana focuses for the first time on the range and vitality of artistic traditions growing out of the unique amalgam of Mexican and American culture that evolved in Southern California from 1820 through 1930. A study of these early regional manifestations provides the essential matrix out of which emerge later art and cultural issues. Featuring painters, printmakers, photographers, and mapmakers from both sides of the border, this collection demonstrates how they made the Mexican presence visible in their art. This beautifully illustrated catalogue addresses two key areas of inquiry: how Mexico became California, and how the visual arts reflected the shifting identity that grew out of that transformation. Published in association with the Laguna Art Museum, and as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Exhibition dates: Laguna Art Museum: October 15, 2017-January 14, 2018
£58.39
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
Scarecrow Press Abstract Artists: Signatures and Monograms, An International Directory
John Castagno's Artists' Signatures and Monograms have become the standard reference source for galleries, museums, libraries, and collectors around the world. Whether used to identify, authenticate, or verify signatures and works of both well-known and little-known artists, Castagno's work has no equal. In this new volume, Castagno has collected the signatures and monograms of artists who have spent all or a part of their careers in abstract art—painters, printmakers, sculptors, and photographers worldwide. This book features approximately 2,300 artists with more than 3,900 signature examples of how they sign their works. In addition to the standard signature entries, the book contains sections for monograms and initials, common surname signatures, alternative surname signatures, symbols, and Cyrillic signatures. This book also lists an additional 1,500 artists whose entry bears no signature. All 3,800 artists are listed with the most updated information on nationality, birth, and/or death dates. The entries direct the researcher to many biographical and bibliographical sources not found on web site searches, and many of the resources offer additional references. Several individual listings provide gallery referrals and catalog auction dates, which can be used to buy or sell a particular artist's work. The use of Abstract Artists Signatures and Monograms: An International Directory provides the researcher a reference tool not duplicated elsewhere—one that will save many hours of research.
£430.00
University of Toronto Press Golden Fruit: A Cultural History of Oranges in Italy
Through a close reading of key texts, including poetic and spiritual writings, fairy tales, and a botanical treatise, Golden Fruit examines the role of oranges in Italian culture from their introduction during the medieval period through to the present day. Featuring a beautiful full-colour spread, Cristina Mazzoni’s book brings together artistic depictions, literary analysis, historical context, and popular culture to investigate the changing representations of the orange over time and across the Italian peninsula. Oranges were introduced to Italy in the 1200s, many centuries after beloved Mediterranean fruits such as grapes, figs, and pomegranates—all well-known since Antiquity. Not burdened with age-old meanings and symbolism, then, oranges in early modern times provided a malleable image for artists, writers, and scientists alike. Thus, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, oranges appear in visual and verbal representations as an effective aid in physical and spiritual health, as symbols of romantic and of divine love, and as signs of geographic allegiance to one’s citrus-rich land. Baroque poets, botanists, and painters regularly compared oranges to women for their shared hybrid nature, whereas later folklore presented this dual character of oranges from an economic standpoint, as both precious and dangerous. The violence intrinsic to oranges in these Sicilian texts from the eighteen and nineteen hundreds returns in the controversial representations of the orange harvest in early twenty-first century Italy.
£45.00
The University of Michigan Press From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry
Jane Miller loves poetry. In these provocative and deeply insightful essays, she unpacks the work of giants like Adrienne Rich, Paul Celan, Marina Tsevetaeya, Osip Mandelstam, and Garcia Lorca alongside painters such as Caravaggio and Paul Klee, as well as ancient Chinese music and techniques of the contemporary poem. Miller explores the use of the question mark in the history of poetry and its function as a revelation of poetic voice. She considers the positive and negative aspects of surrealism on the contemporary poem, its anti-feminist origins in France, its contemporary usage, and the benefits of Super-Real images. Miller examines how identity politics might affect the imagination. She describes ancient Chinese musical instruments to show how their sounds resonate off/in American poems and on the aural integrity of the lyric poem. She interrogates the political implications of language and the degeneration and regeneration of words. Finally, in an essay about what she dares not say about poetry, she comes out against forms of surrealism, narrative, jargon, rhetoric, irony, and appropriation. This masterful work can be read as advice to a young writer, but it also invites us into the mind of a writer who has developed her craft through the course of a lifetime of writing, reading, and exploring the world, showing not only the ideas that influenced her—feminist, lesbian, and international works—but also how Miller has, in turn, influenced ideas.
