In endless odes to the female form, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) traced elongated bodies, almond eyes, and his own name into art history. His languid female subjects are as instantly recognizable as they are startling, sensual, and swan-necked. Modigliani's unique figuration corresponded to his own personal idea of beauty, but drew upon a rich variety of visual influences, including contemporary Cubism, African carvings, Cambodian sculptures, and 13th-century painting from his native Italy. Although most renowned for his nude females, he applied similar stylistic techniques to portraits of male artistic contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Chaim Soutine. With key works from his highly individualistic repertoire, this book introduces Modigliani's brief but revered career at the heart of Paris's early modernist hotbed. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

The first book in English on Maruja Mallo, this volume is an insightful examination of the life and work of this seminal artist of the Spanish avant-garde. Previously sidelined by a culture that treated women as "insider-outsiders" and by her own mythmaking, Mallo no longer can be viewed as simply a muse to famous counterparts such as Salvador DalA and Federico GarcA a Lorca; her role has been re-contextualized to demonstrate that she was a driving force in the flowering of Spanish culture through the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis of Mallo's unique life and extraordinary art is set against the complicated social and political backdrop of interwar Madrid. This book highlights the struggle of Mallo and other women artists against the rampant misogyny of both Spanish culture and the avant-garde community of the time. The effects of the Spanish Civil War are also analyzed-in Mallo's case, Franco's victory forced her into exile in South America for almost 30 years, with profound effects on her art and her life. Added to this rich context, the author's numerous interviews with members of the Mallo family provide essential new background material. Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde recasts this artist as a vital figure in the heretofore all-male establishment of the Spanish artistic vanguard.

In his latest book, Bill Hare offers a comprehensive view of Scottish art from 1945 to the present day.

A draughtsman of remarkable ability, matching even his mentor Augustus John, Henry Lamb (1883-1960) was a founder-member of the Camden Town Group, exhibiting at their inaugural exhibition in 1911. He was a powerful and original War artist, and an engaging and sensitive portrait painter, whose group portraits in particular are as successful as those by any British painter of the age. To date unfairly eclipsed by the glamorous and culturally infl uential circle around him, Lamb is now probably best known through these fi gures and his many compelling portraits of them, amongst them Lady Ottoline Morrell, Evelyn Waugh and Lytton Strachey, whose monumental full-length portrait by Lamb in Tate Britain is probably the artist's best-known work. Lamb abandoned a promising medical career in Manchester to pursue his training as an artist at the London art school run by William Orpen and Augustus John. He found inspiration in the rural simplicity of Brittany, and a later visit to Ireland inspired his great genre painting Fisherfolk, Gola Island of 1913 - not seen in public since the last major retrospective in 1984. Following active service during the First World War as an army medical offi cer (for which he was awarded a Military Cross), he contributed two of the greatest artworks to the proposed National Hall of Remembrance a year after armistice in 1919. Following a productive period in Poole after the War, where he produced some evocative townscapes of its streets and skylines, he eventually settled in Coombs Bissett near Salisbury. Here he established a reputation as a sought-after portrait painter, executing a constant stream of landscapes, still lives, genre pictures and fi ne domestic subjects. Accompanying an exhibition at Salisbury Museum in 2018 and Poole Museum in 2019, Henry Lamb: Out of the Shadows will focus on over 50 works by the artist from across his career. As well as loans from major national collections, the group will include signifi cant works from private collections, including a substantial archive from the artist's family and a number of re-discovered masterpieces. The catalogue will also feature an introductory essay by Lamb's cousin, the writer Thomas Pakenham who knew the artist well.

How did women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun take up the question of female identity in terms of their own aesthetic and intellectual practice? What was the response of women analysts such as Joan Riviere to Freud's psychoanalytic construction of femininity? These are among the questions that Natalya Lusty brings to her sophisticated and theoretically informed investigation into the appropriation of 'the feminine' by the Surrealist movement. Combining biographical and textual methods of analysis with historically specific discussions of related cultural sites such as women's magazines, fashion, debutante culture, sexology, modernist lesbian subculture, pornography, and female criminality, the book examines the ambiguities and blind spots that haunt the work of more central figures such as Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and the Surrealist photographer Hans Bellmer. Lusty's examination of a series of psychoanalytic Surrealist themes, including narcissism, fantasy, masquerade, perversion, and 'the double', illuminates a modernist preoccupation with the crisis of subjectivity and representation and its ongoing relevance to more recent work by Cindy Sherman and Judith Butler. Her book is an important contribution to modernist studies that will appeal to scholars and students working across a diverse range of fields, including literary studies, gender studies, visual culture, cultural studies, and cultural history.

