Search results for ""author painters"

This new volume of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography / Dictionnaire Biographique du Canada (DCB / DBC) presents well-written, carefully documented and meticulously edited biographies of Canadians from all walks of life. Its literary and scholarly standards make it, like its predecessors, the definitive biographical reference for its period of history. The 619 biographies by 446 authors present a panoramic view of the origins of modern Canada, its political landscapes, economic changes, educational institutions, cultural developments, and athletic achievements. The volume's coverage is inclusive, ranging from murderers to artists, from business magnates to religious leaders, from Canada's First Peoples to new immigrants. There are labour leaders, farmers, feminists, and naturalists as well as all the prominent leaders in all aspects of Canadian life. The dominant theme of this volume is the emergence of a country engrossed by material gains and aware of broadening horizons. Sir Clifford Sifton, federal minister of the interior, Sir Lomer Gouin, premier of Quebec, and Sir Robert Bond, premier of Newfoundland, symbolize this age of development. The lives of Sir Adam Beck, father of Ontario Hydro, Gordon Morton McGregor, founder of the Ford Motor Company of Canada, and Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, illustrate how new technologies harnessed natural energy sources and created new ways to communicate. Such innovations drove the transformation of Canada in the early years of the twentieth century. An expanding nation required thousands of new people to answer the demands of the agricultural enterprises in the west, the manufacturing industries of central Canada, and the fishing and lumbering businesses of British Columbia and the Atlantic region. Many newcomers were drawn from eastern Europe and Asia as well as the British Isles and western Europe, traditionally the homelands of new Canadians. The Doukhobor leader Peter Vasil'evich Verigin, the housemaid Angelina Napolitano, the Chinese teacher and merchant Yip Sang, and the Orthodox clergyman Nestor Dmytriw all took their places in the increasingly complex ethnic mosaic. Social and economic changes inspired demands for other types of change. The movement of women into the professions is exemplified by the life of Clara Brett Martin, the first woman called to the bar in Canada. Jeanne Lajoie, an embattled Franco-Ontarian teacher, joins writers Sara Jeannette Duncan, F licit Angers (known as Laure Conan), Jos phine Marchand (Dandurand) and Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall in the cast of women prominent in this volume. Among those representing arts and sports are the painter James Wilson Morrice and the brilliant goalkeeper Georges V zina. Without question Volume XV of the DCB/DBC will take its place as one of the finest to appear in this distinguished ongoing series of Canadian lives. To all purchasers of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume XV 1921-1930. Please be advised that there is an error in some volumes on the staff page. It should read: Ramsay Cook General Editor R al B langer Directeur G n ral Adjoint The Press regrets this error and will provide a corrected tipped-in page, at no expense, if you return the volume. Alternatively, if you contact me, I will send you an erratum slip or a label to correct the error. Bill Harnum Senior Vice President Scholarly Publishing University of Toronto Press 416 978 2239 ext 243 bharnum@utpress.utoronto.ca

Read more less

The paintings of Albert Oehlen live by audacious strategies, by questioning the image and the rules of abstraction, and by an openness and beauty often reached through the unlikeliest of means. In this expansive monograph, we meet the full range of Oehlen’s artistic thoughts and approaches: paintings that integrate mirrors, paintings that are executed strictly in primary colors or only in gray, heavily pixelated paintings produced with the help of one of the first personal computers. We find collaged fragments of garish poster ads on canvases that transforming screaming slogans into abstract elements, charcoal drawings the size of a wall, finger paintings, and paintings in which black treelike silhouettes contort themselves into a lexicon of abstract forms. Throughout, Oehlen transforms the conceptual into the compositional, at once invigorating and challenging the viewer. Revising and updating TASCHEN’s previous Collector’s Edition, this revelatory survey explores Oehlen’s trajectory from his early days up to the present. It features more than 400 paintings as well as insightful commentaries and interviews, covering Oehlen’s different work stages and approaches. Roberto Ohrt’s essay takes us back to the special vibe of the early 1980s where Oehlen worked alongside Kippenberger, Büttner, and others, part of a scene that painted quickly and close to the pulse of time. Oehlen discusses his computer paintings with John Corbett, and follows up on his more recent work, his thoughts on art, and his day in the studio in a lengthy conversation with Alexander Klar. Together with a collection of shorter texts and statements, this brings us close to the ideas of an artist who has been dubbed “the most resourceful abstract painter alive.”

Read more less

Titian (c. 1488-1576) was recognised very early on as the leading painter of his generation in Venice. Starting in the studio of the aged Giovanni Bellini, Titian, with his contemporary Giorgione, almost immediately started to expand the range of what was possible in painting, converting Bellini's statuesque style into something far more impressionistic and romantic. This restless spirit of innovation and improvisation never left him, and during his long life he experimented with a number of different styles, the brushwork of his last great paintings showing a mysterious poetry that has never been equalled. This volume in the series Lives of the Artists collects the major writings about Titian by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. The centrepiece is the biography by Vasari, who as a Florentine found Titian's very Venetian sense of colour and transient forms a challenge to his concept of art as design. The poet Ariosto and sparkling letter writer Aretino had a more nuanced view of their friend's work, and Priscianese's account of a dinner party with Titian, and the contributions by Speroni and Dolce, and the slightly later Tuscan critic Borghini, round out the picture of this hugely thoughtful, intellectual artist, whose paintings remain some of the most sensual and affecting in all of Western art. Mostly unavailable in any form for many years, these writings have been newly edited for this edition. They are introduced by the scholar Carlo Corsato, who places each in its artistic and literary context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations cover the full range of Titian's great oeuvre.

Read more less

Part artist's book, part exhibition catalog, this book chronicles Tauba Auerbach’s multimedia syntheses of abstraction, science, graphic design and typography Tauba Auerbach studies the boundaries of perception through an art and design practice grounded in math, science and craft. Published in conjunction with the first major survey of the artist’s work, this volume, designed by Auerbach in collaboration with David Reinfurt, spans 16 years of their career, highlighting their interest in concepts such as duality and its alternatives, interconnectedness, rhythm and four-dimensional geometry. Encapsulating Auerbach’s longstanding consideration of symmetry, texture and logic, the title S v Z offers a framework for this volume’s typeface, design and structure. Images of more than 130 paintings, drawings, sculptures and artist’s books are mirrored by a comprehensive selection of related reference images, illuminating their multifaceted practice as never before. Essays by Joseph Becker, Jenny Gheith and Linda Dalrymple Henderson provide further context for the work. The book contains original marble patterns created specially for the book by the artist on both the endpapers and the edges of the book block. The cover is lettered in Auerbach’s calligraphy, applied in black foil on a silver paper. The typeface was designed by David Reinfurt with Auerbach expressly for this publication, and is based on their handwriting. New York–based artist Tauba Auerbach (born 1981) grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Stanford University in 2003. They apprenticed and worked as a sign painter at New Bohemia Signs in San Francisco. In 2013 they founded Diagonal Press. They are represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and Standard Oslo.