£21.30
Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd Winifred Knights 1899-1947
Winifred Knights (1899-1947) is one of the outstanding, but until recently neglected, British women painters of the first half of the 20th century. Copiously illustrated in colour throughout, this book provides the first full account of her life and work, examining Knights' art in the context of interwar Modernism and assessing her contribution to the revival in this period of both Decorative Painting and religious imagery.Author Sacha Llewellyn traces the artist's career from her years at the Slade School of Art and her First World War evacuation to rural Worcestershire through to the time she spent at the British School at Rome in the early 1920s and the many commissions she completed between 1926 and 1939. Presenting the artist as the central protagonist, and with models selected from her inner circle, Knights' paintings were deeply autobiographical. She consistently re-wrote fairy-tale and legend, Biblical narrative and Pagan mythology to explore women's relationship to war, the natural world, working communities, marriage, motherhood and death. Drawing on previously unpublished documentary material, including letters, diaries, sketchbooks and photographs, Sacha Llewellyn makes a strong case for recognising Knights as one of the most talented artists of her generation. The book reproduces all of Knights' major works, including her masterpiece, The Deluge, which is among the most remarked upon works at Tate Britain, having been on almost permanent display there since 1995.
£50.00
Simon & Schuster Ltd The French Mind: 400 Years of Romance, Revolution and Renewal
‘Majestic, ambitious’ Literary Review ____________________________________ We are endlessly fascinated by the French. We are fascinated by their way of life, their creativity and sophistication, and even their insistence that they are exceptional. But how did France become the country it is today, and what really sets it apart? Historian Peter Watson sets out to answer these questions in this dazzling history of France, taking us from the seventeenth century to the present day through the nation’s most influential thinkers. He opens the doors to the Renaissance salons that brought together poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells the forgotten stories of the extraordinary women who ran these institutions, fostering a culture of stylish intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in the world. It’s a story that takes us into Bohemian cafés and cabarets, into chic Parisian high culture via French philosophies of food, fashion and sex, and through two explosive revolutions.The French Mind is a history propelled by the writers, revolutionaries and painters who loved, inspired and rivalled one another over four hundred years. It documents the shaping of a nation whose global influence, in art, culture and politics, cannot be overstated. __________________________________________ ‘An encyclopaedic celebration of French intellectuals refusing to give up on universal principles, while remaining slim, bringing up well-behaved children and falling in love at every opportunity’ The Times 'An engaging movement through time towards France's recent reckonings with extremism, exceptionalism and empire' TLS
£11.69
Quercus Publishing The Italian Teacher: The Costa Award Shortlisted Novel
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD***'Wickedly funny, deeply touching . . . I confess this was the first of Rachman's novels I'd read but I was so swept away by it that I raced out to buy the other three' PATRICK GALE'Relentlessly entertaining' Daily MailRome, 1955The artists are gathering together for a photograph. In one of Rome's historic villas, a party glitters with socialites and patrons. Bear Bavinsky, creator of vast, masculine, meaty canvases, is their god. He is at the centre of the picture. His wife, Natalie, edges out of the shot.From the side of the room watches little Pinch - their son. At five years old he loves Bear almost as much as he fears him. After Bear abandons their family, Pinch will still worship him, while Natalie faces her own wars with the art world. Trying to live up to his father's name - one of the twentieth century's fiercest and most controversial painters - Pinch never quite succeeds. Yet by the end of a career of twists and compromises, he enacts an unexpected rebellion that will leave forever his mark upon the Bear Bavinsky legacy.What makes an artist? In The Italian Teacher, Tom Rachman displays a nuanced understanding of art and its demons. Moreover, in Pinch he achieves a portrait of vulnerability and frustrated talent that - with his signature humour and humanity - challenges the very idea of greatness.
