Search results for ""Author Painters"

An innovative novel featuring an astonishingly wicked female villain, Wilkie Collins's Armadale was regarded by T.S. Eliot as 'the best of [his] romances'. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by John Sutherland.When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict and husband-poisoner. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money - and murder. The character of Lydia Gwilt horrified contemporary critics, with one reviewer describing her as 'One of the most hardened female villains whose devices and desires have ever blackened fiction'. She remains among the most enigmatic and fascinating women in nineteenth-century literature and the dark heart of this most sensational of Victorian 'sensation novels'.John Sutherland's introduction illustrated how Wilkie Collins drew on scandalous newspaper headlines and on new technology particularly the penny post and the telegraph - to lend extra pace and veracity to his tale. This edition also contains notes, further reading and an appendix on stage dramatisations of Armadale.Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London in 1824, the eldest son of the landscape painter William Collins. In 1846 he was entered to read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn, where he gained the knowledge that was to give him much of the material for his writing. From the early 1850s he was a friend of Charles Dickens, who produced and acted in two melodramas written by Collins, The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. Of his novels, Collins is best remembered for The Woman in White (1859), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).If you enjoyed Armadale, you might like Collins's No Name, also available in Penguin Classics.

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A fascinating account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from best-selling historian and critic Kathryn Hughes.In Victorians Undone, renowned British historian Kathryn Hughes follows five iconic figures of the nineteenth century as they encounter the world not through their imaginations or intellects but through their bodies. Or rather, through their body parts. Using the vivid language of admiring glances, cruel sniggers, and implacably turned backs, Hughes crafts a narrative of cinematic quality by combining a series of truly eye-opening and deeply intelligent accounts of life in Victorian England.Lady Flora Hastings is an unmarried lady-in-waiting at young Queen Victoria's court whose swollen stomach ignites a scandal that almost brings the new reign crashing down. Darwin's iconic beard provides important new clues to the roles that men and women play in the great dance of natural selection. George Eliot brags that her right hand is larger than her left, but her descendants are strangely desperate to keep the information secret. The poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, meanwhile, takes his art and his personal life in a new direction thanks to the bee-stung lips of his secret mistress, Fanny Cornforth. Finally, we meet Fanny Adams, an eight-year-old working-class girl whose tragic evisceration tells us much about the currents of desire and violence at large in the mid-Victorian countryside. While 'bio-graphy' parses as 'the writing of a life,' the genre itself has often seemed willfully indifferent to the vital signs of that life—to breath, movement, touch, and taste. Nowhere is this truer than when writing about the Victorians, who often figure in their own life stories as curiously disembodied. In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

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The first full edition of the correspondence, between three artists Joanna Boyce, her brother George P. Boyce and Henry Wells, who she eventually married. It dates from the period 1845 to 1861, and covers artistic life in both Paris and London, including the Pre-Raphaelites. This correspondence, between three artists Joanna Boyce, her brother George P. Boyce and Henry Wells, whom she eventually married, dates from the period 1845 to 1861. They were all friends of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, but in addition Henry and Joanna both studied in Paris, and Joanna wrote extensively about her time there, training with Thomas Couture. She wrote for The Saturday Review as well as painting a small number of very interesting and much admired pictures. Her brother George established himself as a successful watercolourist and member of the Old Watercolour Society, having been encouraged both by David Cox on his Welsh sketching expeditions,and by Ruskin, whose letters advising him what to paint in Venice are included here. Henry Wells was primarily a portrait painter. At first he specialised in miniatures, and was commissioned to paint Mary, princess of Cambridge byQueen Victoria. There are vivid accounts of visits to country houses to carry out commissions from their owners. The three wrote constantly about techniques of painting and about the new colours that became available at this period, and about their visits to exhibitions both in Paris and London. They all contributed to the Royal Academy and other exhibitions. In addition, there is the extraordinary story of Joanna's and Henry's courtship and marriage, at first encouraged and then viciously opposed by Joanna's recently widowed mother. The correspondence survives only in an unpublished transcript made in the 1940s, as the originals were all destroyed in a bombing raid on Bath during the second world war. Excerpts from George P. Boyce's diaries were published in the 1930s, but the present edition contains a considerable amount of new material.

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During her difficult childhood, Esther Newton recalls that she “became an anti-girl, a girl refusenik, caught between genders,” and that her “child body was a strong and capable instrument stuffed into the word ‘girl.’” Later, in early adulthood, as she was on her way to becoming a trailblazing figure in gay and lesbian studies, she “had already chosen higher education over the strongest passion in my life, my love for women, because the two seemed incompatible.” In My Butch Career Newton tells the compelling, disarming, and at times sexy story of her struggle to write, teach, and find love, all while coming to terms with her identity during a particularly intense time of homophobic persecution in the twentieth century. Newton recounts a series of traumas and conflicts, from being molested as a child to her failed attempts to live a “normal,” straight life in high school and college. She discusses being denied tenure at Queens College—despite having written the foundational Mother Camp—and nearly again so at SUNY Purchase. With humor and grace, she describes the influence her father Saul's strong masculinity had on her, her introduction to middle-class gay life, and her love affairs—including one with a well-known abstract painter and another with a French academic she met on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Mexico and with whom she traveled throughout France and Switzerland. By age forty, where Newton's narrative ends, she began to achieve personal and scholarly stability in the company of the first politicized generation of out lesbian and gay scholars with whom she helped create gender and sexuality studies. Affecting and immediate, My Butch Career is a story of a gender outlaw in the making, an invaluable account of a beloved and influential figure in LGBT history, and a powerful reminder of just how recently it has been possible to be an openly queer academic.

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“I love this book! Brilliant biography of the…utterly fascinating artist Isabel Rawsthorne” Jennifer Higgie “Every page is gripping, fascinating, forcefully and excitingly written, and sad.” Andrew Motion “Isabel Rawsthorne’s life reads like a ready-made screenplay… – a poverty stricken upbringing, world wars, espionage, affairs, addiction, politics … all set to a series of evocative cinematic backdrops. And that’s before any mention of her career as one of the most hidden but influential artists of the 20th century.” Interiors and Home “Jacobi’s bigger project here, seems to be to reimagine what an artist biography… can be.” The Art Newspaper “Highlights how talented women have often missed out on the recognition they deserved” Observer Isabel Rawsthorne’s painting career at the centre of the Parisian and London avantgardes was eclipsed by the many occasions on which her friends made her the subject of their art, notably Epstein, Derain, Giacometti, Picasso and Bacon. This pioneering painter exhibited from the early 1930s, was influential in the 1940s and well known in the 1960s, but in her later years Giacometti’s and Bacon’s blockbuster biographies made her famous as a muse. Rawsthorne’s work is now in major collections, and this beautifully illustrated book re-writes the pre- and post-war art history of which she was a part: it is traced through the upheavals of the 20th century and her singular relationships with some of its most fascinating figures. A decade of research into the period, Rawsthorne’s art and archives, and the memories of friends, has revealed for the first time her role in a rebel group at Liverpool School of Art; success and tragedy in the 1930s when she was studio assistant to Jacob Epstein; her life-long collaborations with Alberto Giacometti; and, after the war, with Francis Bacon and with African Modernism in the 1960s, as well as her exceptional late work. It also tells the full story of her break from art during the second world war, when she worked for the government in black propaganda.

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Emma, Lady Hamilton, rose from poverty to become a media celebrity, and her relationship with Admiral Nelson, and her renowned beauty, made her the most instantly-recognisable woman of her era, with the press following her every move. She was a friend of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, longed-after by the Prince of Wales, and was a high society fashion icon. Born in 1765, Emma was the daughter of the village blacksmith in Neston, Cheshire, who died just two months later, leaving the family in difficult circumstances. After failing to find a permanent position locally, Emma took the stagecoach to London and the start of her remarkable journey to international fame. Emma worked for various actresses at Dury Lane theatre, before becoming a dancer, a model and, later, a hostess. Her beauty brought her to the attention of Charles Grenville, the second son of the Earl of Warwick, who took her as his mistress, and became the model for the painter George Romney. These paintings thrust Emma into the social spotlight and she soon became London's top celebrity. When Grenville needed to find a rich wife, Emma was passed onto Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to Naples. The couple fell in love and were married in September 1791. When in Naples, Lady Hamilton, as she now was, became a close friend of Queen Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette. It was also in Naples that she met Admiral Nelson - and the great love affair began. Much has been written about this later period of her life, but with Hugh Tours making full use of the letters Emma wrote as well as those she received throughout her life, the fascinating story of her early years is also revealed. This is history as moving as a great tragic novel; most moving of all, being the return, after Trafalgar, of Emma's last letter to Nelson, unopened.