Read more less

Cuban painter Rafael Soriano (1920–2015) was an acclaimed master of geometric abstraction and a global figure in the twentieth-century art world—his work resonated with such international artists of Latin American origin as Roberto Matta, Rufino Tamayo, and Wifredo Lam. As a result of the revolution in Cuba in 1959, Soriano left the country in 1962 for the United States. The effect of the Cuban revolution on his art as well as his aesthetics in general are the focus of this book, an unprecedented examination of his entire oeuvre. Featuring more than ninety paintings, pastels, and drawings, this bilingual English-Spanish catalog for an accompanying exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University begins with a contextual analysis of Soriano’s relationship to the Cuban avant-garde and his position within the emerging mid-century modernists. Essays then trace his evolving styles, examining his work through the lens of surrealism and European and Latin American transnational aesthetics. The idea of exile and struggle is a leitmotif and is framed within questions of transcendence and spirituality. Taken together, the contributions suggest both Soriano’s rootedness in Latin America and his striving for universality. The most comprehensive exploration of Soriano’s work to date, Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic deftly takes the idea of exile and struggle so prominent in the artist’s work and frames it within important questions of transcendence and spirituality. This book will be essential reading for anyone intrigued by Latin American and modern art.

Read more less

"[Santiago Papasquiaro] didn't believe in countries and the only borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics."--Roberto Bolano "Built from the collision of 'low' and 'high' culture--of police brutality and drunken ranting with Modernism and German phenomenology--it is a testament of resistance to political and artistic repression comparable to Ginsberg's 'Howl.'"--Cole Heinowitz Readers might recognize Mario Santiago Papasquiaro as the eccentric and renegade Ulises Lima in Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Fierce and visceral, Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic is canonical to Infrarealism, a poem that renders poetry inseparable from politics. It was published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antologia Poetica, 1974--1997. This is the first widely available English translation of Santiago Papasquiaro's work. the thesis & antithesis of the world meet like 1 white-hot meteor & 1 UFO in distress & inexplicably they greet each other: I'm the 1 who embossed on the back of his denim jacket the sentence: The nucleus of my solar system is Adventure Mario Santiago Papasquiaro founded the radical Infrarealist poetry movement with Roberto Bolano. During his lifetime, Santiago published two books of poetry, Beso eterno (1995) and Aullido de Cisne (1996). He died in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1998. Cole Heinowitz is an associate professor of literature at Bard College. Alexis Graman is a painter and translator living in New York.

Read more less

A gothic novella offering a stepping-stone between German Romanticism and the then-nascent Expressionism In an isolated castle on the outskirts of a city in the Albanian mountains, the wildly ugly painter of blasphemies, Samalio Pardulus, executes works too monstrous to bear viewing, and espouses a philosophy that posits a grotesque world which reflects the ravings of a dead, grotesque god. Told through the horrified account of Messer Giacomo (a mediocre artist at once repulsed and fascinated by the events unfolding around him), Samalio Pardulus describes the simultaneous descent and ascent of the titular antihero into a passionate perversion of Catholicism in which love and madness become one, as a dark, incestuous incubus settles into a doomed family. When it was first published in 1908, Otto Julius Bierbaum’s gothic novella—the first of his Sonderbare Geschichten (“Weird Stories”)—offered a Gnostic stepping-stone between German Romanticism and the nascent Expressionism that had not yet taken root. It presents the grotesque not just as a way of life, but as a godly path to a higher vision, even when it appears to be but a manifestation of evil. This first English edition includes the full set of illustrations by Alfred Kubin from the book’s 1911 German edition. Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865–1910) was a German novelist, poet, journalist and editor. His 1897 novel Stilpe inspired the first cabaret venue in Berlin a few years later; his last novel, the 1909 Yankeedoodlefahrt, produced a German proverb still in use today: “Humor is when you laugh anyway.”

Read more less

Miguel Covarrubias enjoyed transcultural encounters and exchanges in the cosmopolitan centers of Mexico City, New York, and Europe, where he met and exchanged ideas in a global network of modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe. Famous for his caricature studies, he was also an accomplished painter, set designer, and book illustrator. Less well known are his consummate skills as an art historian, curator, cartographer, ethnographer, and documentary filmmaker, as well as his direction of programs in museum studies, dance, and the excavation of cultural sites in Mexico.Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, establishes the importance of Covarrubias’s broad-ranging and significant contributions to modern art. The book includes an extensive selection of this prolific artist’s compositions in graphite, watercolor, and oil paint, as well as illustrations from his scholarly publications. Four accompanying essays consider Covarrubias’s artistic practice and contributions to the richness of modern art. They discuss his lifelong habit of moving between modern cities and remote sites of ancient cultures, which engendered a strong cosmopolitanism in his work; his role in promoting the art of the Americas, from ancient Olmec works to contemporary pieces, through curatorial efforts in New York and Mexico City; the large-scale mural maps Covarrubias made for the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair that bring his anthropological, ethnographic, and geographic interests together with cartography and blur lines between landscape and culture; and his substantial scholarship on the indigenous arts of North America.

Read more less

This beautiful publication presents a catalogue raisonné of Léon Bonvin’s work published in both French and English. Introduced by several illuminating essays and accompanying an exhibition at the Fondation Custodia, this book enriches our understanding of the previously overlooked, yet immensely talented, French artist. Léon Bonvin never enjoyed the same notoriety as his half-brother, Francois (1817–1887), who was a well-regarded realist painter in the nineteenth century. He is characterised from the few remaining sources as misunderstood and ill-fated. As he was struggling to make a living, Bonvin took over his father’s inn in Vaugirard, while continuing to paint watercolours. His work, depicting wild flowers, still lifes and views of the still rural and working-class plain exhibit a deep sincerity.This catalogue raisonné is introduced by a series of essays, the outcome of intensive research that sheds new light on the life and art of Bonvin. Weisberg delivers two essays, a study of his career, and an exploration of contemporary receptions to his art. Luijten’s essay questions the artistic inspiration that Bonvin drew upon. Briggs considers the transatlantic appeal of Bonvin’s works whilst Guichané and Quentin explore his character and artistic practice. The catalogue documents all known works by the artist, which are scattered throughout public and private collections, mainly in the United States of America and France. Among these are many drawings which have never been published before. Together, the essays and comprehensive catalogue of his works, provide an essential foundational knowledge upon which an appreciation of Bonvin’s magnificent oeuvre may be built.

Read more less

See how iconic artists like Louise Bourgeois were influenced by their environments in this beautiful series produced in collaboration with The Met.See the world through Louise Bourgeois’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: Louise Bourgeois, meet famous French American painter, printmaker, and sculptor Louise Bourgeois. 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.