£10.99
Ebury Publishing Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'Uproarious memoir packed with anecdotes about the Harry Potter films' Daily Mail'Very funny and fascinating' Mail on Sunday'Brave and brilliant' Cosmopolitan'Highly readable' The TimesThey called for a break, and Gambon magicked up a cigarette from out of his beard. He and I were often to be found outside the stage that housed the Astronomy Tower, having 'a breath of fresh air' as we referred to it. There would be painters and plasterers and chippies and sparks, and among them all would be me and Dumbledore having a crafty cigarette.From Borrower to wizard, Tom Felton's childhood was anything but ordinary. His early rise to fame saw him catapulted into the limelight aged just twelve when he landed the iconic role of Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films.Speaking with candour and his own trademark humour, Tom shares his experience of growing up on screen and as part of the wizarding world for the very first time. He tells all about his big break, what filming was really like and the lasting friendships he made during ten years with the franchise, as well as the highs and lows of fame and the reality of navigating adult life after filming finished.Prepare to meet a real-life wizard.The instant New York Times bestseller, November 2022Sunday Times bestseller, December 2022
£12.99
Princeton University Press Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting
Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frederic Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.
£49.50
Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc Portfolio: Beginning Acrylic: Tips and techniques for learning to paint in acrylic: Volume 1
With comprehensive instruction and artist tips and tricks, Beginning Acrylic is the perfect resource for aspiring painters just getting started in this colorful medium.Beginning Acrylic teaches aspiring artists everything they need to know to get started painting in acrylic. From showing how to choose the right paper, brushes, and paints to basic painting tips and techniques, this beginner’s guide to acrylic painting is bursting with valuable exercises and advice to help artists master this colorful and approachable medium. This book guides beginners through an exploration of acrylic painting with easy-to-understand concepts and step-by-step methods, including how to paint a variety of skies, trees, mountains, roads, clouds, and waterscapes from start to finish. Building on these basic, fundamental techniques, novice artists can practice their craft with step-by-step painting projects that are broken down and explained with large, detailed images and examples. From the first brushstroke to the finishing touch, let Beginning Acrylic guide you as you begin your artistic journey in acrylic painting. The Portfolio series covers essential art techniques, core concepts, and media with an approach and format that’s perfect for aspiring, beginning, and intermediate artists.Also available from the series:Beginning Drawing, Beginning Watercolor, Beginning Pastel, Beginning Colored Pencil, Beginning Color Mixing, Expressive Painting, Beginning Color Mixing, Beginning Pen & Ink, and Beginning Composition.
£12.99
Princeton University Press Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman
Northern Arts is a magnificent and provocative exploration of Scandinavian literature and art. With intellectual power and deep emotional insights, writer and critic Arnold Weinstein guides us through the most startling works created by the writers and artists of Scandinavia over the past two centuries. Here readers will gain new perspectives on canonical giants such as Soren Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Knut Hamsun, and Ingmar Bergman. Readers will also encounter popular favorites like children's writer Astrid Lindgren, and come to know the work of lesser-known masters such as the novelist Tarjei Vesaas and the painters Ernst Josephson and Lena Cronqvist. Weinstein uses the concept of "breakthrough"--boundary smashing, restlessness, and the exploding of traditional forms and values--as a thematic lens through which to expose the roiling energies and violence that course through Scandinavian literature and art. Defying preconceptions of Scandinavian culture as depressive or brooding, Weinstein invites us to imagine anew this transformative and innovative tradition of art that continually challenges ideas about the sacred and the profane, family and marriage, children, patriarchy, and personal identity. Through these works he brings us face-to-face with our most hidden selves and urges, enriching our understanding of the emotions and forces that govern our lives. Northern Arts is the essential introduction to Scandinavian literature and art, one that illuminates the fierce beauty and breathtaking reach of these incomparable works.