The Empord triangle, like its notorious sister the Bermuda Triangle, outlines a space where unusual things happen. In this case, that space is the land surrounding three major landmarks of Salvador Dali's life: his house at Port Lligat, its front door guarded by a stuffed bear; the castle of Pbol, where he lived in his old age and where his wife Gala is buried; and the Dalu Theatre-Museum of Figueres, where he himself is buried. Some of these landscapes and buildings recur in Dali's work, and each of the buildings constitutes a work in itself. Enticing, wide, glossy landscape photographs throughout The Empord Triangle constitute a tour of these three centers of Dal'nian experience.

This beautifully illustrated book is the first full-length critical study to focus on the watercolours of multitalented British artist and designer Eric Ravilious (1903-1942). Adopting the wide-ranging approach familiar to readers of his previous books on the artist, author James Russell explores the evolution of a remarkable talent. An introductory section offers an intimate portrait of Ravilious, an artist for whom personal relationships, particularly with women, were paramount. It goes on to describe the extraordinary achievements of an all-too-brief career, drawing on new research to seek out artistic influences and examine Ravilious's relationships with fellow-artists, as well as the development of his mark making. There follows the most comprehensive display of Ravilious watercolours yet assembled. Some have never been published, while others are familiar and well loved. Many are explored in short accompanying essays, some with full-bleed images that show details of paintings at full size. These texts are designed to entertain and enlighten, looking at composition, technique, influence and inspiration, or discussing the significance of particular subjects and the people behind the scenes. This is the definitive guide to the luminous, evocative and timeless watercolours of Eric Ravilious, an artist now regarded as one of the finest of the twentieth century.

Illustrator and cartoonist W. Heath Robinson is renowned for his ingenious and haphazard contraptions. His witty drawings of complicated machines, are ironically designed to simplify everyday life, but always manage to make everything appear more complicated! His work is steeped in the humour of calamity and his name soon became synonymous for absurd and makeshift devices. This delightful new book is packed with his madcap designs and the delicate watercolour illustrations which continue to delight us all today.

Allen W. Seaby's life has been described as "a classic tale of Victorian self-improvement." But there is more to the tale than just upward mobility. A. W. Seaby was a pioneering, innovative and inspirational man who rose to become a prominent print-maker, teacher, author and illustrator. Best-known for his colour woodcut printing using traditional Japanese methods, and as a prominent wildlife artist, the story of Seaby's many accomplishments is recounted by his grandson, who inherited Seaby's love of birds and became internationally renowned in his own right, Robert Gillmor. Alongside this personal recount, Martin Andrews (Seaby's successor as President of the Reading Guild of Artists) selects aspects of his career and expands upon his techniques, his illustrative methods, his circle of fellow artists and the books he published to give a full and rounded account of a man whose work is currently enjoying a well-deserved renaissance.

Jorn + Munch is the first publication to examine the enduring impact Edvard Munch (1863-1944) had on Asger Jorn (1914-1973). In Munch's later works, Danish artist Jorn discovered an artist with a direct, spontaneous, and raw form of expression. Already influenced by surrealism's unprompted painting style, Jorn was naturally drawn to Munch's similarly unbridled compositions. In particular, Jorn was interested in Munch's use of intense colors and his gestural application of paint in the later works. From the middle of the 1940s, and for many years after that, Munch is shown to be a challenging and important reference point for Jorn's own body of work. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Munch Museum, Oslo (10/15/16-01/15/17) Jorn Museum, Silkeborg, Denmark (02/11/17-05/28/17)

A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and leading art theoretician whose influence resonates to this day. Coining the term "Neo-plasticism", he pursued a style of painting composed only of primary colors against a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines and a white base background. Mondrian's vision was that this essential painting would help to achieve a society in which art as such has no place, but rather exists for the total realization of "beauty." With stints in Amsterdam, Paris, London, and New York, Mondrian drew upon the modern metropolis and modern music, especially jazz, as points of inspiration. In 1917, he cofounded De Stijl, originally a publication, and subsequently a circle of practitioners, committed to a strictly geometrical art of horizontals and verticals. With key works and succinct texts, this introductory book presents Mondrian's distinctive and pioneering oeuvre, an abiding inspiration for fashion, art, architecture, and design, from White Stripes album covers to Yves Saint Laurent dresses. 2016 (c) US Mondrian/Holtzman Trust About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