Read more less

A riveting history and maritime adventure about priceless masterpieces originally destined for Catherine the Great.On October 1771, a merchant ship out of Amsterdam, Vrouw Maria, crashed off the stormy Finnish coast, taking her historic cargo to the depths of the Baltic Sea. The vessel was delivering a dozen Dutch masterpiece paintings to Europe’s most voracious collector: Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Among the lost treasures was The Nursery, an oak-paneled triptych by Leiden fine painter Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s most brilliant student and Holland’s first international superstar artist. Dou’s triptych was long the most beloved and most coveted painting of the Dutch Golden Age, and its loss in the shipwreck was mourned throughout the art world. Vrouw Maria, meanwhile, became a maritime legend, confounding would-be salvagers for more than two hundred years. In July 1999, a daring Finnish wreck hunter found Vrouw Maria, upright on the sea floor and perfectly preserved. The Tsarina’s Lost Treasure masterfully recounts the fascinating tale of Vrouw Maria—her loss and discovery—weaving together the rise and fall of the artist whose priceless masterpiece was the jewel of the wreckage. Gerald Easter and Mara Vorhees bring to vivid life the personalities that drove (and are still driving) this compelling tale, evoking Robert Massie’s depiction of Russian high politics and culture, Simon Schama’s insights into Dutch Golden Age art and art history, Gary Kinder’s spirit of, danger and adventure on the beguiling Archipelago Sea.

Read more less

With the publication of her first book of criticism, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. “What is important now,” she wrote, “is to recover our senses . . . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, the aesthetics of science-fiction and pornography, or a range of modern thinkers from Simone Weil to E. M. Cioran. She opened dazzling new perspectives on any subject she addressed, whether the nature of photography or cultural attitudes toward illness. This volume, edited by Sontag’s son David Rieff, presents the full texts of four essential books: Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will (1969), On Photography (1977), and Illness as Metaphor (1978). Also here as a special feature are six previously uncollected essays including studies of William S. Burroughs and the painter Francis Bacon and a series of reflections on beauty, aging, and the emerging feminist movement.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Read more less

See how iconic artists like Claude Monet were influenced by their environments in this beautiful series produced in collaboration with The Met.See the world through Claude Monet’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 artwork, too. In What the Artist Saw: Claude Monet, meet famous French painter Claude Monet. Step into his life and learn how he pioneered the Impressionist movement. Learn all about his love of nature and how he was inspired to paint light, water, and water lilies. Have a go at producing your own art inspired by what you find most beautiful about nature! 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.

Read more less

In 1832, Eugène Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco, the first leg of a journey through the Maghreb and Andalusia that left an indelible impression on the painter. This comprehensive, annotated English-language translation of his notes and essays about this formative trip makes available a classic example of travel writing about the “Orient” from the era and provides a unique picture of the region against the backdrop of the French conquest of Algeria.Delacroix’s travels in Morocco, Algeria, and southern Spain led him to discover a culture about which he had held only imperfect and stereotypical ideas and provided a rich store of images that fed his imagination forever after. He wrote extensively about these experiences in several stunningly beautiful notebooks, noting the places he visited, routes he followed, scenes he observed, and people he encountered. Later, Delacroix wrote two articles about the trip, “A Jewish Wedding in Morocco” and the recently discovered “Memories of a Visit to Morocco,” in which he shared these extraordinary experiences, revealing how deeply influential the trip was to his art and career. Never before translated into English, Journey to the Maghreb and Andalusia, 1832 includes Delacroix’s two articles, four previously known travel notebooks, fragments of two additional, recently discovered notebooks, and numerous notes and drafts. Michèle Hannoosh supplements these with an insightful introduction, full critical notes, appendices, and biographies, creating an essential volume for scholars and readers interested in Delacroix, French art history, Northern Africa, and nineteenth-century travel and culture.

Read more less

No other large city is more rewarding to wander around, with a wealth of interesting things to see, both grand and intimate in scale. Watercolor painter Graham Byfield set out to capture the essence of the place, and his impressions are recorded in the London Sketchbook Britain’s capital is varied and cosmopolitan. It has no formally planned centre; each area has its own particular style and atmosphere. Central London is the setting for parliament, royal palaces, formal squares and grand hotels. The City is the financial district, but it is also rich in architecture, including Sir Christopher Wren’s greatest work. Much was destroyed here in the Second World War; but the City has seen a flowering of daring and innovative modern architecture, contrasting with the sober mass of the Tower of London, parts of it nearly a thousand years old. Byfield savours the village-like atmosphere of Hampstead and Islington to the north, and the 19th-century residential and museum areas of the west, from Chelsea and Kensington up to Notting Hill and Bayswater. For many people, including many Londoners, much that lies south of the River Thames is undiscovered territory, but the London Sketchbook shows not only the formal splendors of Greenwich, but also the terraced houses of Stockwell and Battersea, and the adaptation of great industrial buidlings such as the Bankside Power Station, now the Tate Modern art gallery. The sketches are accompanied by notes handwritten by the artist. There is an introduction on London, its history and its buildings by the architectural writer and conservationist Marcus Binney, who has also contributed a Gazetteer with more detailed information on the buildings shown in the book.

Read more less

Best Art Book and Best of Show - 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book AwardBorn in San Diego in 1946 and raised in the American Southwest, painter Paul Pletka has created a body of work that owes much to the West of his childhood, and more to the West of his imagination. Infused with an operatic sense of theater and drama, his paintings conjure scenes from the cultures, history, and religions of the American West and Mexico - diffused, as Pletka writes, ""through the lens of personal experiences, dreams, research, and ancestral memory."" In Paul Pletka: Imagined Wests, the first book on this major American artist in over thirty years, readers will encounter the full range of Pletka's oeuvre through more than eighty color reproductions of his best-known and most influential works. Images of warriors and shamans are paired with depictions of George Armstrong Custer, Christian saints, and the lost gods of North and South America, their forms rendered in a distinctive style that mixes classical drawing and expressionist distortion with elements of surrealism and European symbolism. An artist statement and notes on selected paintings provide rare insight into Pletka's creative process, and an introductory essay by art historian Amy Scott discusses how Pletka's studies of indigenous cultures of the American West and Mexico, as well as art historical and critical influences, have informed his work. Complex, mysterious, and mesmerizing, Pletka's paintings are designed to make it almost impossible to look away. In their boldly conceived subject matter, vivid color, and ethnographic detail, these works - and their creator - are true originals in the rich artistic landscape of the American West.