£28.80
Anness Publishing Watercolour, Oil and Drawing
This title helps you in mastering the art of drawing and painting with step-by-step projects and techniques shown in over 2450 photographs. This is a boxed set of fully illustrated practical guides to painting and drawing with watercolours, oils, acrylics, gouaches and charcoal. It includes a complete guide to artist's materials. This is a comprehensive teaching course from beginner level to advanced skills: the different strokes, washes, and how to mix the paints to create the right palette, drawing outlines, shading and tonal work, line and wash, sketching, using negative spacing, blending, frottage and sgraffito, as well as fundamental principles such as understanding perspective, composition and colour. This instructive painting course offers step-by-step projects to help you to put the basics into practice. There are projects for beginners, and others for intermediate painters, grouped by subject and by complexity. Covering the varied media of watercolours, acrylics, oils, gouache and drawing, this new box set is the perfect practical art guide whether you are a complete beginner or a more experienced artist looking for inspiration and to expand your skills. Each concisely written, beautifully illustrated book begins with a helpful introduction that explains the basics for each technique, plus some of the fundamentals of art, such as colour theory, scale and perspective. Each then offers small-scale practice exercises and 20 to 25 projects, shown step by step. Whatever your level of experience, these accessible and inspiring handbooks are packed with practical advice and tips for every new artist.
£19.99
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
£97.20
Peeters Publishers The Knife: Temporal Ruptures in Revelation and Transformation
The Greek sculptor Lysippos of Sicyon (fourth century BCE) represented Kairos carrying a razor in his left hand. According to the epigram dedicated to this statue by Posidippus of Pella (mid-third-century BCE), the Greek divinity of the opportune moment is said to move with a swiftness that is sharper than any razor’s edge. Why does Kairos carry a razor in his hand? And how does the knife relate to opportunity and temporality? This book embarks on a narrative detour to answer these questions. Stories of revelation and transformation are anatomised to discover the moments of the knife pulsating underneath the surface. The sword grasped at the right moment by the Biblical heroine Judith, Abraham’s sacrificial knife, the eucharistic knife from the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, Psyche’s razor, the surgeon’s scalpel, or the apocalyptic double-edged sword each figure as multifaceted imaginations of these kairotic moments. Under the skin of this book lives the question raised by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) in his Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (1766). Who is best suited to capture the right moment, the painter, or the poet? At the heart of it all is the disruption of time itself. The moment of the knife is the time of the wound in time. Sudden, sharp, and unexpected this moment pierces deep into the human experience, stirring the soul with a swiftness beyond imagination.
£154.30
Faber & Faber Sydney
Renowned and much-loved travel writer Jan Morris turns her eye to Sydney: 'not the best of the cities the British Empire created ... but the most hyperbolic, the youngest at heart, the shiniest.' Sydney takes us on the city's journey from penal colony to world-class metropolis, as lively and charming as the city it describes. With characteristic exuberance and sparkling prose, Jan Morris guides us through the history, people and geography of a fascinating and colourful city. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan '45, A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav, her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. 'Sydney should be flattered. A great portrait painter has chosen it for her recent subject . . . Few writers - a handful of novelists apart - have got so far under the city's skin as Morris . . . Few Sydneysiders could match her knowledge of their city's history and its anecdotes' The Times 'The writing is, at times, like surfing: sentences rise like vast waves above which she rides, never overbalancing into gush . . . Jan Morris convincingly explains modern Sydney through its history' Observer
£11.55
Officina Libraria Livre a dessiner de P. De Valenciennes
In 1778 Pierre Henri De Valenciennes, a young landscape painter from Toulouse, found himself in Rome with many other foreign artists intent on studying not only the ancient monuments and the works of the modern masters, but also to encounter Italy's light and landscape. Contrary to most of his companions, Valenciennes rarely copied ancient or modern works of art, but instead he chose to sketch views of Rome, 'a mix of antique and of modern, an assemblage of irregularity and symmetry'. The 96 pages of the sketchbook, reproduced in their actual size and accompanied by a commentary, guide us through Rome, from the river port of Ripa Grande to the basilica of St. John Lateran, from the Ponte Salario bridge to the Vatican, from Piazza Barberini to the Villa Borghese and along the banks of the river Tiber. An advocate of en plein air painting, Valenciennes' sketches use two or three tints of the same colour to trace the landscape of an ideal Rome, and to achieve this goal he did not hesitate to modify or move the surrounding architecture. Contents: Preface by Xavier Salmon, Director of the Prints and Drawings Department of the Louvre; Introduction; Travel to Italy and meeting with artists; Valenciennes' Italian Sketchbooks; Description of the organisation of Sketchbook RF 12966; Material Description; Provenance; List of Exhibitions, Bibliography. Text in French.