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15th-c. adaptations of Chrétien de Troyes, the use of motifs, and standard features including current state of research and book review section. Setting the tone for volume 24 is a trio of articles on 15th-century French adaptations of Chrétien de Troyes's Arthurian romances. Norris Lacy examines adaptation and reception in Cligés,Jane Taylor writes on the importance of cultural details to reception studies of both Erec and Cligés, and Maria Timelli on structural aspects of Erec. Other studies of romance include MaryLynn Saul's article on courtly love and patriarchal marriage institutions in Malory, and Anne Caillaud's piece on gender conventions of courtly love as a vehicle for misogyny in Antoine de la Sale's Petit Jehan de Saintre. Hans-Joachim Behr deals with an adaptation of the 12th-century historical figure of Heinrich von der Löwe in his article on the poetic workof Michel Wyssenherre. Roxana Recio's article on Spanish "amplifications and glosses" draws connections between translation, reception, and interpretation.Moving from romance to legend, Peter De Wilde, in his article on the legendary matter of St. Patrick's journeys to Purgatory, relates a 15th-century account of one Englishman's "visionary pilgrimage" to that destination.A second area of concentration in the volume is the thematic and structural use of motifs. Rainer Goetz discusses archery in Spanish poetry of love and death; Georg Roellenbleck courtly pastimes and the term passe temps inFrench poetry. James Wilkins focuses on the "body as currency" in French passion plays. Kristine Patz moves into art history, examining the importance of the Pythagorean ypsilonin the work of the Italian painter Mantegna.Dealing with the turn to Renaissance humanism are articles by Grady Smith on the short literary career and Latin dramas of Titus Livius Frulovisi, and by Christiane Raynaudon humanism and good government in the Latin Romuleon. Franco Mormando investigates a darker moment: the 1426 witch trial in Rome and the role of Bernardino of Siena as its instigator and chronicler. Rouben Choulakian writes on the poetry of Charles d'Orlean

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This major work comprises a comprehensive study of Eastern and Western esoteric streams and the occult powers that stand behind them. In Part 1 Prokofieff discusses the spiritual movement of Agni Yoga, presented to the world by Helena Roerich and her husband, the painter Nicholas Roerich. Part 2 focuses on the teachings developed by Alice Bailey, whilst Part 3 considers the relationship between Eastern and Western spiritual masters and the occult streams they represent. The first two Parts of the book give descriptions of both the Roerichs' and Alice Bailey's philosophy, based on their own perspective, together with anthroposophical commentaries that give an understanding of these two streams in the light of modern Christian esotericism. As Prokofieff points out, both the Roerichs and Bailey were convinced that the occult teachers who inspired them were the same as those referred to by the founder of Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky. Part 3 deals directly with the mystery of the Eastern teachers, or mahatmas, and their relationship to Christian esotericism. On the basis of extensive research, Prokofieff comes to the startling conclusion that the occultists whom both the Roerichs and Alice Bailey named as their leaders actually have nothing in common with Blavatsky's Eastern mahatmas. In Prokofieff's words: 'Hence...one has to do not with the Eastern mahatmas but with quite different occultists who had illicitly appropriated their names and then tried - while deliberately misleading their followers - to attain their highly dubious occult political aims with the help of the occult movements which had already been initiated.' Prokofieff argues that this appropriation led to a distortion of the age-old Eastern philosophies, giving them an anti-Christian character, and led to phenomena such as 'occult materialism', insidious political goals, and prophecies of a physically incarnating 'Messiah'. Previously available only in German as three separate books, with just an early version of Part 1 published in English, this long-awaited translation of Prokofieff's incisive study offers a fine schooling in discernment, judgement and spiritual insight.

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This biography charts the life of Paddy Moriarty, the Kerryborn Chief Executive of ESB, a man who revolutionized corporate life during his leadership of the largest semi-state company in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Dingle in 1926, he became one of Ireland's leading business people of the twentieth century as he transformed ESB into a world-class electricity provider and a highly efficient, commercially driven company. Having built the power infrastructure of the new State, ESB played a critical role in the revitalization of the Irish economy and, on Moriarty's watch, proceeded to assist in developing the foundations of the Celtic Tiger economy. His vision was to make ESB 'the best electricity utility in the whole world', developing the highest standards of infrastructure at home while developing an international business in the economies of North and Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. Moriarty joined ESB as a clerical officer in June 1945 at the age of nineteen and quickly gained a reputation as a young man with a determined view on how business should be run. He rose rapidly through the company ranks. He was head of Research and Audit in 1961, Assistant Chief Financial Officer in 1967 and Director Personnel in 1970, before becoming Chief Executive in 1981 and Chairman ESB in 1991. The man they called Paddy Mo conducted comprehensive and difficult industrial relations negotiations with the trade unions, ensuring harmony in the workplace during the 1980s – a decade of fast-moving change, massive technological reform and associated redundancies. His interpersonal skills, as well as his business instincts, became legendary. With Taoiseach Charles Haughey he helped pioneer the North-South Erne Waterways project in a bid to revitalize border communities. He was also a significant patron of the arts, encouraging sponsorship of painters, sculptors and musicians. His wide-ranging interests included sports and horse racing, with one of the Leopardstown classics being named in his honour. A sense of family, which included his younger brother Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh the renowned GAA broadcaster and commentator, was central to his world view.

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Discover art that dared to be different, risked reputations and put careers in jeopardy. This is what happens when artists take tradition and rip it up. ArtQuake tells the stories of 50 pivotal works that shook the world, telling the fascinating stories behind their creation, reception and legacy. The books begin with the rebels who struck out against Victorian conformism, daring painters and sculptors like Manet and Rodin, Van Gogh and Courbet, who experimented with expressionist and realist art styles as well as controversial subjects. Moving into the fin de siècle and the 20th century, we study the truly iconic works and turbulent lives of artists like Munch and Klimt, Picasso and Egon Schiele, whose work into abstraction, surrealism and cubism shocked and scandalized, but ultimately changed the course of western art forever. Moving into the second half of the 20th Century, we see spectacular works of conceptual rebellion, absurdity and political protest, from Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement to Marina Abramovic, whose often visceral and violent works of performance art laid bare the savagery of the patriarchy and the human condition. In the 21st century, we see how iconoclastic creators have pushed the boundaries of art even further, from Banksy to Louise Bourgeoise, from self-destructing paintings to experimental works of computerized art. Complete with beautiful reproductions of their iconic works, as well as a glossary of terms and movements at the back, meet the huge egos, uncompromising feminists, gifted recluses, spiritualists, anti-consumerists, activists and satirists who have irrevocably carved their names into the history of art around the world. In telling the history of modern and contemporary art through the works that were truly disruptive, and explaining the context in which each was created, ArtQuake demonstrates the heart of modern art, which is to constantly question and challenge expectation. This book is from the Culture Quake series, which looks into iconic moments of culture which truly created paradigm shifts in their respective fields. Also available is FilmQuake, which tells the stories of 50 key films that consciously questioned the boundaries, challenged the status quo and made shockwaves we are still feeling today.

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Ernie O’Malley was a revolutionary republican and writer. One of the leading figures in the Irish independence and civil wars, he survived wounds, imprisonment and hunger strike, before going to the USA in 1928 to fundraise on de Valera’s behalf. Broken Landscapes tells of his subsequent journeys, through Europe and the Americas, where O’Malley moved in wide social circles that included Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Hart Crane and Jack B. Yeats. Back in Mayo he took up farming. In 1935 he married Helen Hooker, an American heiress, with whom he had three children, Cathal, Etain and Cormac, before a bitter separation. His literary reputation was established with a magnificent memoir, On Another Man’s Wound (1936). In later years he was close to John Ford, and worked on The Quiet Man (1952). This vibrant new collection of letters, diaries and fragments opens up the broad panorama of his life to readers. It enriches the history of Ireland’s troubled independence with reflections on loss and reconciliation. It links the old world to the new – O’Malley perched on the edge of the Atlantic, a folklore collector, art critic and radio broadcaster; autodidact, modernist and intellectual. It conducts a unique conversation with the past. In Broken Landscapes, we travel with O’Malley through Italy, the American Southwest, Mexico and points inbetween. In Taos, he mingled wiht the artistic set around D. H. Lawrence. In Ireland, he drank with Patrick Kavanagh, Liam O’Flaherty and Louis MacNiece. The young painter Louis le Brocquy was his guest on his farm in Burrishoole, Co. Mayo. These places and people remained with O’Malley in his private writing, assembled for the first time from family and institutional archives. Reading these letters, dairies and fragments is to see Ireland in the tumultuous world of the twentieth century, as if for the first time, allowing us to view the intellectual foundations of the State through the eyes of its leading chronicler.

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A new selection of post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gough's letters, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh put a human face on one of the most haunting figures in modern Western culture. In this Penguin Classics edition, the letters are selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw, and translated by Arnold Pomerans in Penguin Classics.Few artists' letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh's, and this selection, spanning his artistic career, sheds light on every facet of the life and work of this complex and tortured man. Engaging candidly and movingly with his religious struggles, his ill-fated search for love, his attacks of mental illness and his relation with his brother Theo, the letters contradict the popular myth of van Gogh as an anti-social madman and a martyr to art, showing instead a man of great emotional and spiritual depths. Above all, they stand as an intense personal narrative of artistic development and a unique account of the process of creation. The letters are linked by explanatory biographical passages, revealing van Gogh's inner journey as well as the outer facts of his life. This edition also includes the drawings that originally illustrated the letters.Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) was born in Holland. In 1885 he painted his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, a haunting scene of domestic poverty. A year later he began studying in Paris, where he met Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, who became very important influences on his work. In 1888 he left Paris for the Provencal landscape at Arles, the subject of many of his best works, including Sunflowers.If you enjoyed The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, you might also like 100 Artists Manifestos, available in Penguin Modern Classics.'If there was ever any doubt that Van Gogh's letters belong beside those great classics of artistic self-revelation, Cellini's autobiography and Delacroix's journal, this excellent new edition dispels it'The Times