Read more less

One of the world’s preeminent Abstract Expressionists, California-born painter Sam Francis (1923-1994) first travelled to Japan in 1957, quickly established studios and residences there, and became active in a circle of avant-garde artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, and composers, including members of the nascent Gutai and Mono-ha movements. This book chronicles those connections, as well as his complex and evolving relationship with East Asian aesthetics from the 1950s through the 1990s. From the very first exhibitions Francis had in Tokyo, critics linked his evocative use of negative space with the Japanese concept of “ma”, a symbolically rich interval between objects or ideas. This shared pictorial and philosophical syntax laid the foundation for a feedback loop of mutual influence that spurred frequent collaborations between the artist and his Japanese contemporaries, extending into the realms of printmaking, ceramics, music, poetry, publishing, and performance. Written by art critic and curator Richard Speer, with a foreword by Debra Burchett-Lere, executive director/president of the Sam Francis Foundation, this is the first full-length monograph to explore an important but sometimes overlooked milieu in Post-World War II art—a dialogue between Eastern and Western sensibilities that prefigured our current era of global interconnectedness and cross-cultural exchange. Lavishly illustrated with colour plates and archival images, it is an adjunct publication for the related exhibition “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021), co-curated by Speer.

Read more less

The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet--the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno. "From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against--political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class--both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities--whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death--but for just the opposite." -Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. In addition to the films for which he is world famous, he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism, and was an accomplished painter. He was murdered in 1975 at Ostia, near Rome.

Read more less

A collection of essential quotations and other writings from artist and icon Jean-Michel BasquiatOne of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat explored the interplay of words and images throughout his career as a celebrated painter with an instantly recognizable style. In his paintings, notebooks, and interviews, he showed himself to be a powerful and creative writer and speaker as well as image-maker. Basquiat-isms is a collection of essential quotations from this godfather of urban culture. In these brief, compelling, and memorable selections, taken from his interviews as well as his visual and written works, Basquiat writes and speaks about culture, his artistic persona, the art world, artistic influence, race, urban life, and many other subjects. Concise, direct, forceful, poetic, and enigmatic, Basquiat’s words, like his art, continue to resonate.Select quotations from the book: "I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them." "I think there are a lot of people that are neglected in art, I don’t know if it’s because of who made the paintings or what, but, um . . . black people are never really portrayed realistically or I mean not even portrayed in modern art." "Since I was 17, I thought I might be a star." "The more I paint the more I like everything." "I think I make art for myself, but ultimately I think I make it for the world."

Read more less

Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice.

Read more less

A delectable novel of a man's lifelong devotion to erotic exploration, The Arch of Desire is based very loosely on the life of the artist Pierre Molinier, admired by the surrealists and creator of a many-layered erotic universe. As the novel opens, Pierre is a boy, raised by a wealthy family of Belgian winemakers. Precociously curious about the opposite sex -- particularly the intimate garments he finds drying in the laundry room -- he is initiated into the erotic by a family servant and soon moves on to the more forbidden charms of his lovely, sophisticated half sister. As he comes of age -- attending art school, becoming an acclaimed painter, and settling in Bordeaux -- Pierre simultaneously pursues ever more complex pleasures, devouring his father's collection of de Sade, Restif de la Bretonne, and other erotic classics, sampling the varieties of women -- from a Senegalese prostitute, to a lesbian who works as a dominatrix to rich men, to a beautiful German who becomes his last, most perfect lover -- and exploring the limits of his fetishes for dressing up and the adoration of beautiful, feminine feet. A delightful recollection of sexual pleasure from the dawn to the twilight of life, The Arch of Desire will satisfy every erotic appetite. "[A] delicious, bold and genuinely immoral book, or perhaps ... a treatise in favor of hedonism and the pleasures of desire." -- A. Castro, El Periodico "A fascinating novel, exquisitely conceived and structured ... De Sade would applaud." -- Antonio Bordon, La Provincia "Munoz Puelles uses an erotic vocabulary that stretches the rules of the genre." -- Maria Jose, El Pais

Read more less

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), perhaps the most famous of all German artists, embodies the modern ideal of the Renaissance man—he was a remarkable painter, printmaker, draftsman, designer, theoretician, and even a poet. More is known about his thoughts and his life than about any other Northern European master of his time, since he wrote extensively about himself, his family's history, his travels, and his friends. His woodcuts and engravings were avidly collected and copied across Europe, and they quickly established his reputation as a master. Praised in life and elegized in death by such thinkers as Martin Luther and Erasmus, he served Emperor Maximilian and other leading church and secular princes in the Holy Roman Empire. Although there is a vast specialized literature on the Nuremberg master, The Essential Dürer fills the need for a foundational book that covers the major aspects of his career. The essays included in this book, written by leading scholars from the United States and Germany, provide an accessible, up-to-date examination of Dürer's art and person as well as his posthumous fame. The essays address an array of topics, from separate and detailed studies of his paintings, drawings, printmaking, and sculpture, to broader concerns such as his visits to and interactions with Venice and the Netherlands, his personal relationships, and his relationships with other artists. Collectively these stimulating essays explore the brilliance of Dürer's creativity and the impact he had on his world, exposing him as an artist fully engaged with the tumultuous intellectual and religious challenges of his time.

Read more less

Around 1505 Goossen Van der Weyden, Rogier's grandson, painted a monumental altarpiece depicting the various phases of Saint Dymphna's insane life. This Irish princess, who fled her incestuous father in the sixth century, was beheaded in the Kempen village of Geel. On account of her tragic end and uncompromising chastity, the princess was venerated from that moment on as the patron saint of the mentally ill. From the late Middle Ages, pilgrims flocked to Geel in large numbers to catch a glimpse of Saint Dymphna. They paid homage to the local celebrity in the hope that she would alleviate their mental problems. To this day, Geel is known for its unique treatment of the mentally ill, who are cared for at home by locals. Goossen Van der Weyden's altarpiece came into being at the height of Dymphna's popularity. The masterpiece was intended for the church of Tongerlo Abbey. Today this work is characterised by a remarkable iconography and an eventful history: a panel was lost and the triptych was even sawn into pieces. It ultimately came into the hands of a team of specialists from Belgium and abroad who subjected the altarpiece to a meticulous conservation over a period of three years, a colossal undertaking during which new techniques were used. This gave the conservators unprecedented insight into the mind, and workshop, of an early 16th century painter. This richly illustrated book is the result of years of research and contains essays by Till-Holger Borchert (Musea Brugge), Stephan Kemperdick (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), Katharina Van Cauteren (The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp), Lucinda Timmermans (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Patrick Allegaert (Dr. Guislain Museum, Ghent) and many others.