£40.50
Dalkey Archive Press Lines From a Canvas
Lines from a Canvas offers the public one of the best kept secrets in the world of poetry for years, the work of Jacob Miller. His poems uniquely traverse the cultural territory from Homer to the Grateful Dead, taking the reader from ancient Greece and Rome to the Holocaust to the Cold War to Vietnam to 9/11. In short, the expansive canvas of his content presents a compelling spectrum mixing classical and modern brush strokes, all while exploring experiences of love and loss, isolation and separation, as well as mortality. Consistent with his content, though perhaps of even greater importance, the crowning achievement shown in this collection is Jacob Miller’s new poetic technique, which delivers the reader to an expertly constructed and long-needed bridge between classical traditions (such as rhyme and meter, or even hidden slant rhymes or assonance connections), and imagistic free-verse. Additionally, this collection contains the poet’s free-verse libretto to the modern opera Manhattan in Charcoal, (recently released on CD). The title poem, Lines from a Canvas, offers the point of view of a canvas, not the painter, and this launches the operative conceit in this collection: each poem explores the perspective of the canvas of life and death, more than the poet himself. Each poem truly brings something new to the page.
£10.99
Yale University Press The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation
Together, Cranach's paintings and Luther's powerful oratory created a force field that transformed Germany, Europe, and ultimately the Western world This compelling book retells and revises the story of the German Renaissance and Reformation through the lives of two controversial men of the sixteenth century: the Saxon court painter Lucas Cranach (the Serpent) and the Wittenberg monk-turned-reformer Martin Luther (the Lamb). Contemporaries and friends (each was godfather to the other’s children), Cranach and Luther were very different Germans, yet their collaborative successes merged art and religion into a revolutionary force that became the Protestant Reformation. Steven Ozment, an internationally recognized historian of the Reformation era, reprises the lives and works of Cranach (1472–1553) and Luther (1483–1546) in this generously illustrated book. He contends that Cranach's new art and Luther's oratory released a barrage of criticism upon the Vatican, the force of which secured a new freedom of faith and pluralism of religion in the Western world. Between Luther's pulpit praise of the sex drive within the divine estate of marriage and Cranach's parade of strong, lithe women, a new romantic, familial consciousness was born. The "Cranach woman" and the "Lutheran household"—both products of the merged Renaissance and Reformation worlds—evoked a new organization of society and foretold a new direction for Germany.
£28.34
Vintage Publishing Self-Portrait
I’m not a portrait painter. If I’m anything, I have always been an autobiographer.Self-Portrait reveals a life truly lived through art. In this short, intimate memoir, Celia Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves. From her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio, she meticulously assembles the surprising, beautiful, haunting scenes of a life. Paul brings to her prose the same qualities that she brings to her art: a brutal honesty, a delicate but powerful intensity, and an acute eye for visual detail.At its heart, this is a book about a young woman becoming an artist, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. As she moves out of Freud’s shadow, and navigates a path to artistic freedom, Paul’s power and identity as an artist emerge from the page.Self-Portrait is a uniquely arresting, poignant book, and a work of art and literature by a singular talent. 'Fascinating… Painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what.’ Olivia Laing, New Statesman**Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019**
£22.50
Watson-Guptill Publications Pop Manga Drawing: 30 Step-by-Step Lessons for Pencil Drawing in the Pop Surrealism Style
An easy-to-follow, step-by-step manga drawing instruction book from fan favourite manga artist and painter Camilla d'Errico, featuring 30 lessons on illustrating cute, cool and quirky characters in the Pop Surrealist style with pencils. With appearances at Comic Cons and her paintings displayed in art galleries around the world, Camilla d'Errico has established herself as a go-to resource for manga-influenced art. Following in the footsteps of her past art-instruction books 'Pop Manga' and 'Pop Painting', 'Pop Manga Drawing' provides the most direct and accessible lessons yet for rendering characters in her signature Pop Surrealist style. Written in the fun and encouraging voice that fans have come to expect, this book takes you step-by-step through lessons on drawing with graphite and mechanical pencils, along with insights on enhancing pieces with other mediums (including coloured pencils and pastels). It also provides tips and expert advice on drawing specific elements, including hands, hair and backgrounds, that can take your manga art to the next level. 'Pop Manga Drawing' grants one-of-a-kind access to the basic building blocks of artistic expression, giving you the tools you need to create your own pop manga masterpieces.