That incomparable melancholy in Edward Hopper's pictures occasionally leads us to look at the details of his life. Where exactly did this master of loneliness live and work? What were his most important influences while he was working on his great paintings of America? In this wonderful, simply structured, A-to-Z book, Ulf Kuster pursues these themes, which say a great deal about the painter and his interests, and yet he never loses sight of the artist and the necessary distance to his inimitable pictures. Thus, Kuster strolls through the ABCs of Hopper's life and work, from the "American landscape," "Buick" "Goethe," and "shadow and sunlight" to the key word, "time." On the way he opens up many new doors or insights, enriching the views of Hopper's paintings and make it possible to interpret them in new ways. An entertaining and informative book.

More popular than ever, the work of Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is rooted in the landscape of pre-war and early wartime England. This best-selling book by Alan Powers, the established authority on Ravilious, provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the artist's work in all media - watercolour, illustration, printmaking, graphic design, textiles and ceramics - and firmly positions Ravilious as a major figure in the history of early 20th-century British art. Now available in paperback, the accessible and engaging text, copiously illustrated with reproductions of work drawn from a range of sources, discusses the part Ravilious' work played in creating an English style, positioned between tradition and modernism, and borrowing from naive and popular art of the past. The book analyses Ravilious' different spheres of activity in turn, covering his education and formative influences, his mural painting, his printmaking and illustration, his work as leader in forming a new style of watercolour painting between the wars and his final period as an official War Artist. In a career curtailed by an early death, Ravilious also played a significant role as a designer; Powers argues that Ravilious showed how decoration and historical reference could find a place in the reform of the applied arts whilst simultaneously renewing a sense of national identity. Eric Ravilious will be welcomed by all those with an interest in an artist whose imagination was backed by great skill and a sharp eye for the unusual.

Emerging from the disruption of the First World War, surrealism confronted the resulting 'crisis of consciousness' in a way that was arguably more profound than any other cultural movement of the time. The past few decades have seen an expansion of interest in surrealist writers, whose contribution to the history of ideas in the twentieth-century is only now being recognised. Surrealism: Key Concepts is the first book in English to present an overview of surrealism through the central ideas motivating the popular movement. An international team of contributors provide an accessible examination of the key concepts, emphasising their relevance to current debates in social and cultural theory. This book will be an invaluable guide for students studying a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology and Cultural Studies, and anyone who wishes to engage critically with surrealism for the first time. Contributors: Dawn Ades, Joyce Cheng, Jonathan P. Eburne, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Guy Girard, Raihan Kadri, Michael Loewy, Jean-Michel Rabate, Michael Richardson, Donna Roberts, Bertrand Schmitt, Georges Sebbag, Raymond Spiteri, and Michael Stone-Richards.

In 1911, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and his friend August Klipstein (1885-1951), a scholar of art history and later renowned art dealer, undertook a grand tour of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, and Italy. While Klipstein's interests were more focused on research for his doctoral thesis, Le Corbusier's impressions were more immediate, his mindset more romantic. They both kept a diary of their journey and produced many sketches, drawings, watercolours, and photographs en route, sometimes capturing the same motif and even copying each other's work. While Le Corbusier's record was published in 1966 as Journey to the East and has become a classic, Klipstein's testimony of the expedition remained largely unknown until today. In this new book, Ivan Zaknic explores the creative symbiosis of this friendship and what the two ambitious young men brought back from their trip. Richly illustrated, including reproductions from both of their diaries, and featuring the complete text of Klipstein's diary as well as that of the little known correspondence between Le Corbusier and Klipstein, the book offers an entirely new perspective of this seemingly well-known undertaking. It introduces the personality of Klipstein as well as lesser-known facets of the very young Le Corbusier.