Read more less

Avis is a nineteenth-century painter who strives to keep herself free of marriage and entanglements. As a child, Avis decides that given a woman's options of marriage or being a "lady," "I think I'd rather keep dogs." She is caught all the same, by a "modern man" and through her life, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps describes the struggle of a woman to be wife, mother, and artist. Although Avis declares and her fiance agrees that she must not "resign my profession as an artist," the reality greets her with their first house: "It was not quite clear where the studio was to be, unless in the attic." But the house is near the college, where her husband teaches, and that "in the view of the New England winters, and the delicate health of the young professor, was decisive." She returns from an hour in her studio to clogged drains and unexpected company, descending "from the sphinx to the drainpipe in one fell swoop." Truly, she does hate housekeeping, and while she loves her baby, "sometimes, sitting burdened with the child upon her arms, she looked out and off upon the summer sky with a strangling desolation like that of a forgotten diver, who sees the clouds flit, from the bottom of the sea." And so it goes. How modern is the "modern man" and how much do women's roles ever change? This book, written more than one hundred years ago, will still seem very real to many women today. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister

Read more less

A visionary scientist, a supreme painter, a man of eccentricity and ambition: Leonardo da Vinci had many lives. Born from a fleeting affair between a country girl and a young notary, Leonardo was never legitimized by his father and received no formal education. While this freedom from the routine of rigid and codified learning may have served to stimulate his natural creativity, it also caused many years of suffering and an insatiable need to prove his own worth. It was a striving for glory and an obsessive thirst for knowledge that prompted Leonardo to seek the protection and favour of the most powerful figures of his day, from Lorenzo de’ Medici to Ludovico Sforza, from the French governors of Milan to the pope in Rome, where he could vie for renown with Michelangelo and Raphael. In this revelatory account, Antonio Forcellino draws on his expertise – both as historian and as restorer of some of the world’s greatest works of art – to give us a more detailed view of Leonardo than ever before. Through careful analyses of his paintings and compositional technique, down to the very materials used, Forcellino offers fresh insights into Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual development. He spans the great breadth of Leonardo’s genius, discussing his contributions to mechanics, optics, anatomy, geology and metallurgy, as well as providing acute psychological observations about the political dynamics and social contexts in which Leonardo worked. Forcellino sheds new light on a life all too often overshadowed and obscured by myth, providing us with a fresh perspective on the personality and motivations of one of the greatest geniuses of Western culture.

Read more less

A witty introduction to the Louvre’s many masterpieces, told from the perspective of the subjects themselves – including resident superstar Mona Lisa. Millions of people visit the Louvre Museum every year to gaze and gawp at its all-star art collection. But there’s one star who gets a lot more attention than anyone else – and her very own special queuing system, if you can believe it! Well, the Louvre’s many other masterpieces aren’t too happy about being overshadowed – and they’re here to tell everyone what makes them just as worthy of the Mona Lisa’s teeming crowds. With a focus on portraits and other person-centred artworks, Mona Lisa and the Others reveals the stories behind some of the Louvre Museum’s most famous artworks. Napoleon Bonaparte takes readers behind the scenes at his own coronation; the Venus de Milo explains what happened to her missing arms; the Seated Scribe lets slip some gossip about the ancient Egyptian royal family; and Madame le Brun has a polite moan about juggling the demands of being Marie Antoinette’s portrait painter and a working mother. But perhaps most intriguing of all, Mona Lisa reveals that there’s more to her portrait than her mysterious smile… Written in a light-hearted and contemporary style by Alice Harman, and illustrated with the energetic artwork of Sir Quentin Blake, Mona Lisa and the Others is an entertaining introduction to the Louvre Museum’s collection that will appeal to children, parents, guardians and teachers from all walks of life.

Read more less

Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design. While he did not receive much recognition in his hometown of Glasgow during his lifetime, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic detail inspired modernists across Europe. Mackintosh’s avant-garde approach embraced a variety of media as well as fresh stylistic devices. His multi-faceted oeuvre incorporated architecture, furniture, graphic design, landscapes, and flower studies. He embraced strong lines, elegant proportions, and natural motifs, combining an adventurous dose of japonisme with a modernist sensibility for function. He preferred bold black typography, restrained shapes, and tall, generous windows suffusing rooms with light. Much of his work was collaborative practice with his wife, fellow artist Margaret Macdonald. The couple made up half of the loose Glasgow collective known as “The Four”; the other two were Margaret’s sister, Frances, and her husband, Herbert MacNair. On the continent, the “Glasgow Style” was met with delight. In Italy, Germany, and, in particular, Austria, artists of the Viennese Secession and Art Nouveau drew much from its rectilinear yet lyrical forms. In this introductory book, we take in Mackintosh’s practice across art, architecture, and design to explore his particular combination of the statuesque and sensual and its vital influence on modernist expression across Europe. Featured projects include his complete scheme for the Willow Tea Rooms and the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, widely considered Mackintosh’s masterwork.

Read more less

In this international bestseller from the critically acclaimed Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the life of Frida Kahlo, the world-renowned painter. When Frida was a teenager, a terrible road accident changed her life forever. Unable to walk, she began painting from her bed. Her self-portraits, which show her pain and grief, but also her passion for life and instinct for survival, have made her one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the artist's life.Little People, BIG DREAMS is a bestselling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream. This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardback and paperback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

Read more less

With a deeply-imbedded indebtedness to their father Morimasa Morimoto, a self-made man in post-war Japan, two sisters struggle to uphold a family legacy. Sakiko moves to the fantastically free United States. Fragile and unsure in 1960s San Francisco, she clings to her brazen artist husband for stability. Hiroko, headstrong and irreverent, uses her father's money to move to New York, promising to become a famous artist. Intolerant of weakness in others, she crumbles in the face of her own shortcomings. From catty carpooling moms to manipulative stoners, abortions to adultery, White Elephant is a vivid book from a seasoned artist turned writer. Mako Idemitsu, daughter of Rockefeller-esque petroleum executive Sazo Idemitsu, reconfigures her own family discord to reflect on the binds of being female in this gorgeous English translation. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Mako Idemitsu immigrated to the United States in 1963 where she met and married abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis. Disillusioned with housewife life she picked up an 8mm camera and became a pioneer in experimental video and the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Internationally acclaimed, her work has been featured in major museums worldwide and is included in the MOMA's permanent collection. This is her debut novel. Award-winning translator Juliet Winters Carpenter has rendered the works of Abe Kobo, Fumiko Enchi, and Minae Mizumura. Within the year she will be the first person to have won the prestigious Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature twice.

Read more less

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is the only Scandinavian painter of modern times to have achieved a world reputation. A tragic childhood – his mother died when he was five and a sister when he was thirteen – wounded him deeply, and much of his early work expresses this in its agonized pessimism. In the first half of his career he lived much of his life in Germany, and became one of the fathers of modern German art. After 1900, however, and particularly after his return to Norway in 1909 following a severe nervous breakdown, his subjects tended to become more extrovert and objective, while his palette assumed increasingly brighter colours. The period 1910-20 was a particularly prolific one, in which he painted mural decorations for Oslo University and many other outdoor subjects, but Munch continued working throughout his life and produced some remarkable sefl-portraits shortly before his death.This introduction to the art of Munch includes forty-eight full-page colour plates, of work from all stages of his career, from the naturalism of the early work, through the symbolic psychological dramas of the 1980s to the brilliant colours of the later works. John Boulton Smith's authoritative essay on Munch has here been revised and updated. The plates are complemented by notes written by art historian James Malpas, discussing each painting in detail, and there is a wealth of black-and-white comparative illustrations.