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"Through the format of the letter and the correspondence, Delrue implements his stance with regard to the role of contemporary drawing as a valid generator of artistic languages and as a humble, yet effectively poetic alternative to the virtual circulation of digital images between the communication systems that surround us." - Ory Dessau, art critic "The unique character and strength of Ronny Delrue's work are the result of his intense search for the essence of Being. [...] In a highly meticulous, almost obsessive way, he explores the sensitive fault line between control and loss of control. The process, the path, the quest is of fundamental importance to this exploration. The quest is not idiosyncratic, it is not inward, it allows room for dialogue with others, like a mirror image in which the encounter occurs, as in a crossover of minds." - Carine Fol, artistic director CENTRALE for Contemporary Art, Brussels "What is more beautiful than the circle left on a piece of paper by a coffee cup, even if an algorithm can produce a lifelike imitation? What is even lovelier is the artists' ideas, the exchange, the noise, the geographical and cultural differences, the slowness, the simplicity, the banality, the trace, the moment, the text, the language, the distance, the ideas, the powerlessness." - Philippe Van Cauteren, artistic director S.M.A.K., Ghent In recent years, Ronny Delrue (*1957) corresponded with six artists namely: Martin Assig (Germany), Salam Atta Sabri (Iraq), Roger Ballen (South Africa), Sanjeev Maharjan (Nepal), Mithu Sen (India) and Christine Remacle (Belgium). Through exchanges in the form of drawings, letter fragments and collages, among other things, this publication not only explores the encounters between artists with different geographical backgrounds and cultural attitudes; it also looks at Delrue's own oeuvre from a new angle. Ronny Delrue is a painter, but first and foremost an artist for whom drawing is a core activity. For him, drawing is a way of thinking, a state of being. For this project a conscious decision was made to send the letters by post, as opposed to the swift exchange of digitally scanned documents. Correspondances is an ode to slowness and a tribute to human acts, in which representation becomes the language of the encounter. Text in English, French and Dutch.

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A fascinating account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from best-selling historian and critic Kathryn Hughes.In Victorians Undone, renowned British historian Kathryn Hughes follows five iconic figures of the nineteenth century as they encounter the world not through their imaginations or intellects but through their bodies. Or rather, through their body parts. Using the vivid language of admiring glances, cruel sniggers, and implacably turned backs, Hughes crafts a narrative of cinematic quality by combining a series of truly eye-opening and deeply intelligent accounts of life in Victorian England.Lady Flora Hastings is an unmarried lady-in-waiting at young Queen Victoria's court whose swollen stomach ignites a scandal that almost brings the new reign crashing down. Darwin's iconic beard provides important new clues to the roles that men and women play in the great dance of natural selection. George Eliot brags that her right hand is larger than her left, but her descendants are strangely desperate to keep the information secret. The poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, meanwhile, takes his art and his personal life in a new direction thanks to the bee-stung lips of his secret mistress, Fanny Cornforth. Finally, we meet Fanny Adams, an eight-year-old working-class girl whose tragic evisceration tells us much about the currents of desire and violence at large in the mid-Victorian countryside. While 'bio-graphy' parses as 'the writing of a life,' the genre itself has often seemed willfully indifferent to the vital signs of that life—to breath, movement, touch, and taste. Nowhere is this truer than when writing about the Victorians, who often figure in their own life stories as curiously disembodied. In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

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An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

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Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America’s most revered and widely read film critics, more famous than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the 1960s and beyond were deeply influenced by four earlier critics: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler scrutinized what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Although largely ignored by the arts media of the day, they honed the sort of serious discussion of films that would be made popular decades later by Kael, Sarris, Ebert and their contemporaries. With The Rhapsodes, renowned film scholar and critic David Bordwell—an heir to both those legacies—restores to a wider audience the work of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the “Rhapsodes” for the passionate and deliberately offbeat nature of their vernacular prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism in order to find new ways to talk about the popular films that contemporaries often saw at best as trivial, at worst as a betrayal of art. Ferguson saw in Hollywood an engaging, adroit mode of popular storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies found in romantic poetry. Farber, trained as a painter, brought a pictorial intelligence to bear on film. A surrealist, Tyler treated classic Hollywood as a collective hallucination that invited both audience and critic to find moments of subversive pleasure. With his customary clarity and brio, Bordwell takes readers through the relevant cultural and critical landscape and considers the critics’ writing styles, their conceptions of films, and their quarrels. He concludes by examining the profound impact of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler on later generations of film writers.The Rhapsodes allows readers to rediscover these remarkable critics who broke with convention to capture what they found moving, artful, or disappointing in classic Hollywood cinema and explores their robust—and continuing—influence.

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The Imagery of Chess Revisited recovers a celebrated and extraordinary moment in art history: the 1944-45 exhibition The Imagery of Chess, held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. The exhibit was a legend in its own time and has been considered a singular event in the history of art exhibitions ever since. The show's organizersthe influential art dealer Julien Levy, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, and Dada leader Marcel Duchamp, himself a serious chess playerinvited a virtual "who's who" of artists and members of the cultural avant-garde to redesign the standard chess set or otherwise explore chess imagery and its symbolism in bold new ways. Participants included famous European expatriates and soon-to-be famous American modernists: Andre Breton, Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Ernst, Man Ray, Isamu Noguchi, and Yves Tanguy are among those who contributed chess sets; John Cage and Vittorio Rieti created original musical scores; and Dorothea Tanning, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Man Ray, Matta, Robert Motherwell, and others produced pivotal chess-related paintings, sculptures, and photographic works. Featuring new color photographs as well as rarely seen archival images, recollections by participants and their descendants, and period reviews, The Imagery of Chess Revisited includes previously unpublished works. Among them are Andre Breton and Nicolas Calas's wine-glass chess set and Alexander Calder's chess set made of found materials, in addition to thirty-five of Calder's chess-related drawings. An essay by Larry List explores the chess designs as visual objects and pivotal creations in the context of participating artists' lives and work. Lowell Cross and Paul B. Franklin examine the two musical scores included in the show; and Ingrid Schaffner provides an introduction to the art-world milieu in which The Imagery of Chess took place. 50 illustrations in color, 80 in black and white.

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An astonishing discovery was made in 1995 during the British Library's removal from the British Museum. Thirty-four letters and eighteen draft poems, including "Break of Day in the Trenches", "Dead Man's Dump", and "Returning, We Hear the Larks" by the poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg were found in a bundle of papers stored by former museum keeper Laurence Binyon, himself a poet and Rosenberg's mentor. After his death as a private soldier on the Western Front on 1 April 1918, Isaac Rosenberg, now regarded as a major poet of the First World War, was largely forgotten, and only the devotion of his family and the support of his fellow poets rescued his work for posterity. Binyon and another older poet, Gordon Bottomley, encouraged and corresponded with Rosenberg until his death, and then edited his poems and extracts from his letters for publication. The newly discovered papers include all Rosenberg's complete letters and draft poems to Binyon and Bottomley, together with material about Rosenberg from family, friends and mentors such as his sister Annie, Whitechapel librarian Morley Dainow, schoolteacher Winifreda Seaton, and patron Frank Emmanuel. All are published here, most for the first time. At first overshadowed by the more acceptably English war poets, Rosenberg's poetry did not fit the poetic ideals of the time, just as he, an East End Jew born of immigrant parents, did not present the accepted public image of the heroic soldier poet. The originality and strength of his poetry were rooted in the struggle with the opposing elements of his life, which did not follow the conventions of any role he played: East End Jew, poet, painter or soldier. In one unpublished letter from the trenches he reveals his difficulties, 'I don't suppose my poems will ever be poetry right and proper until I shall be able to settle down and whip myself into more expression. As it is, my not being able to get poetry out of my head & heart causes me sufficient trouble out here.' (Letter to Bottomley, postmarked 11 July 1917)

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A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the Foiled Quarto Journals combine high-quality production and FSC pages with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, list-makers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. A NEW SERIES. The Quarto format is named after the earliest form of European printed publication, dating back to the 1400s when Gutenberg invented the first moveable-type printing press, heralding a revolution in mass communication, spreading ideas of literature, science and philosophy of the Renaissance. We celebrate this with our range of fine art and contemporary illustrations. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk, table, in the hand and in your bag. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: the high-quality, 120-gsm lined pages are FSC, Acid Free and Bleed Proof – suitable for all pen types, such as gel and rollerball. A pocket at the back for scraps and receipts, two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list, and a magnetic side flap helps keep everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. The most notable period in printmaker and painter Katsushika Hokusai's artistic life was the latter part of his career, beginning in 1830 when he was 70 years old. He began the series of woodblock print landscapes he is most famous for: 'Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji', which included The Great Wave, off Kanagawa, probably his most iconic image. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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A resident of Nashville whose work has been exhibited and collected internationally, Jack Spencer alters the surfaces of his photographs with techniques suggestive of painting - rich patinas and luminous colours, softly-focused or veiled forms, and traces of the artist's hand: imperfections, marks, and painterly textures. The exhibition catalog consists of an essay by Susan Edwards and 70 full-page colour plates selected from such series as ""Native Soil,"" ""Apariciones,"" ""This Land,"" and ""Portraits and Gestures"" to exemplify the relationship between these compelling surfaces and Spencer's interest in myth, mystery, and the ephemeral nature of existence that is implied by and beyond the surface. Each of six sections includes works from various series in which the language of photography is expanded to convey narratives inspired by other art forms, especially literature and painting. ""Portraits and Figures"" reveals Spencer's capacity to define the psychological complexity of the people he photographs, who often occupy the periphery of society. Further exploring the theme of hidden narratives, but as suggested by the altered face, ""Disguise/Perform"" includes photographs - primarily taken in Mexico - featuring masked and painted figures often associated with ancient rituals and alternative life styles. ""Beautiful Lies"" includes new work in which the exposed skin of subjects has been painted or otherwise altered by the artist and then photographed with luminous props and mysterious settings to underscore the sense of artifice, as if the body itself is shown to be an imaginative construction. ""Day into Night"" continues Spencer's consideration of transitions from one state of being to another, this time through the use of ephemeral plays of light and shadow, often suggesting dawn or dusk as signifiers of change. The final two sections focus on the symbolic meaning and phenomenological experiences of the landscape. Inspired by such regionalist painters as Grant Wood, ""This Land"" includes works that convey dreamlike views of rural and small-town America. ""Colour as Light"" features landscapes in which the limpid atmosphere merges land, trees, animals, and sky into a palpable gestalt - landscapes of the mind's eye that evoke the limitless quality of Mark Rothko's colour-saturated canvases.