£13.49
Dorling Kindersley Ltd The Met Frida Kahlo: She Painted Her World in Self-Portraits
See the world through Frida Kahlo'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 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: Frida Kahlo, meet the famous Mexican painter. Learn all about how she experimented with different ways of painting herself, and how she channelled her experiences into her art. Have a go at producing your own self portrait!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
DK The Met Edgar Degas: He Saw the World in Moving Moments
See how iconic artists like Edgar Degas were influenced by their environments in this beautiful series produced in collaboration with The Met.See the world through Edgar Degas’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: Edgar Degas, meet the famous French painter and sculptor. Learn all about how he broke new ground and captured the energy and elegance of skilled ballet dancers.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.
£14.99
Prestel Francis Bacon Graphic Novel
Told for the first time in graphic novel form, the story of Francis Bacon’s life is as complex, colorful, and highly charged as his paintings. Drawn in shades of mauve, red, yellow, and blue that distinguished his palette, these illustrations weave together a troubling but compassionate narrative, one that draws on the tragic events of Bacon’s childhood and youth, as well as reflecting the profoundly passionate yearnings of the artist he became. Separated into thematic and chronological sections the novel highlights the prevailing influences of Bacon’s life and times: his early autodidacticism and estrangement from his family; his struggles to make his way as a surrealist painter and his destruction of his early work. It traces his gradual success in postwar Europe, his powerful and often violent romantic relationships, his foray into portraiture, and his never-ending search for subject matter and meaning in his work. Alternating between full-page illustrations and smaller, captioned works, Portolano imagines not only the known details of Bacon’s biography, but also his inner life—the dreams, fears, and obsessions that were equally formidable underpinnings of his oeuvre. Woven together with historical facts and figures, this graphic novel reconstructs a life as only a cartoonist could—image led, thoughtfully composed, and deeply evocative of its subject matter.
£17.09
DK The Met Vincent van Gogh: He saw the world in vibrant colors
See the world through Vincent van Gogh'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, 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
£12.53
Rowman & Littlefield The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London, 1817
On December 28, 1817, the eccentric painter B. R. Haydon gave a famous dinner party in his painting room in London. He invited, among others, three of the greatest literary lights of the age: the poets John Keats and William Wordsworth and the essayist and wit Charles Lamb. Over the course of a long winter evening of delights, the guests recited poetry, indulged in high-minded conversation, and took part in ridiculous antics, with such displays of brilliance and wit that the party came to be known as the Immortal Dinner. Penelope Hughes-Hallett celebrates this unique gathering by vividly bringing to life these illustrious diners against a backdrop of social change. Literary London society was at its extraordinarily gifted best just two years after Waterloo: the Elgin Marbles controversy still raged; Mrs. Siddons performed Lady Macbeth in her drawing room to a distinguished audience; Joseph Ritchie, a young physician and would-be poet, prepared to explore the River Niger with a copy of Keats in his pocket. The Immortal Dinner offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives and thoughts of this literary elite at a turning point in English society. It recaptures these rare spirits, using a great many of their own words from letters and diaries. With 75 black-and-white illustrations and 2 maps.
