Weight | 0.613 kg |
---|---|
Dimensions | 236 × 192 × 30 mm |
ISBN | 9781419732522 |
Cover | Hardback |
Publication Year | 2018 |
Publisher | Abrams Press |
£10.50
The Downtown Pop Underground
The 1960s to early ’70s was a pivotal time for American culture, and New York City was ground zero for seismic shifts in music, theater, art, and filmmaking. The Downtown Pop Underground takes a kaleidoscopic tour of Manhattan during this era and shows how deeply interconnected all the alternative worlds and personalities were that flourished in the basement theaters, dive bars, concert halls, and dingy tenements within one square mile of each other. Author Kembrew McLeod links the artists, writers, and performers who created change, and while some of them didn’t become everyday names, others, like Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and Debbie Harry, did become icons. Ambitious in scope and scale, the book is fueled by the actual voices of many of the key characters who broke down the entrenched divisions between high and low, gay and straight, and art and commerce—and changed the cultural landscape of not just the city but the world.
Out of stock
Related products
Velazquez
£16.99A 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.
The Writer’s War
£7.00‘When I come home and leave behind Dark things I would not call to mind …’ wrote Leslie Coulson, one of the many soldiers who tried to express his wartime experiences in writing: dreaming of an idyllic England in the face of the horror of the Western Front. Coulson was one of the hundreds of thousands who did not come home – but because of his poetry we glimpse something of his thoughts and experiences.
Today we can be grateful that so many of those who endured the First World War did write about it: giving us an unmatched view of an event which would otherwise be completely beyond our ability to imagine. The Writers’ War is a collection of excerpts from outstanding accounts of the First World War. It provides an essential insight to anyone interested in modern history or early twentieth-century literature. Extraordinary extracts bring the human experience of war brilliantly to life – from the terror of bombardment, or the camaraderie of military service, to the home front.
The writing reflects an enormous range of nationalities and personalities. It includes memorable poetry, fiction, and journalism. Some great names of modern English literature appear, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, D. H. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling. In addition, there are superb accounts by foreign authors such as novelists Edith Wharton and Henri Barbusse, and flying ace Manfred von Richthofen. The Writers’ War gives an unparalleled insight into a world-changing event, and what it meant in human terms both to the writers and millions of others caught up in it.
Possessions: Indigenous Art / Colonial Culture / Decolonization
£35.00A 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.
Who Shot Van Gogh?: Facts and counterfacts about the world’s most famous artist
£16.99Fact 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.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: A Life in Art
£25.00An 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.