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Carpeted in boreal forests, dotted with lakes, cut by rivers, and straddling the Arctic Circle, the region surrounding the White Sea, which is known as the Russian North, is sparsely populated and immensely isolated. It is also the home to architectural marvels, as many of the original wooden and brick churches and homes in the region's ancient villages and towns still stand. Featuring nearly two hundred full color photographs of these beautiful centuries-old structures, Architecture at the End of the Earth is the most recent addition to William Craft Brumfield's ongoing project to photographically document all aspects of Russian architecture.The architectural masterpieces Brumfield photographed are diverse: they range from humble chapels to grand cathedrals, buildings that are either dilapidated or well cared for, and structures repurposed during the Soviet era. Included are onion-domed wooden churches such as the Church of the Dormition, built in 1674 in Varzuga; the massive walled Transfiguration Monastery on Great Solovetsky Island, which dates to the mid-1550s; the Ferapontov-Nativity Monastery's frescoes, painted in 1502 by Dionisy, one of Russia's greatest medieval painters; nineteenth-century log houses, both rustic and ornate; and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Vologda, which was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s. The text that introduces the photographs outlines the region's significance to Russian history and culture.Brumfield is challenged by the immense difficulty of accessing the Russian North, and recounts traversing sketchy roads, crossing silt-clogged rivers on barges and ferries, improvising travel arrangements, being delayed by severe snowstorms, and seeing the region from the air aboard the small planes he needs to reach remote areas.The buildings Brumfield photographed, some of which lie in near ruin, are at constant risk due to local indifference and vandalism, a lack of maintenance funds, clumsy restorations, or changes in local and national priorities. Brumfield is concerned with their futures and hopes that the region's beautiful and vulnerable achievements of master Russian carpenters will be preserved. Architecture at the End of the Earth is at once an art book, a travel guide, and a personal document about the discovery of this bleak but beautiful region of Russia that most readers will see here for the first time.

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"How tame and manageable are the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions!" complained essayist T. W. Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1870. "The American poet of passion is yet to come." He was, of course, unaware of the great erotic love poems such as "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" and "Struck was I, nor yet by Lightning" being privately written by his reclusive friend Emily Dickinson.In a profound new analysis of Dickinson's life and work, Judith Farr explores the desire, suffering, exultation, spiritual rapture, and intense dedication to art that characterize Dickinson's poems, and deciphers their many complex and witty references to texts and paintings of the day. In The Passion of Emily Dickinson the poet emerges, not as a cryptic proto-modern or a victim of female repression, but as a cultivated mid-Victorian in whom the romanticism of Emerson and the American landscape painters found bold expression.Dickinson wrote two distinct cycles of love poetry, argues Farr, one for her sister-in-law Sue and one for the mysterious "Master," here convincingly identified as Samuel Bowles, a friend of the family. For each of these intimates, Dickinson crafted personalized metaphoric codes drawn from her reading. Calling books her "Kinsmen of the Shelf," she refracted elements of Jane Eyre, Antony and Cleopatra, Tennyson's Maud, De Quincey's Confessions, and key biblical passages into her writing. And, to a previously unexplored degree, Dickinson also quoted the strategies and subject matter of popular Hudson River, Luminist, and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, notably Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life and Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes. Involved in the delicate process of both expressing and disguising her passion, Dickinson incorporated these sources in an original and sophisticated manner.Farr's superb readings of the poems and letters call on neglected archival material and on magazines, books, and paintings owned by the Dickinsons. Viewed as part of a finely articulated tradition of Victorian iconography, Dickinson's interest in the fate of the soul after death, her seclusion, her fascination with landscape's mystical content, her quest for honor and immortality through art, and most of all her very human passions become less enigmatic. Farr tells the story of a poet and her time.

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In 1932, Benno Weiser Varon was a student of medicine in Vienna. During a brawl at the Anatomic Institute he rescues a Jewish fellow student, when he cracked the skull of a huge Nazi with two outsized metal keys, while some thirty Nazis watched from an upper floor. He considered this event his rite of passage, in which he proved to himself that “Jews are no cowards.” Life would give him many an opportunity to prove it again. A Jewish Rambo? Not at all. Fellow Viennese remember him for making them laugh. He wrote, directed, and performed in literary cabarets. Gerhard Bronner, Vienna’s foremost entertainer, claims that watching Weiser perform inspired his choice of career. “All I could take along from Nazi Vienna,” says Weiser Varon, “was my accent.” But he also exported his fighting spirit. As Ecuador’s first syndicated columnist, blending drama with satire, he dispensed faith to those who rooted for the Allies and heartburn to the powerful Nazi colony. The Axis powers sponsored seven weeklies to counteract his influence, there was an interpellation in parliament, a “promise” by the minister of the interior to silence him, an op-ed dual with a Vichy diplomat. The New York Times, reporting on his struggle, called him one of Latin America’s best known columnists. In 1946 the World Zionist Organization drafted him into its campaign to convince the nations of Latin America of the justice of the Jewish fight for statehood. Varon’s niche in history is the U.N. Palestine Partition Resolution of 1947. The Encyclopedia Judaica credits him and a colleague with the decisive Latin American votes. In 1964 Golda Meir appointed him ambassador to a succession of Latin American countries. In 1970 Baron survived an assassination attempt by Palestinian terrorists. In 1972 he retired from diplomacy and returned to journalism. Varon met Albert Einstein and Aleksandr Kerensky as well as the Who’s Who of Latin-American writers, painters, intellectuals, and statesmen, such as Perón, Castro, the Somozas, Stroessner. He also placed second-best in a joke contest with Bob Hope and, together with his actress-wife, wrote a play, “A Letter to the Times,” which was produced in both English and Spanish.

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The myth of Van Gogh today is linked as much to his extraordinary life as it is to his stunning paintings. His biography has often shaped the way that his self-portraits have been (mis)understood. Van Gogh. Self-Portraits reconsiders this aspect of his production and places the artist’s self-representation in context to reveal the role it plays in his oeuvre. It also explores the power and profound emotion of these highly personal paintings.Van Gogh. Self-Portraits is the first time this theme has been exclusively addressed. Self-portraits painted during Van Gogh’s time in Paris (February 1886 – February 1888) have been the subject of two exhibitions (in 1960 at Marlborough Fine Arts in London and in 1995 at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg) but never has the full chronological range been explored. The exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, which this volume accompanies, features paintings from both the Parisian and Provençal periods. It brings together half of Van Gogh’s thirty-five known self-portraits to examine the ways the artist approached this particular subject-matter. On a practical level, painting himself provided Van Gogh with the cheapest and most patient of models and represented an important conduit for stylistic experimentation. He also used self-portraiture as an homage to his illustrious Dutch predecessor Rembrandt, as well as a way of fashioning his own identity and presenting himself to the outside world. Of particular interest is the striking way the evolution of Van Gogh's self-representation over the short years of his artistic activity can be seen as a microcosm of his development as a painter.In addition to the world-famous Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear in The Courtauld’s collection, the exhibition showcases a group of major masterpieces brought together from international collections, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Muse d’Orsay in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others. This beautifully illustrated catalogue includes detailed entries on each work, an appendix illustrating all of Van Gogh’s self-portraits and three insightful essays on the theme.

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Lindsey Davis has received the Crime Writer's Association Lifetime Achievement Award for her two immortal series of detective novels featuring Marcus Didius Falco and his adopted daughter, Flavia Albia. She is regarded as the finest living novelist of Ancient Rome. Here, for the first time in book form, are four novella-length stories written to illuminate her unparalleled output of the last 30 years.The Bride from Bithynia tells the story of Aelia Camilla who travels 1000 miles to Britain to marry Gaius Flavius, a Roman officer. But their relationship struggles, then the province explodes in the Boudican Revolt. Now, it will be up to Aelia to save herself from the conflagration. The Spook Who Spoke Again. Marcus Didius Alexander Postumus is an odd boy who has known two families. That of Marcus Didius himself and his actual birth mother, Thalia the Snake Dancer. Things begin to unravel quickly when he decides to emulate his adopted father and investigate a death in Thalia's troupe of exotic performers.Vesuvius by Night. Two men share a room but seldom meet. Nonius is a pimp and part time thief who operates at night, Larius is a fresco painter who dreams of artistic greatness by day. When the volcano erupts, one will begin looting hastily abandoned villas, the other will do anything he can to save himself and his family.Invitation to Die. When the Emperor Domitian invites the entire senatorial class to a banquet to honour the recent war dead, many think he intends to take revenge on his enemies. When the Camillus brothers enter the black-painted hall where the feast is being held and see their names engraved on monumental stones, they fear they will not survive the night...Four pivotal events, fact and fiction. Four stories which allow Davis's much-loved characters new space and the opportunity to take personal roles in tense situations, with moving results. They face villainy, tragedy, accident, confusion and fear - but each story is told with the wry humour, and underpinned by human wisdom, courage and love.