Read more less

Vietnam is an ancient and beautiful land, with a deep history of occupational conflict that remains an enigma in Americans’ collective memory. It is still easy to forget that Vietnam is a country and not a war, even as America’s role in Vietnam inflamed and divided the American citizenry in ways that are still evident today. It is as if Vietnam’s civil war resurrected our own. And if you are a Vietnam War veteran or a family member of a vet, it’s worse, because, even after a half-century, many of the wounds won’t heal. What do you do when you have given up on forgetting? Chuck Forsman is one of a sizable number of aging Vietnam vets who have found deep satisfaction in revisiting Vietnam, supporting charities, orphanages, and clinics, doing volunteer work and more—anything to redeem what the U.S. military did there. He is also a renowned painter and photographer who depicts places and environments in ways that become unforgettable visual experiences for the contemporary viewer. Lost in Vietnam chronicles a journey, not a country. They were taken on visits averaging two months each and two-year intervals over a decade. Forsman traveled largely by motorbike throughout the country—south, central, and north—sharing his experiences through amazing photographs of Vietnam’s lands and people. His visual journey of one such veteran’s twofold quest: the one for redemption and understanding, and the other to make art. The renowned Le Ly Hayslip introduces the book and sets the table for Forsman’s incredible sojourn.

Read more less

Ever innovative and predictably diverse in their physical formats, artists' books occupy a creative space between the familiar four-cornered object and challenging works of art that effectively question every preconception of what a book can be. Many artists specialize in producing self-contained art projects in the form of books, like Ken Campbell and Susan King, or they establish small presses, like Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn's Coracle Press or Harry and Sandra Reese's Turkey Press. Countless others who are primarily known as sculptors, painters, or performance artists carry on a parallel practice in artists' books, including Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Tuttle. Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists includes eighty important examples selected from the Getty Research Institute's Special Collections of more than six thousand editions and unique artists' books. This elegant catalogue also presents precursors to the artist's book, such as Joris Hoefnagel's sixteenth-century calligraphy masterpiece; single-sheet episodes from Albrecht DuIA rer's Life of Mary, designed to be either broadsides or a book; early illustrated scientific works; and avant-garde publications. Twentieth-century works reveal the impact of artists' books on Pop art, Fluxus, Conceptual, feminist art, and postmodernism. The selection of books by an international range of artists who have chosen to work with texts and images on paper provokes new inquiry into the nature of art and books in contemporary culture.

Read more less

Shortly after the dawn of photography, the unlikely partnership between the respected painter David Octavius Hill and the young engineer Robert Adamson produced some of the most important photographs in the history of the medium. Their alliance began when Hill, while working on his large commemorative painting of the people involved in forming the Free Chruch of Scotland in 1843, began using photography as a tool to document the church elders. What followed was a four-and-a-half-year partnership - cut short by Adamson's untimely death in 1848 - that produced a large body of work. During their association Hill and Adamson experimented with some of the earliest calotype processes creating hundreds of portraits, staged dramatic photographs, and architectural and landscape images. The Getty Museum holds more than 400 works by Hill and Adamson, 47 of which are featured in this volume. The plates are accompanied by commentary from Anne M. Lyden, curatorial assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Museum. A colour foldout of Hill's above-referenced painting "The Signing of the Deed of Demission (The Disruption Picture)" appears in the back of the book. The book includes a chronology of the key events of the artists' partnership and an edited transcript of a colloquium on the artists, with participants: Lyden; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Sara Stevenson, curator of photographs at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; Alison Morrison-Low, curator, History of Science Section, National Museums of Scotland; Jonathon Reff, photographer, Los Angeles; Michael Wilson, private collector, Los Angeles and London; and David Featherstone, independent editor and curator, San Francisco.

Read more less

Most people like to travel in comfort: they stay in fancy hotels, never leave tourist spots, and stay away from the locals. Michael Wigge isn’t like most people, though. After travelling the world without money for 150 days while writing How to Travel the World for Free, his next challenge: turn an apple into a house in Hawaii. Wigge goes around fourteen countries and six continents exchanging goods for more valuable ones, and he meets an array of good-humored people who take his deals. Taking on his Barterman persona, he trades the apple for sixteen cigarettes in Germany; a couple of trades later in India, he fixes up a motorized rickshaw and trades it for silk; in Australia, a millionaire amuses himself by offering him an art piece for the silk if Wigge feeds a wild crocodile. Finally, he arrives in Hawaii armed with two bicycles, a surfboard, Portuguese porcelain, three solid-gold coins, a Porsche wristwatch, a record by musician Coati Mundi and accompanying contract for 25 percent of the proceeds from his next single, a voucher for a two-night stay in a mansion in L.A., and a piece of original artwork by painter Alex Stenzel—now he just has to find someone to give him a house in exchange. On the 200-day journey around the world, Wigge makes forty-two trades and meets strange, kind, funny, friendly, eccentric, and good-natured people who help him in his quest. It’s a journey you won’t want to miss!

Read more less

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an account of the genre’s comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches with which Rembrandt problematizes standard group-portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader’s enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters’ expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the homefires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four examines them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts. The result is an interpretation that reads Rembrandt’s painting both as a deliberate parody by the sitters and as the artist’s covert parody of the sitters.

Read more less

Georges Seurat is best known as the painter of A Sunday on the Grande Jatte—1884, one of the most recognizable and reproduced works of art in the world. In recent years the painting has been the subject of a highly successful exhibition, the inspiration for a Broadway musical (by Stephen Sondheim), and the subject of a television program. The Grande Jatte has achieved this iconic status for a number of reasons, but is unknown to most people except as a simulacrum. The Grande Jatte is also plagued by the long-standing cliché that it embodies a “scientific” way of painting. The painting is much more complex, however; so is Seurat’s body of work as a whole. In this collection of essays, Paul Smith has assembled a broader view of Seurat’s oeuvre. Seurat Re-viewed touches on its engagement with society, gender, politics, new artists’ materials, and developments in art theory.Individual essays focus on the many facets of Seurat’s work and its context, including its use of color and its debt to color theory; its exploitation of different drawing media; its connection to the work of the artist’s contemporaries, including the poets Jules Laforgue and Stéphane Mallarmé; and its concern with nineteenth-century social issues. The contributions also show important links among the Grande Jatte, literary Symbolism, and the development of future Modernist practices. The book amounts to a major reevaluation of Seurat’s art in the culture of the late nineteenth century. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Anthea Callen, S. Hollis Clayson, Jonathan Crary, Joan U. Halperin, Richard Hobbs, John House, Brendan Prendeville, Georges Roque, and Richard Shiff.