£18.88
Phaidon Press Ltd Anni & Josef Albers: Equal and Unequal
A spectacular and unprecedented visual biography of the leading pioneers and protagonists of modern art and design Josef - painter, designer, and teacher - and Anni Albers - textile artist and printmaker - are among the twentieth century's most important abstract artists, and this is the first monograph to celebrate the rich creative output and beguiling relationship of these two masters in one elegant volume. It presents their life and work as never before, from their formative years at the Bauhaus in Germany to their remarkable influence at Black Mountain College in the United States through their intensely productive period in Connecticut. Accessibly written, the book is packed with more than 750 artworks, archival images, and documents - many published here for the first time - all tracing the remarkable lives and careers of this legendary couple. Dispersed throughout area series of short essays on artists that focuses on the Alberses relationship with a number of important artists and architects of the 20th century, like Ruth Asawa, Marcel Breuer, Merce Cunningham, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Jacob Lawrence, and many more. The beautifully cloth-bound package utilizes an elegant color palette and design that speaks to the work of both artists. This comprehensive visual biography showcases the artists' rich and dynamic lives, and their infinite influence on each other, as they shared the profound conviction that art was central to human existence.
£90.00
Yale University Press Fortuny: Time, Space, Light
Uncovers the extraordinary breadth of designer Mariano Fortuny, including and beyond his fashion output, alongside the personal and political catalysts that inspired him Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871–1949) was a polymath who experimented in a variety of media including electric lighting, stage design, photography, the development of pigments, and textile and garment design. Yet his vision as a painter, persistently attuned to light and color, shaped all his artistic endeavors. Fortuny: Time, Space, Light examines Fortuny’s Venetian workspaces, clothing designs, stage lighting inventions, and paintings to find unifying themes of revivalism, memory, light, magic, and secrecy that run throughout his wide-ranging career. It features new archival discoveries, including unseen artworks and unpublished personal writings, as well as a new analysis of Fortuny’s paintings, never-before discussed in an English-language publication. In addition to providing historical context and visual analysis of his work, the book delves into the relationships between Fortuny and Proust, Wagnerian opera, and Italian fascism. It also aims to illuminate more of Fortuny’s personal motivations through new archival evidence and unpublished notes to explore how his object collection and library were used as catalysts for his innovative creations.
£35.00
Lannoo Publishers Politics as Painting
Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that's nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck's paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck's mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you're only as important as you make yourself.
£99.00
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).
£45.00
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
University of Washington Press William H. Johnson: An American Modern
"My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me."--William H. Johnson An essential figure in modern American art, William H. Johnson (1901-1970) was a virtuoso skilled in various media and techniques, who produced thousands of works over a career that spanned decades, continents, and genres. This volume considers paintings from the collection of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, that show the pivotal stages in Johnson's career as a modernist painter of post-impressionist and expressionist works reminiscent of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Soutine, and the vernacular paintings in which he articulates his specific, unforgettable voice as an artist. In this lavishly illustrated book, some of the world's premier scholars of William H. Johnson and African American art history examine the artist and his artistic genius in fresh new ways, including his relationship with one of his earliest patrons, the Harmon Foundation; the critical role played by scholars at the nation's historically black colleges and universities; the context of Johnson's experiences living in Harlem and his deep southern roots; and Johnson as a trailblazer in the genres of still life and landscape painting.
£23.99
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.
£54.00
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
D Giles Ltd Creating Connections: Self-Taught Artists in the Rosenthal Collection
Creating Connections features over 70 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and watercolours from the Rosenthal Collection of work by self-taught artists. This richly illustrated publication explores the mysterious connections we have with works of art and examines the journey into the meaning of art for its creators. It looks at the historic approaches to the creations of self-taught artists and the problems inherent in their interpretation. It also considers where we should go to achieve a more equitable and inclusive art history. The Rosenthal Collection comprises a significant and notably varied grouping. Not only does it cover a broad mix of American names including Earl Cunningham, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Bill Traylor, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Ralph Fasanella, Martin Ramirez, and Janet Sobel, it also includes non-US artists Carlo Zinelli, Hiroyuki Doi, Adolf Woelfli, Donald Pass, and Nek Chand among others. Jean Dubuffet, the French painter who famously promoted their study, is also featured. An illustrated interview by Julie Aronson with Richard Rosenthal provides special insight into the collector who has brought together this exceptionally diverse array of work. Essays by Olivia Sagan and Charles Russell look at the need for a more nuanced approach to these artists and their work, at the history of its appreciation (including terminology such as "Outsider Art"), and examine the work in the context of autobiography, trauma, connection, and remembering.
£36.00