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Werner Reinisch (*1930) is the oldest active German painter in France, where he has lived and worked for around 60 years. This makes him a living symbol of Franco-German friendship. In 2023, the Élysée Treaty, which laid the foundation for Franco-German reconciliation and cooperation between the states, will celebrate its 60th anniversary. This provides an occasion to show paintings and drawings by Reinisch from the current series of works on black canvas. The catalogue, published by the Werner Reinisch Institute together with Montgelas Society for the Promotion of Bavarian-French Cooperation, shows drawings and oil paintings from the past years revealing the full diversity of the artist's work. In addition, the publication includes an autobiographical text by Reinisch and new aphorisms. 60 years of Werner Reinisch in France and 60 years of the Élysée Treaty Including the artist’s own aphorisms and biographical memories Exhibition Münchner Künstlerhaus am LenbachplatzDecember 8, 2022-January 14, 2023 Werner Reinisch (*1930) est le peintre allemand le plus âgé encore en activité en France, sa nouvelle patrie depuis environ 60 ans. Il est ainsi le symbole vivant de l’amitié franco-allemande. En 2023, le Traité de l’Élysée qui a jeté les bases de la réconciliation franco-allemande et de la coopération entre les deux états, fêtera son 60e anniversaire. C’est l’occasion de montrer des tableaux et des dessins de Reinisch issus de sa série d’oeuvres actuelles sur toile noire. Le catalogue, publié par l’Institut Werner Reinisch avec la Société Montgelas pour la promotion de la coopération franco-bavaroise, présente des dessins et des peintures à l’huile de ces dernières années qui révèlent la diversité de l’artiste. On y trouve également, outre de nouveaux aphorismes, un texte autobiographique de Reinisch...

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How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era-which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War, and ended with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression-there was a special belligerence to this question. It was a cultural period that envisioned many different models of itself: to the Cubists, it looked like a vast jigsaw puzzle; to the Expressionists, it resembled a convulsive body; to the Dadaists, it brought to mind a heap of junk following an explosion. In Putting Modernism Together, Daniel Albright searches for the center of the modernist movement by assessing these various artistic models, exploring how they generated a stunning range of creative work that was nonetheless wound together aesthetically, and sorting out the cultural assumptions that made each philosophical system attractive. Emerging from Albright's lectures for a popular Harvard University course of the same name, the book investigates different methodologies for comparing the evolution and congruence of artistic movements by studying simultaneous developments that occurred during particularly key modernist years. What does it mean, Albright asks, that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, appeared at the same time as Claude Debussy's Nocturnes-beyond the fact that the word "Impressionist" has been used to describe each work? Why, in 1912, did the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Vassily Kandinsky feel such striking artistic kinship? And how can we make sense of a movement, fragmented by isms, that looked for value in all sorts of under- or ill-valued places, including evil (Baudelaire), dung heaps (Chekhov), noise (Russolo), obscenity (Lawrence), and triviality (Satie)? Throughout Putting Modernism Together, Albright argues that human culture can best be understood as a growth-pattern or ramifying of artistic, intellectual, and political action. Going beyond merely explaining how the artists in these genres achieved their peculiar effects, he presents challenging new analyses of telling craft details which help students and scholars come to know more fully this bold age of aesthetic extremism.

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One of America's most popular and influential American artists, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) is renowned for his depictions of the Old West. Through paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he immortalized a dynamic world of cowboys and American Indians, hunters and horses, landscapes and wildlife. Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is a comprehensive presentation of the artist's body of flat work, both in print and on this book's companion website. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 figures and 100 color plates, this book offers insightful essays by notable art historians who explore Remington's experiences in Taos, New Mexico, and other parts of the West. The chapters include analyses of Remington's artistic development from an illustrator to a fine art painter, his search for and understanding of ""men with the bark on,"" his relationship with the famed illustrator Howard Pyle, and the shared imagery of Remington and ""Buffalo Bill"" Cody. A chapter considering Remington's enduring bond with the horse and its representation in his paintings follows an examination of Remington's ties to Theodore Roosevelt that reveals how the two men helped move the American conscience toward wildlife preservation. An assessment of the authentication process for evaluating Remington's works opens the collection: Remington is perhaps the most frequently faked American artist. The book features a unique keycode granting access to a companion website that brings together more than 3,000 reproductions of the artist's flat works, including the complete original 1996 edition of the Catalogue Raisonné and nearly 300 previously unknown or relocated pieces. Each entry includes the title, date, medium, size, inscriptions, provenance, and exhibition and publication history of the work, as well as select commentary. The online catalogue is fully searchable and will be continuously updated as new information becomes available. Based on decades of scholarship and research, the revised Remington Catalogue Raisonné is an essential resource for scholars, collectors, museum curators, historians of the American West, and anyone seeking definitive information on the art of Frederic Remington.Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is published in cooperation with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.

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How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era-which began roughly in 1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War, and ended with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression-there was a special belligerence to this question. It was a cultural period that envisioned many different models of itself: to the Cubists, it looked like a vast jigsaw puzzle; to the Expressionists, it resembled a convulsive body; to the Dadaists, it brought to mind a heap of junk following an explosion. In Putting Modernism Together, Daniel Albright searches for the center of the modernist movement by assessing these various artistic models, exploring how they generated a stunning range of creative work that was nonetheless wound together aesthetically, and sorting out the cultural assumptions that made each philosophical system attractive. Emerging from Albright's lectures for a popular Harvard University course of the same name, the book investigates different methodologies for comparing the evolution and congruence of artistic movements by studying simultaneous developments that occurred during particularly key modernist years. What does it mean, Albright asks, that Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, appeared at the same time as Claude Debussy's Nocturnes-beyond the fact that the word "Impressionist" has been used to describe each work? Why, in 1912, did the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Vassily Kandinsky feel such striking artistic kinship? And how can we make sense of a movement, fragmented by isms, that looked for value in all sorts of under- or ill-valued places, including evil (Baudelaire), dung heaps (Chekhov), noise (Russolo), obscenity (Lawrence), and triviality (Satie)? Throughout Putting Modernism Together, Albright argues that human culture can best be understood as a growth-pattern or ramifying of artistic, intellectual, and political action. Going beyond merely explaining how the artists in these genres achieved their peculiar effects, he presents challenging new analyses of telling craft details which help students and scholars come to know more fully this bold age of aesthetic extremism.

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The Ruskin Society Book of The Year. Who was John Ruskin? What did he achieve - and how? Where is he today? One possible answer: almost everywhere. John Ruskin was the Victorian age's best-known and most controversial intellectual. He was an art critic, a social activist, an early environmentalist; he was also a painter, writer, and a determined tastemaker in the fields of architecture and design. His ideas, which poured from his pen in the second half of the 19th century, sowed the seeds of the modern welfare state, universal state education and healthcare free at the point of delivery. His acute appreciation of natural beauty underpinned the National Trust, while his sensitivity to environmental change, decades before it was considered other than a local phenomenon, fuelled the modern green movement. His violent critique of free market economics, Unto This Last, has a claim to be the most influential political pamphlet ever written. Ruskin laid into the smug champions of Victorian capitalism, prefigured the current debate about inequality, executive pay, ethical business and automation. Gandhi is just one of the many whose lives were changed radically by reading Ruskin, and who went on to change the world. This book, timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of John Ruskin's birth in 2019, will retrace Ruskin's steps, telling his life story and visiting the places and talking to the people who - perhaps unknowingly - were influenced by Ruskin himself or by his profoundly important ideas. What, if anything, do they know about him? How is what they do or think linked to the vivid, difficult but often prophetic pronouncements he made about the way our modern world should look, live, work and think? As important, where - and why - have his ideas been swept away or displaced, sometimes by buildings, developments and practices that Ruskin himself would have abhorred? Part travelogue, part quest, part unconventional biography, this book will attempt to map Ruskinland: a place where, two centuries after John Ruskin's birth, more of us live than we know.

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Un juego intertextual que atraviesa la Ciudad de México con el espíritu de Juan Rulfo y Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.José Federico Burgos es un pintor frustrado devenido falsificador, atrapado en un esplendor surrealista y algo alarmante que involucra una obra maestra flamenca, un vagabundo pícaro y dos hermanos mellizos tan intimidantes como ingeniosos. Él bebe demasiado alcohol, deambula por la zona y, cada día que pasa sin lograr copiar la pintura, se acerca un poco más hacia lo que realmente sucede tras los altos muros del jardín.En homenaje a grandes como Juan Rulfo y Luis Barragán, Puertas demasiado pequeñas de Ave Barrera recorre la Guadalajara de fines del siglo XX con la exuberancia y excentricidad de una novela picaresca del siglo XVIII. Una travesura magnífica y lúdica que se adentra en asuntos como la identidad, el arte y la amistad; un retrato audaz, divertido e íntimo del México contemporáneo digno de El Bosco. The Spanish language edition of The Forgery_. A failing artist turned forger, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins—Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque._An artist races to finish his forgery of a masterpiece while held captive in surreal, menacing splendor.José Federico Burgos is a failed painter turned forger trapped in surreal, an architectural masterpiece hidden behind high walls, an impish vagabond, and some very resourceful, very intimidating twins—Forgery pays homage to greats like Juan Rulfo and Luis Barragán, traversing late 20th Century Guadalajara with the exuberance and eccentricity of an 18th Century picaresque.