Abstract action: The splattered oeuvre of a cultural iconThe rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912 1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.Pollock s most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewer s search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.Notoriously reclusive and volatile, struggling with alcoholism, married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and killed in a car crash aged just 44, Pollock is as much a compelling celebrity icon as an artistic pioneer. This essential artist introduction explores both his work and his fame to understand masterpieces of the modernist story, and the making of a cultural icon.About the series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions"

Painter, draftsman and engraver, Pierre Lesieur (1922-2011) was one of the most influential French artists of the second half of the 20th century. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris - where he took lessons from Andre Lhote - and at the Academie de Montmartre, he had his first exhibition in 1952. Lesieur's paintings of the 1950s are characterised by the use of brightly coloured areas, in line with the work of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. In the 1960s, this research bordered on abstraction, particularly in still lifes and representations of objects. From the 1970s onwards, through his paintings and drawings, Lesieur took a particular interest in interiors, as well as in portraits and female nudes. Early in his career, Pierre Lesieur was recognised as an important artist. After his first personal exhibition in 1952, his work was regularly shown at the Coard Gallery in Paris. From the 1990s, Lesieur's notoriety became international, resulting in further exhibitions in Japan and the United States. Some of his works are now housed in major museums such as the Center Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum. Text in English and French.

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was an English surrealist artist and writer who emigrated to Mexico after the Second World War. This volume approaches Carrington as a major international figure in modern and contemporary art, literature and thought. It offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the intellectual, literary and artistic currents that animate her contribution to experimental art movements throughout the Western Hemisphere, including surrealism and magical realism. The book contains nine chapters from scholars of modern literature and art, each focusing on a major feature in Carrington's career. It also features a visual essay drawn from the 2015 Tate Liverpool exhibition Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline, and two experimental essays by the novelist Chloe Aridjis and the scholar Gabriel Weisz, Carrington's son. This collection offers a resource for students, researchers and readers interested in Carrington's works. -- .

When the First World War broke out, Morris Meredith Williams was living in Edinburgh with his wife Alice, a sculptor, and earning his living from book illustration and teaching. A short man, his attempt to join the army in 1914 failed, but six months later he was accepted by the 17th Battalion, The Welsh Regiment, the first Bantam battalion to be raised in Wales. From June 1916, he spent ten months in and out of the trenches of the Western Front near Loos, Arras and the Somme, later mapping enemy positions from aerial reconnaissance shots with the Heavy Artillery. In 1918 he joined the Royal Engineers' camouflage unit at Wimereux. After the peace, he was among a handful of artists kept back to make paintings for the official record and toured the shattered landscape in an old ambulance car. Never without a sketchbook and pencils in his pocket, he drew at every opportunity, producing an extraordinary record of his surroundings. After the war some of the sketches became oil paintings while others inspired a series of war memorials in bronze, stone, wood and stained glass, most notably for the Scottish National War Memorial, on which he and Alice worked together. In this stunning book, the Meredith Williams's art is displayed in fine style, ranging from the touching and heartfelt to the most brutal, stark images of the waste and loss of war.

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War. Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement's relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zurn, the Austrian Birgit Jurgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period. -- .

Franz Kline spent years struggling to find a style for himself and then achieved "overnight success" with his dramatic black and white abstractions. They were, in fact, so successful that they overwhelmed every other aspect of Kline's art, and as a result he has been oversimplified and underestimated. Now, after nearly twenty years of research, Harry F. Gaugh has written the definitive volume on Kline, which provides the first comprehensive view of his life and work, and reveals how unexpectedly complex they both were.

Using interviews and correspondence with dozens of Kline's friends and critics, and quoting from the artist's own letters, the author has created an evocative portrait of Kline's evolution from an ambitious art student in Boston and London to a penniless Greenwich Village artist painting murals in bars just to pay the rent, and finally to a mature artist in command of his own unique and hard-won style. Kline made his initial, admittedly modest, reputation as a figurative artist, and rare photographs of that early work--sketches from life-drawing class, portraits of Nijinsky, scenes of the Pennsylvania countryside--offer an intriguing background for his later paintings. Not until his late thirties did Kline begin to develop an abstract mode, working his way through a series of strikingly dissimilar styles. Dr. Gaugh illuminates how talent, training, experimentation, the influence of fellow artists, and pure chance interacted to yield the famous black and white abstractions. When he died in 1962, Kline had begun exploring the potential of vibrant color, and the vivid full-color reproductions of his late paintings make poignantly clear how much the art world lost with hisdeath at the relatively young age of fifty-one.

With its detailed yet thoroughly readable text and 170 illustrations (many never before published) this comprehensive volume brings to light much new information about Kline and enriches the reader's appreciation and understanding of his art.

Other Details:
170 illustrations, 70 in full color. 9 x 11" trim size. First published 1985.

A book of new paintings by John Welson and new poems by David Greenslade, working in collaboration for the first time on a suite of poems and paintings connected by the theme of moths and butterflies.