Read more less

The declaration that a work of art is “about sex” is often announced to the public as a scandal after which there is nothing else to say about the work or the artist-controversy concludes a conversation when instead it should begin a new one. Moving beyond debates about pornography and censorship, Jennifer Doyle shows us that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday life: exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. Sex Objects examines the reception and frequent misunderstanding of highly sexualized images, words, and performances. In chapters on the “boring parts” of Moby-Dick, the scandals that dogged the painter Thomas Eakins, the role of women in Andy Warhol's Factory films, “bad sex” and Tracey Emin's crudely evocative line drawings, and L.A. artist Vaginal Davis's pornographic parodies of Vanessa Beecroft's performances, Sex Objects challenges simplistic readings of sexualized art and instead investigates what such works can tell us about the nature of desire. In Sex Objects, Doyle offers a creative and original exploration of how and where art and sex connect, arguing that to proclaim a piece of art “about sex” reveals surprisingly little about the work, the artist, or the spectator. Deftly interweaving anecdotal and personal writing with critical, feminist, and queer theory, she reimagines the relationship between sex and art in order to better understand how the two meet-and why it matters. Jennifer Doyle is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is coeditor, with Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, of Pop Out: Queer Warhol.

Read more less

A vividly illustrated catalogue of linocuts by the Modern British printmakers of the Grosvenor School of Art. The Grosvenor School of Modern Art was founded by the influential teacher, painter and wood-engraver Iain McNab in 1925. Situated in London’s Pimlico district, the school played a key role in the story of modern British printmaking between the World Wars. The Grosvenor School artists received critical acclaim in their time that continued until the late 1930s under the influence of Claude Flight who pioneered a revolutionary method of making the simple linocut to dynamic and colourful effect. Cyril Power, a lecturer in architecture at the school, and Sybil Andrews, the School Secretary, were two of Flight’s star students. Whilst incorporating the avant-garde values of Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism, the Grosvenor School printmakers brought their own unique interpretation of the contemporary world to the medium of linocut in images that are strikingly familiar to this day. They are included in the print collections of the world’s major museums, including the British Museum, the MoMA in New York and the Australian National Gallery. Cutting Edge, which accompanied an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, illustrates over 120 linocuts, drawings and posters by Grosvenor School artists; its thematic layout focuses on the key components which made up their dynamic and rhythmic visual imagery. For the first time, three Australian printmakers, Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme - who played a major part in the Grosvenor School story - are included in a major museum exhibition outside of Australia.

Read more less

Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out is the touching and beautifully told story of the women who were left alone after World War I - a remarkable generation of women who were changed by war; and in their turn helped change society.In 1919 a generation of young women discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round, and the statistics confirmed it. After the 1921 Census, the press ran alarming stories of the 'Problem of the Surplus Women - Two Million who can never become Wives...'. This book is about those women, and about how they were forced, by a tragedy of historic proportions, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity and their future happiness.'This is a ground-breaking book, richly nuanced with titbits of information, insight and understanding' Daily Mail 'Remarkably perceptive and well-researched ... Virginia Nicholson has produced another extraordinarily interesting work, sensitive, intelligent and well-written' Sunday Telegraph 'This in an inspiring book, lovingly researched, well-written and humane... the period is beautifully caught' Economist 'Brave, humane and honest' Observer Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television and her first book, Charleston - A Bloomsbury House and Garden (written in collaboration with her father, Quentin Bell), was an account of the Sussex home of her grandmother, the painter Vanessa Bell. Her second book, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939, was published by Penguin in 2002. She lives in Sussex.

Read more less

Presenting the first comprehensive art historical study of some magnificent Mesoamerican murals, this book demonstrates how generations of ancient Mexican artists, patrons, and audiences created a powerful statement of communal identity that still captures the imagination. Honorable Mention, ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation, 2016Between AD 650 and 950, artists at the small Central Mexican city-state of Cacaxtla covered the walls of their most important sacred and public spaces with dazzling murals of gods, historical figures, and supernatural creatures. Testimonies of a richly interconnected ancient world, the Cacaxtla paintings present an unexpectedly deep knowledge of the art and religion of the Maya, Zapotec, and other distant Mesoamerican peoples. Painted during a period of war and shifting alliances after the fall of Teotihuacan, the murals’ distinctive fusion of cosmopolitan styles and subjects claimed a powerful identity for the beleaguered city-state.Presenting the first cohesive, art historical study of the entire painting corpus, The Murals of Cacaxtla demonstrates that these magnificent works of art constitute a sustained and local painting tradition, treasured by generations of patrons and painters. Exhaustive chapters on each of the mural programs make it possible to see how the Cacaxtla painting tradition developed over time, responding to political and artistic challenges. Lavishly illustrated, The Murals of Cacaxtla illuminates the agency of ancient artists and the dynamics of artistic synthesis in a Mesoamerican context, offering a valuable counterpoint to studies of colonial and modern art operating at the intersection of cultural traditions.

Read more less

Artisan has recently become a buzzword in the developed world, used for items like cheese, wine, and baskets, as corporations succeed at branding their cheap, mass-produced products with the popular appeal of small-batch, handmade goods. The unforgiving realities of the artisan economy, however, never left the global south, and anthropologists have worried over the fate of these craftspeople as global capitalism has again remade their cultural and economic territory. Yet artisans are proving to be surprisingly vital players in contemporary capitalism, as they interlock innovation and tradition to create effective new forms of entrepreneurship. Based on seven years of extensive research in Colombia and Ecuador, veteran ethnographers Jason Antrosio and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld's Fast, Easy, and In Cash explores how small-scale production and global capitalism are not directly opposed, but are rather essential partners in economic development. Antrosio and Colloredo-Mansfeld demonstrate how artisan trades arrive and flourish in modern Latin American communities. In uncertain economic environments, small manufacturers have adapted to excel at home-based production, product design, technological efficiency, and high-risk investments. Illuminating this process are vivid case studies from Ecuador and Colombia: peasant farmers in Tuquerres, Otavalo weavers, Tigua painters, and the t-shirt industry of Atuntaqui. Fast, Easy, and In Cash exposes how these ambitious artisans, far from being holdovers from the past, are crucial for capitalist innovation in their communities and provide indispensable lessons in how we should understand and cultivate local economies in this era of globalization.

Read more less

Read four sample poems for free - just click the Extracts tab above.Peter Carpenter's poetry is radiant with quiet surprises, important moments captured in the folds of an old document wallet, in back gardens or on winter sea-fronts, buried in the sand or hidden by the noise of a football crowd. Such moments take flight to uncover a distinctive take on both 'the here and now' and the echoes of public and private histories. After the Goldrush is thus of its time and about time, in the attentive, skilful hands of a poet truly hitting his stride.One year's the historyOf Europe, time runs barefoot on the cinder-trackAt the White City (from 'Namings')"… a new voice, precise and distinct, and therefore, doubly welcome."George Szirtes "In short, Peter Carpenter is a masterly portrait-painter." Matthew Jarvis, English "always original and enjoyable poems…there's something modestly dazzling about Peter Carpenter's writing, but also something wonderfully spare and taut… it reminds me in places of the modern pastorals of R.F. Langley… the tone jinks and darts from the tender to the sardonic, the wry to the comic."CJ Allen, Staple "Peter Carpenter has the ability to pull the rug from under your feet at the very moment when you think you've got his number."Jeremy Page, The Frogmore Papers Peter Carpenter is co-director of Worple Press and was recently Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Reading. His fourth collection of poetry is Catch from Shoestring; and he recently contributed to Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances (Penguin).