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'A STRIKINGLY SHARP AND SUBTLE WRITER' Guardian'SUPERB...BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN...UNFORGETTABLE' FT Weekend'SKILFUL' Sunday Times 'RICH, INTRICATE, IMPRESSIVELY REALISED' Observer 'VIVIDLY REALISED' The Times'A VISION OF THE PAST AND A VISION OF THE FUTURE' Irish Times'A VIVID SLICE OF HISTORICAL FICTION' Sunday Express1815, Sumbawa Island, IndonesiaMount Tambora explodes in a cataclysmic eruption, killing thousands. Sent to investigate, ship surgeon Henry Hoggcan barely believe his eyes. Once a paradise, the island is now solid ash, the surrounding sea turned to stone. But worse is yet to come: as the ash cloud rises and covers the sun, the seasons will fail.1816In Switzerland, Mary Shelley finds dark inspiration. Confined inside by the unseasonable weather, thousands of famine refugees stream past her door. In Vermont, preacher Charles Whitlock begs his followers to keep faith as drought dries their wells and their livestock starve.In Suffolk, the ambitious and lovesick painter John Constable struggles to reconcile the idyllic England he paints with the misery that surrounds him. In the Fens, farm labourer Sarah Hobbs has had enough of going hungry while the farmers flaunt their wealth. And Hope Peter, returned from the Napoleonic wars, finds his family home demolished and a fence gone up in its place. He flees to London, where he falls in with a group of revolutionaries who speak of a better life, whatever the cost. As desperation sets in, Britain becomes beset by riots - rebellion is in the air.The Year Without Summer is the story of the books written, the art made; of the journeys taken, of the love longed for and the lives lost during that fateful year. Six separate lives, connected only by an event many thousands of miles away. Few had heard of Tambora - but none could escape its effects.'VIVID, VIBRANT, HARD TO PUT DOWN' Hilary Spurling'THOUGHT-PROVOKING, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND VERY COMPELLING' Harriet Tyce'INGENIOUS AND ABSORBING' Kirsty Wark 'ASTONISHING, RIVETING, MASTERFUL, POETIC' Emily Rapp Black 'A WORLDWIDE CANVAS BROUGHT TO LIFE IN VIVID, HEARTBREAKING DETAIL' Marianne Kavanagh

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This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world’s greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch’s artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858–1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch’s work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development.Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch’s early ‘realist’ phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist’s move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch’s career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch’s famous ‘Frieze of Life’ series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his ‘Frieze of Life’ works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch’s powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century.This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

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"In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers metaphors for those other antagonisms, the private battles of our private lives, our conflicts with one another and with the world, and with ourselves." Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers. On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes's essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself--the battlefield uproar of actual combat--is unimaginable for those who weren't there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren't, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can't possibly know. The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes's experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, e. e. cummings, and Cecil Day Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years--men like Samuel Hynes.

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This is the first catalogue of the collection of early modern ceramics in the Courtauld. The pieces in the collection showcase brilliantly the skill of potters and pottery painters working at the time of Raphael and Titian.Maiolica is one of the most revealing expressions of Renaissance art. Its extraordinary range of colours retain the vividness that they had when they left the potter's kiln. Italian potters absorbed techniques and shapes from the Islamic world and incorporated ornament and subject matter from the arts of ancient Rome. This new approach to pottery making, combined with the invention of printing, woodcut and engraving, resulted in an extraordinary type of painted pottery, praised by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists for 'surpassing the ancient with its brilliance of glaze and variety of painting'.The collection boasts a magnificent group of vessels made during the high Renaissance, the golden age of Italian maiolica. It includes precious and delicate Deruta lustreware with imagery deriving from Perugino and Raphael, as well as vessels painted in a narrative style of pottery painting known as istoriato. Highlights include vessels depicting episodes taken from the first printed Bibles of the Renaissance. Istoriato maiolica flourished particularly in the lands of the Dukes of Urbino, who promoted this craft by sending painted pottery to prestigious patrons across Europe.Emblems and devices painted on the pottery help us understand that they were meant to be used and enjoyed by the elites in Renaissance society, such as the Medici and other great Tuscan families. The catalogue will include two recent gifts to the Courtauld, a rare tile of the famous patroness of the arts Marchioness Isabella D'Este, and a refined dish painted with the story of Diana and Actaeon.All major Renaissance pottery centres are represented in the collection, including Siena, Faenza and Venice, as well as splendid examples of the mysterious pharmacy jars made at the foot of the mountain of Gran Sasso in the town of Castelli d'Abruzzo. These achievements of the art of pottery in the early modern period are completed by fine examples of Ottoman pottery, as well as examples of Valencian lustreware.Sani's introductory essay on the Victorian collector Thomas Gambier Parry will shed new light on the development of this fascinating collection, making links between Gambier Parry's artistic practice and his collecting and revealing new insights into his taste as a collector. Each detailed entry uncovers a wealth of new information on the provenance of the pieces.

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As an artist, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) defies easy description. Allied with the French impressionists through his commitment to portraying modern life, he also took an independent course, preferring line over color and the visible brushstroke, and working in a studio instead of out-of-doors. He is perhaps best known as a painter, but his most widely known work is a sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Executed in wax, near life-sized, dressed in a ballerina's tutu, with real ballet slippers and real hair, the sculpture caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1881. It is the only sculpture Degas ever showed publicly, though more than one hundred--of dancers, horses, and bathers--were found in his studio after he died, all dusty, some fallen apart. For almost forty years after his death, these works were known only through the bronzes his heirs had cast from the originals.Then, in 1955, the waxes themselves appeared on the art market. Thanks to the discernment and generosity of Paul Mellon, the majority are now preserved at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, most on permanent display. This groundbreaking volume honors this extraordinary gift by linking art and science. It brings together the insights of a distinguished art historian of nineteenth-century painting and sculpture and the specialized knowledge of National Gallery conservators and scientists who have published pioneering technical studies. Including essays on Degas' life and work, his sculptural technique and materials, and the story of the sculptures after his death, it features art-historical and technical discussions of every work in the collection as well as indispensable concordances and bibliography. The richly illustrated text is intended for both art lover and specialist. Was Degas the sculptor technically inept or unusually inventive? How do we understand his sculpture in light of his paintings, prints, and photographs? These questions and many others are explored with originality and depth, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the artistic avant-garde in the late nineteenth century and to our appreciation of this controversial artist.

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White supremacy shaped all aspects of post-Civil War southern life, yet its power was never complete or total. The form of segregation and subjection nicknamed Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself over time even as white southern politicians struggled to extend its grip. Here, some of the most innovative scholars of southern history question Jim Crow's sway, evolution, and methods over the course of a century. These essays bring to life the southern men and women--some heroic and decent, others mean and sinister, most a mixture of both--who supported and challenged Jim Crow, showing that white supremacy always had to prove its power. Jim Crow was always in motion, always adjusting to meet resistance and defiance by both African Americans and whites. Sometimes white supremacists responded with increased ferocity, sometimes with more subtle political and legal ploys. Jumpin' Jim Crow presents a clear picture of this complex negotiation. For example, even as some black and white women launched the strongest attacks on the system, other white women nurtured myths glorifying white supremacy. Even as elite whites blamed racial violence on poor whites, they used Jim Crow to dominate poor whites as well as blacks. Most important, the book portrays change over time, suggesting that Strom Thurmond is not a simple reincarnation of Ben Tillman and that Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to say no to Jim Crow. From a study of the segregation of household consumption to a fresh look at critical elections, from an examination of an unlikely antilynching campaign to an analysis of how miscegenation laws tried to sexualize black political power, these essays about specific southern times and places exemplify the latest trends in historical research. Its rich, accessible content makes Jumpin' Jim Crow an ideal undergraduate reader on American history, while its methodological innovations will be emulated by scholars of political history generally. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Edward L. Ayers, Elsa Barkley Brown, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Laura F. Edwards, Kari Frederickson, David F. Godshalk, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Stephen Kantrowitz, Nancy MacLean, Nell Irwin Painter, and Timothy B. Tyson.

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A highly-illustrated monograph on the life and work of Arthur Singer, an American wildlife artist specializing in birds. His work in reference books and U.S. stamps is internationally acclaimed. Arthur B. Singer was an American wildlife artist specializing in bird illustration. In a career spanning five decades, he illustrated more than 20 books, including his masterpiece, Birds of the World, as well as classic bird guides: Birds of North America, Birds of Europe, and The Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe. Singer joined the U.S. Army in 1942 and was assigned to Company C of the 603rd Camouflage Engineers.As a member of unit, known as the "Ghost Army," Singer along with other artists, created camouflage and other forms of deception on the battlefields of Europe. Upon his return to the U.S., he worked briefly in an advertising agency and became a full-time illustrator and artist in 1955. During the 1980s, assisted by his son, Alan, Singer's paintings of state birds were seen by millions when the U.S. Postal Service issued the State Birds & Flowerspostage stamps. The stamps became one of the largest selling commemoratives in U.S. Postal history. He received the Hal Borland Award in 1985 from the National Audubon Society. His paintings are represented in several public and private collections in the United States and Europe. Since his death in 1990, retrospectives of Singer's artwork have been presented in several museums and art galleries across the U.S. PAUL SINGER has focused on designs for zoos, museums, and botanic gardens. He has worked as an interpretive sign designer for the National Park Service and his illustrations are included inThe Knopf Nature Guide series for Audubon, The Audubon MasterGuides to Birding, The Knopf Collector Guides to American Antiques and other publications. ALAN SINGER is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art and worked with his father, Arthur, on painting revisions to both of Singer's field guides to birds, and helped illustrate the State Bird & Flower Stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. Since 1989, he has been a tenured professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A prolific printmaker, painter, andauthor, he has had 27 solo exhibits.

