Musical Truth
£12.99With a signed bookplate
This extraordinary retelling of Black British history will dazzle readers of all ages.
£30.00
An exciting narrative and visual history of the artist’s studio, examining the myth and reality of the creative space from early times to today.
The artist’s workplace has always been an imaginary as well as an actual location, an idealized utopia as well as the domain of dirty, back-breaking work. Written descriptions, paintings, prints and even photographs of the artist’s atelier distort as much as they document. This pioneering cultural history charts the myth and reality of the creative space from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Tracing a history that extends far beyond the bohemian, romantic and renaissance cults of the artist, each chapter focuses on key developments of the studio space as seen in a variety of familiar and unfamiliar images. Mythical and divine makers, and some amateurs, are included, and so too are craftspeople – workers in metal and wood, potters, illuminators, weavers, embroiderers and architects to name a few. Each carefully chosen example is placed within a cultural and political context, with the aim of correcting the historical imbalance that has long overlooked the many artisans who collaborated with artists. Leading authority James Hall also extends the discussion to the artist’s museum and the artist’s house, as well plein air painting and the development of portable studios.
With a signed bookplate
This extraordinary retelling of Black British history will dazzle readers of all ages.
A timely re-examination of European engagements with indigenous art and the presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world.
The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation?
This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.
A penetrating analysis of the work of one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art by one of the world’s most respected art historians.
For more than a century the art of Paul Cezanne was held to hold the key to modernity. His painting was a touchstone for Samuel Beckett as much as Henri Matisse. Rilke revered him deeply, as did Picasso. If we lost touch with his sense of life, they thought, we lost an essential element in our self-understanding.
If These Apples Should Fall: Cezanne and the Present looks back on Cezanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying. What was it, the book asks, that held Cezanne’s viewers spellbound?
At the heart of Cezanne lies a sense of disquiet: a homelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety underlying the appeal of colour. T. J. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it. Above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cezanne’s achievement.
A comprehensive introduction to Velazquez’s life and art which includes a discussion of all his major works.
Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) was one of the towering figures of western painting and Baroque art, a technical master renowned for his focus on realism and startling veracity. Everything he painted was ‘treated’ as a portrait, from Spanish royalty and Pope Innocent X, to a mortar and pestle. This comprehensive introduction to Velazquez’s life and art includes a discussion of all his major works, and illustrates most of Velazquez’s surviving output of approximately 110 paintings. The artist’s greatest innovation – his unorthodox and revolutionary technique is explored in relation to the styles of certain of his most celebrated contemporaries both in Spain and beyond, including Titian and Rubens. The book concludes with a final chapter on the influence and importance of Velazquez’s art on later painters from the time of his own death to the art of recent times including Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and the Impressionists.
Fact or fiction? An imaginative collection of statements about Vincent van Gogh that challenges what we think we know about the artist’s much mythologized existence.
Van Gogh is the most famous artist in the world, yet our understanding of his life is full of contradictions. Art historians, filmmakers, journalists, psychologists and conspiracy theorists have offered theories on his life and work, yet their views are often poles apart. Van Gogh has been described as a suffering genius, a madman, the embodiment of peace and compassion, a man of violence who was a danger to himself and others, a religious fanatic and a Marxist. Where does the truth lie and the myth begin?
This book examines the continual rewriting of Van Gogh’s story since the first publications on the artist appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. Presenting a collage of succinct facts and ‘counterfacts’, the text is drawn from a wide field of sources: fellow artists, friends and family, doctors and psychoanalysts, actors and writers, theorists, crackpots and scholars. Conflicting statements go hand in hand with an unconventional curation of images, which include postcards of locations associated with the artist, photographs of a fraudster’s legal trial, a children’s toy, a bottle label and a rusty revolver.
Turnbull presents a kaleidoscope of fact and fiction about the world’s most discussed artist – sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending, always revealing – giving readers new insights into the artist, his work and his legacy. Van Gogh himself would be amazed not only to see what people have said about him, but also to grasp the global phenomenon that he has become. A must-have for art lovers and museumgoers, this book invites all readers familiar with Van Gogh to challenge long-accepted ideas about the man and his work.
An accessible introduction to the life and work of this trailblazing pioneer of early modernism, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy, London.
Paula Modersohn-Becker is today hailed as one of the great pioneers of modernism. When she died in 1907 at the age of just 31, she had completed more than 700 paintings and 1,000 drawings and prints. Despite selling only a few paintings during her lifetime, her distinct style, daring subject matter and perseverance in overcoming barriers to women left a significant artistic mark on the brief epoch between the old and the new, and paved the way for the German avant-garde.
Uwe M. Schneede, one of the foremost experts on Modersohn-Becker’s work, shows how the artist translated her life’s experiences into her own, very distinctive, pictorial language. He focuses in particular on her time in Paris, where she absorbed the luminous palette and expressive brushwork of the French avantgarde, and which so strongly impacted her ambitions and artistic trajectory. Schneede’s lively narrative is supported by some 120 illustrations, and peppered throughout with quotations from Modersohn’s letters and diaries.