Read more less

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an account of the genre’s comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches with which Rembrandt problematizes standard group-portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader’s enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters’ expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the homefires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four examines them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts. The result is an interpretation that reads Rembrandt’s painting both as a deliberate parody by the sitters and as the artist’s covert parody of the sitters.

Read more less

Constance Markievicz (1868–1927), born to the privileged Protestant upper class in Ireland, embraced suffrage before scandalously leaving for a bohemian life in London and then Paris. She would become known for her roles as politician and Irish revolutionary nationalist. Her husband, Casimir Dunin Markievicz (1874–1932), a painter, playwright, and theater director, was a Polish noble who would eventually join the Russian imperial army to fight on behalf of Polish freedom during World War I. Revolutionary Lives offers the first dual biography of these two prominent European activists and artists. Tracing the Markieviczes' entwined and impassioned trajectories, biographer Lauren Arrington sheds light on the avant-garde cultures of London, Paris, and Dublin, and the rise of anti-imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century.Drawing from new archival material, including previously untranslated newspaper articles, Arrington explores the interests and concerns of Europeans invested in suffrage, socialism, and nationhood. Unlike previous works, Arrington's book brings Casimir Markievicz into the foreground of the story and explains how his liberal imperialism and his wife's socialist republicanism arose from shared experiences, even as their politics remained distinct. Arrington also shows how Constance did not convert suddenly to Irish nationalism, but was gradually radicalized by the Irish Revival. Correcting previous depictions of Constance as hero or hysteric, Arrington presents her as a serious thinker influenced by political and cultural contemporaries.Revolutionary Lives places the exciting biographies of two uniquely creative and political individuals and spouses in the wider context of early twentieth-century European history.

Read more less

Many of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases--naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarme, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a distinctive feature of his work. Reading Cy Twombly poses both literary and art historical questions. How does poetic reference in largely abstract works affect their interpretation? Reading Cy Twombly is the first book to focus specifically on the artist's use of poetry. Twombly's library formed an extension of his studio and he sometimes painted with a book open in front of him. Drawing on original research in an archive that includes his paint-stained and annotated books, Mary Jacobus's account--richly illustrated with more than 125 color and black-and-white images--unlocks an important aspect of Twombly's practice. Jacobus shows that poetry was an indispensable source of reference throughout Twombly's career; as he said, he "never really separated painting and literature." Among much else, she explores the influence of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; Twombly's fondness for Greek pastoral poetry and Virgil's Eclogues; the inspiration of the Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Twombly's love of Keats and his collaboration with Octavio Paz. Twombly's art reveals both his distinctive relationship to poetry and his use of quotation to solve formal problems. A modern painter, he belongs in a critical tradition that goes back, by way of Roland Barthes, to Baudelaire. Reading Cy Twombly opens up fascinating new readings of some of the most important paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.

Read more less

John Rothenstein, son of Sir William Rothenstein, the celebrated portrait painter, was born in 1901, four years after the Tate Gallery had been founded as the national gallery of British art. When Rothenstein took over as its fifth director in 1938, the Tate was in serious trouble: after 1917 when its remit was extended to include the national collection of modern foreign art, the confused dual purpose had placed an intolerable burden on those required to manage an institution still partly controlled by the National Gallery. Furthermore, it had no purchasing budget from the Government and was bound to accept often inappropriate pictures imposed on it by the Royal Academy under the terms of the infamous Chantrey Bequest. 26 years later when Rothenstein retired as Director in 1964, the Tate had acquired a Government grant, escaped the clutches of the National Gallery in 1955, and was firmly established both as the principal collection of modern art in the UK, and the best collection of British art in the world. Yet Rothenstein's career in the art world had never run a smooth course. After a childhood and early professional life dominated by the influence of his father, his curatorial posts in America, Leeds and Sheffield were not without incident, and at times it had looked as if his chosen career would stall. Adrian Clark's thoroughly researched account of the origins and professional life of John Rothenstein, covers his highs and lows and tries to give a balanced view and summary of the achievements of this remarkable human being.

Read more less

Religion, Renaissance, and Reformation—these three ideologies shaped the world of 16th-century portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543), a pivotal figure of the Northern Renaissance, whose skills took him to Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, and England, and garnered patrons and subjects as prestigious as Henry VIII, Thomas More, Anne of Cleves, and Reformation advocate Thomas Cromwell. This book brings together key Holbein paintings to explore his illustrious and international career as well as the courtly drama and radical religious change that informed his work. With rich illustration, we survey the masterful draftsmanship and almost supernatural ability to control details, from the textures of luxurious clothing to the ornament of a room, that secured Holbein’s place as one of the greatest portraitists in Western art history. His probing eye was matched with a draftsman. Along the way, we see how he combined meticulous mimesis with an inspired amalgam of regional painterly traits, from Flemish-style realism to late medieval German composition and Italian formal grandeur. During his time in England, Holbein became official court painter to Henry VIII, producing both reformist propaganda and royalist paintings to bolster Henry’s status as monarch and as the new Supreme Head of the Church following the English Reformation. His portrait of Henry from 1537 is regarded not only as a portraiture pinnacle but also as an iconic record of this transformative monarch and the Tudor dynasty. Through this turbulent period, Holbein also produced anticlerical woodcuts, and sketched and painted Lutheran merchants, visiting ambassadors, and Henry’s notorious succession of wives.

Read more less

Son of a convicted felon whose early death left the family impoverished, Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) went on to lead a staggeringly full and successful life. A portrait painter who produced an unparalleled body of work, including the iconic "The Artist in His Museum", Peale was also a revolutionary soldier, a radical activist, an impresario of moving pictures, a natural historian, an inventor, and the proprietor of one of the first modern museums. His many other interests included a lifelong preoccupation with writing; in fact, his autobiography is one of the first examples of the genre in the United States. David C. Ward's engaging book, richly textured with references to the history and culture of the time, is the first full critical biography of Peale. It links the artist's autobiography to his painting, illuminating the man, his art, and his times. Peale emerges for the first time as that particularly American phenomenon: the self-made man. Before Peale's time, autobiographies had been written mainly as religious and confessional documents. Peale, however, produced his secular work to describe, not how God made him, but how he worked to make himself. This compelling study, drawing extensively from Peale's extraordinary autobiography, shows how Peale's life itself documents the development of American independence and individualism. Ultimately Ward addresses Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's great question, 'What then is the American, this new man?' as he sheds light on one of these new men and on the formative years in which he lived.

Read more less