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A funny little book for funny little fashionistas about choosing the right clothes and accessories for different events and occasions. Thirteen silly characters have gotten their clothes and equipment all mixed up for various events and occasions, causing them all sorts of trouble. Young readers are encouraged to pick out the correct clothing and equipment for each occasion, making for a fun, zany, and interactive experience. To save the day, kids will help the following characters in crazy outfits find the proper attire: People dressed in regal period costumes to go to the theater A woman wearing a wedding dress while playing tennis A couple in snorkeling gear attending a wedding A couple dressed like rodeo cowboys at a fancy restaurant An office worker in her work clothes attending Carnival A woman in a fancy ball gown playing soccer Kids still in their pajamas in the classroom A guy fully decked out in winter gear lying in bed A girl in a tennis outfit on a dirty farm A painter covered in paint and hiking in the rain A woman in a fancy dress figure skating A man dressed as a mermaid while swimming A man in a nice suit getting his paints everywhere while painting With these wacky and colorful illustrations depicting funny situations and crazily dressed people, kids will be drawn into various scenes and encouraged to help the zany characters pick the right clothing and accessories for each event. Along the way, they will learn about appropriate attire for different occasions. Silly questions such as, "Is it okay to go to school in pajamas?" and "What is it like to play soccer in slippers?" are explored, adding a fun and lightly educational aspect to the book, which offers an interactive experience that encourages creativity and problem-solving. This book is perfect for young readers aged 3–5 who enjoy funny situations and are interested in fashion, clothing, and what we wear in different circumstances. Equally suitable for a parent looking for a fun activity to share with their child or a teacher seeking a unique way to teach about professions, this book offers an opportunity for children to learn about different types of clothing, accessories, and events while also improving their decision-making skills. The colorful and engaging illustrations will captivate children immediately, making this book a great addition to any young reader’s collection.

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Bedside Matters, the fifth novel by painter and writer Richard Alther, enlivens its singular setting with an unexpected journey at life's end for one man.Walter had mastered the business world at an unaccounted cost to discover in old age and ill-health a disease that would render his body useless. Walter is a complicated man now captured in the gilded cage of his mansion, watching the world, his world, go by without him.Visitors with agendas appear to remind him of his life and responsibilities: Walter's ex-wife Polly, a voluptuous handful as he would describe her, Paula, his chip-off-the-old block all-business daughter, Gavin, his attractive and irresponsible son with a dodgy track record, and the irrepressible daydreams and memories that flood his consciousness with emotions long shunned.While Walter reads the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi's work, his inner life takes on a new shape, as his body continues to betray him and deteriorate. He says a long, reluctant goodbye while engaging a side to life that has been unexplored until now.The natural world in the garden outside his window pleasures as he battles pain. New people enter his world to invigorate his last days, including his physical therapist Tressie, a woman so enticing he counts the minutes between visits.Succession becomes an obsession with Paula as she builds her empire, and Gavin tries to start over again after another stint in rehab. Walter watches them play the game of life as he becomes a mere observer from the solitude of his stately manor, lost and found in his thoughts. For the first time, he seems to experience life as a poet would, even as the inevitable end comes closer.A cinematic non-linear take and frank examination of the promise of life, even at its end, Bedside Matters concern us all at one time or another as we ask the ultimate question: what matters most?

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

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A fully updated edition of the most comprehensive illustrated survey of the life and work of Peter Blake, one of Britain’s most popular artists. Since his emergence in the early 1960s as a key member of the Pop Art movement, Peter Blake has become one of the best-known and most popular artists of his generation. Though primarily a painter, he has worked across many media, from drawings, watercolours and collages to sculpture and printmaking, as well as commercial art in the form of graphics and album covers – most notably his design for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album in 1967. Exploring his remarkable creative output from the 1950s to the present, Peter Blake is the most comprehensive illustrated survey available of the life and work of the artist. Marco Livingstone grounds Blake’s art firmly in his working-class origins, identifying a yearning for the innocence of childhood in his bittersweet paintings of the early to mid-1950s that depict children reading comics or going to the Saturday matinee at the cinema. From that moment, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Blake concerned himself with popular entertainments as subject matter, and as the source of formal solutions, for his paintings. The directness with which Blake gave expression to his enthusiasms for mass culture during the 1950s brought him to the forefront of the Pop Art movement before it had even been named, and independently of the investigations into similar areas by other British, American and European artists. The radical nature of his collage paintings of 1959–62, in particular, in which he combined existing imagery from popular culture with unapologetically bold and bright colours, made him a singularly influential figure within British Pop. This fully updated edition includes a new chapter on what the artist has jokingly styled his ‘Late Period’, in which Blake has continued to mine the many strands of his art with undiminished energy and completed some of his most ambitious long-standing projects. As well as the sheer scale of Blake’s production, what becomes clear is the kaleidoscopic variety of subject matter, form and medium to be found in his work, its humour and friendly appeal, and, above all, its celebration of life and humanity.

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‘A mesmerising story of love and hope…the best book that I have read this year’ Penny, Reader Review The most heartbreaking historical fiction novel you will read this year from the USA Today bestseller! A train journey into the past A love that echoes through time Paddington Station, present day A young woman boards the sleeper train to Cornwall with only a beautiful emerald silk evening dress and an old, well-read diary full of sketches. Ellie Nightingale is a shy violinist who plays like her heart is broken. But when she meets fellow passenger Joe she feels like she has been given that rarest of gifts…a second chance. Paddington Station, 1944 Beneath the shadow of the war which rages across Europe, Alex and Eliza meet by chance. She is a gutsy painter desperate to get to the frontline as a war artist and he is a wounded RAF pilot now commissioned as a war correspondent. With time slipping away they make only one promise: to meet in Berlin when this is all over. But this is a time when promises are hard to keep, and hope is all you can hold in your heart. From a hidden Cornish cove to the blood-soaked beaches of Normandy in June 1944, this is an epic love story like no other. Perfect for fans of Pam Jenoff, Kate Quinn, Rachel Hore and Kate Furnivall. Readers are absolutely loving this book: ‘Everyone needs to get aboard, The Night Train to Berlin! It is a fascinating tale that keeps you riveted to the very last page’ Jenny ‘This book just caught me by the heart…I felt so caught up in the lives of these wonderful women that I was gutted when it came to the end. I wanted more!’ Jenn ‘I made it five sentences into this story, and I knew I would be hooked…exceptional’ Mikkayla ‘Toot! Toot! All aboard! In every chapter there’s a giant hug reaching out from the pages…You MUST read this book – it’s historical fiction at its finest!’ Norma ‘Paints a vivid picture not only of beautiful Cornwall but of the horrors of WWII …The danger and uncertainty, the fatigue, the pain, the love, the loss – all seem real’ Sally

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In her vibrant works, the Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes fuses two very different worldviews. Her abstract compositions, which can be seen in a line with modernist masters from Henri Matisse to Bridget Riley, are saturated with the colors and light of her native country. Her paintings are strewn with symbols of everyday life in Brazil, invoking carnival, traditional craftsmanship, and motifs from baroque to pop, all choreographed in an exuberant visual rhythm. The colorful atmosphere has an irresistible exotic allure, but as in the works of Paul Gauguin, we find a broken paradise in which darker, more melancholic tones resonate, both in the promises of tropical life and those of modernist abstraction. In seeking this balance, Milhazes developed a special transfer technique in the late eighties, painting her motifs onto plastic sheets, gluing these to the canvas and letting them dry, and then peeling away the plastic once dry so that the paint remains on the canvas. This method allows the artist to layer surface upon surface and to achieve an iridescence somewhere between radiant aura and shimmering melancholy. Since her breakthrough in the early 1990s, Milhazes has extended the scope of her work to other media, producing screen prints, collages made of chocolate and candy wrappers, sculptures such as giant mobiles made of carnival decorations, site-specific projects that transform building façades into stained glass windows, and experiments with body and rhythm in collaboration with her sister Marcia’s ballet ensemble. This updated edition, which has been expanded to include works made as recently as 2020, explores all of the artist’s creative phases, from her beginnings to the present, with over 300 of her works. The book was created in close collaboration with the artist, in both the selection of images and specially designed pages between chapters. It includes a conversation with editor Hans Werner Holzwarth in which the artist unravels her working methods and talks about the ideas and cultural background behind her work. An art historical essay by David Ebony, a poetic dictionary of Milhazes’s key motifs by Adriano Pedrosa, and a detailed, updated artist biography by Luiza Interlenghi round off this comprehensive work. Also available in an Art Edition with a silkscreen print signed by Beatriz Milhazes

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Jane Grigson wrote of Italian Food ‘Basil was no more than the name of bachelor uncles, courgette was printed in italics as an alien word, and few of us knew how to eat spaghetti or pick a globe artichoke to pieces. ... Then came Elizabeth David like sunshine, writing with brief elegance about good food, that is, about food well contrived, well cooked. She made us understand that we could do better with what we had.’ Published in 1954 the importance of this book, which required a full year's research in Italy, can only be appreciated when you realise that she was working in a post-rationing England which regarded Italian cuisine as nothing more than variations on pasta and veal. What she discovered was an enormous wealth of regional diversity in ingredients, methods, and even language, where the same pasta shape can be called three or four names in different parts of the country. She understood that all Italian cooking is regional; there is no 'national' cuisine and so there are eight recipes for aubergines, fourteen for artichokes, five for fennel and seven for lentils, all from different regions. But if such descriptions seem to today’s reader overly thorough it is because many of her 1950's audience would have never heard of risotto, gorgonzola, prosciutto or even olive oil, let alone been able to purchase them. This is a critical and analytical look at Italian food – her personality and point of view come out on almost every page – organised by type of dish rather than by region and is full of details of kitchens and cooking by painters from the 14th, 15th and 18th centuries. The book is filled with asides and quotes from Italian writers and thinkers and as confirmation that this is more a work of scholarship than a simple book on cookery, there are appendices of bibliographies and notes on wine. If you want to explore the authentic regional roots of the Italian kitchen, Elizabeth David's masterpiece is the place to start. And the joy and relevance of this book today is that recipes that could only be read 60 years ago can now be cooked and savoured. Elizabeth David’s acclaimed writings are often cited as an inspiration by many of today’s leading chefs, as well as home cooks, and are essential to any serious cookery book collection.

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This volume is the fifth volume of A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, a project devoted to all Rembrandt’s paintings. This is the work of ‘The Rembrandt Research Project’, consisting of a group of scholars led since 1993 by Professor Ernst van de Wetering. The project began in 1968 with the aim of separating Rembrandt’s own paintings from the vast number of Rembrandtesque paintings made by his many apprentices and followers. Having opted for a chronological approach to the cataloguing of Rembrandt’s paintings (from 1625 till 1642) in the first three volumes, it was decided in 1993 to adopt a thematic approach for further volumes. This was largely to facilitate the recognition of different hands. The new approach yielded much more information not only about Rembrandt’s working methods but also about the function and meaning of his works. This expanded field of view meant that etchings and drawings with similar themes also needed to be included. In 2005 Volume IV appeared, devoted to Rembrandt’s self-portraits, in painting, etching and drawing. Volume V consists of a catalogue and analysis of the so-called small-scale history and genre paintings. That theme was chosen because this type of complex work shows a variety of full-length protagonists acting in different narrative settings. For this reason, in the 17th century, painting, etching or drawing biblical and mythological scenes was looked upon as an artist’s greatest challenge. The choice of this theme proved to be highly fruitful in several ways. Small-scale history pieces reveal Rembrandt’s artistic ambitions most clearly. They also offer the authors a much more accurate view of the daily routine in Rembrandt’s studio; his apprentices mostly copied this type of work or used it as a starting point for their own. As a result it was easier to distinguish the works by the master himself from those of his pupils. All aspects of the skills necessary to create a pictorial illusion play a part in the creation of small-figured history paintings. These aspects were referred to as ‘the basis of the noble art of painting’ in Rembrandt’s days. Two seventeenth century painter/theoreticians discussed these principles systematically in two books which up till now have only sporadically been consulted in the context of 17th century studio practice. Karel van Mander wrote his Grond der edel vry schilder-const [Basis of the Art of Painting] in 1604 and Samuel van Hoogstraten produced his Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst [Academy of Painting] in 1678. Van Hoogstraten was a pupil of Rembrandt between 1642 and ’48. Comparing the two books and considering them in relation to Rembrandt’s oeuvre, gradually reveals his original views on painting and how these had developed during his career. Thus, the authors of this new Volume of A Corpus have gained an unexpected and profound insight into Rembrandt’s ideas and approach to his art. The ‘basic aspects’ of painting included the following topics: function and methods of drawing; human proportions; various positions, poses and gestures of figures; ways of arranging a scene’s protagonists in a composition; facial expressions of a variety of emotions; light, shadows and reflected light; landscape and animals; draperies and articles of clothing; methods of painting, and various characteristics and uses of colours. The way these ‘basic aspects’ were selected and dealt with presumed that the more practical side to the art of painting would be learned by the apprentice in the daily routine of his master’s studio. With the development of art history in the nineteenth century the ‘basic aspects’ of the art of painting listed above acquired the vague label of ‘style’. However, the seventeenth century categorization of the ‘basic aspects’ provides a much more acute means of probing the views and criteria for judging a painting by Rembrandt and his contemporaries than the concept of ‘style’. Volume V in the series A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings breaks new ground from the point of view of art history, not only in its approach to Rembrandt as an artist, but more particularly to his thinking about painting. Moreover, a detailed comparison of Rembrandt’s works and those by his apprentices who based their works on his, led to a profound and detailed understanding of Rembrandt’s views on pictorial quality. In art historical literature quality usually does not feature prominently since it is regarded as being too subjective. This comparative approach, together with the analysis of seventeenth century categories of thought about painting, have given the research on Rembrandt a new impetus, at the same time allowing us to see more clearly through seventeenth century eyes. That is why the new volume of the ‘Corpus’ is an important publication – not only for art historians but also for all who want to fully enjoy the numerous works of art that date back to the Dutch Golden Age, now scattered in museums around the world.

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In Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, Lois Oppenheim illustrates the enhancement of self that creativity affords, the relationship of imagination to the self as agent. The premise of this book is twofold: First, that the imaginary is real. Where it differs from what we commonly take to be reality is in structure and in form. The imaginary of art, for example, is not illusionary for it is phenomenologically describable and even depictable, as demonstrated by the self-reflexive efforts of modernist painters and writers. No less real than the imaginary of art, and thus fantasy, is the imaginary of delusion, ascertainable in the very function it serves. Though fundamentally different, fantasy and delusion do share a significant feature: a preoccupation with agency. Second is that change, the enhancement of self through an increase in agency, is facilitated by the biology of reward: The pleasure of increased self-cohesion—the efficacy acquired through knowledge of, and the attribution of meaning to, the world—is ultimately the sine qua non of imaginative thought.Oppenheim emphasizes the idea that imagination generates knowledge. Our sensory systems, like our higher cognitive functions, give the human brain knowledge to maintain the homeostatic balance required for survival and to enrich the sense of self required for agency. And, she suggests, imagination is a function of their doing so. Moreover, she explores the construct by which we apprehend the workings of imagination—fantasy—and considers in what the mental imagery that endows it consists, how fantasy may be transmitted transgenerationally, and how delusion can be an impediment to imagination while also being a product of it. Additionally, she likens psychoanalysis to the making of art as a process of acquiring knowledge and looks at creativity itself as a coming-to-know.Throughout this book, there run several opposing threads. The first is that of the intra- and interpsychic psychoanalytic paradigms. This theoretical contrast bears on our understanding of aesthetic experience as sublimatory versus object relational and on our understanding of the construction of meaning. A second opposition resides in the notion of agency (with its implication of self-cohesion) which has everything to do with ego function and, seemingly, the usefulness of "unconscious fantasy," a cornerstone of psychoanalysis now thrown into question by the postmodern favoring of dissociation over repression and other mechanisms of defense. Last, but no less significant, is the contrast interwoven between the empiricism of neuroscience and the metaphysics of philosophical thought. Oppenheim's underlying effort is to explore the validity of these oppositions, which seem not to hold as steadfastly as we tend to suppose.

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"Noli me tangere," these are the words of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene in the Latin Bible translation of John 20:17. Few expressions from the Bible have stimulated so much interest among artists and theologians alike as these three intriguing words. The "Noli me tangere" motif serves as the basis of an interdisciplinary research programme supported by the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders, and entitled "Mary Magdalene and the Touching of Jesus: An Intra- and Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Interpretation of John 20:17 in Exegesis, Iconography and Pastoral Care." In cooperation with the Centre for Women's Studies Theology of the Faculty of Theology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), the research team organised an exhibition in the Maurits Sabbe Library under the title "Noli me tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images (Maria Magdalena in veelvoud)" (23 February to 30 April 2006). In the first part of the present volume, the four members of the research team , Sabine Van Den Eynde, Reimund Bieringer, Karlijn Demasure and Barbara Baert explore the significance of the "Noli me tangere" motif each from the perspective of their own particular discipline. The second part of the volume contains a catalogue of the exhibited works with a colour photograph and a short description. The artworks stem from a number of historical periods, running from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. A variety of genres and artistic media are also represented in this exhibition: graphics, paintings, sculpture and miniatures side by side with devotional art. The research team also invited contemporary artists to contribute their interpretation of the "Noli me tangere" motif to the exhibition. The painting of the Indian artist Lucy D'Souza represents the fine line between Christianity and Hinduism. The photographer Malou Swinnen photographed a woman from the Philippines while the calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander created a sculpture covered with a veil of letters. The painter Claire Vanden Abbeele was found willing to make her already existing "Noli me tangere" available for the occasion. The exhibition thus combines artistic periods, artistic media and the various continents of the world. "Noli me tangere: Mary Magdalene: One Person, Many Images" hopes to provide a glimpse of Mary Magdalene that unites both past and present.

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