As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recently, her work was recognised the day after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, when the front page of the Daily Mirror ran her 1989 painting Oh America, which shows the Statue of Liberty, head in hands. This is the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher's work. It examines her unique position connecting avant-garde art movements, counterculture, punk and even contemporary street art. While Vaucher rejects all 'isms', her work offers a unique take on the history of feminist art. -- .

In Dragging Away Lex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends. Through a process Lancaster theorizes as a drag-dragging past aesthetics into the present and reworking them while pulling their work away from direct representation-these artists reimagine midcentury forms of abstraction and expose the violence of the tendency to reduce abstract form to a bodily sign or biographical symbolism. Lancaster outlines how the geometric enamel objects, grid paintings, vibrant color, and expansive installations of artists ranging from Ulrike Muller, Nancy Brooks Brody, and Lorna Simpson to Linda Besemer, Sheila Pepe, and Shinique Smith offer direct challenges to representational and categorical legibility. In so doing, Lancaster demonstrates that abstraction is not apolitical, neutral, or universal; it is a form of social praxis that actively contributes to queer, feminist, critical race, trans, and crip politics.

With his graphic style, figural distortion, and defiance of conventional standards of beauty, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism and one of the most startling portrait painters of the 20th century. Mentored by Gustav Klimt, Schiele dabbled in a glittering Art Nouveau style before developing his own much more gritty and confrontational aesthetic of sharp lines, lurid shades, and mannered, elongated figures. His prolific portraits and self-portraits stunned the Viennese establishment with an unprecedented psychological and sexual intensity, favoring erotic, exposing, or unsettling poses in which he or his sitters cower on the floor, languish with legs akimbo, glower at the viewer, and thrust their genitalia into the foreground. His models are at times skeletal and sickly, at other times strong and sensual. Many contemporaries found Schiele's work to be not only ugly but morally objectionable; in 1912, the artist was briefly imprisoned for obscenity. Today, his oeuvre is celebrated for its revolutionary approach to the human figure and for its direct and particularly fervent, almost furious brand of draftsmanship. This book presents key Schiele works to introduce his short but urgent career and his profound contribution to the development of modern art, which reaches right through to such contemporary talents as Tracey Emin and Jenny Saville. 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

A fun and fact-filled introduction to the dismissed Black art masters and models who shook up the world. Elegant. Refined. Exclusionary. Interrupted. The foundations of the fine art world are shaking. Beyonce and Jay-Z break the internet by blending modern Black culture with fine art in their iconic music video filmed in the Louvre. Kehinde Wiley powerfully subverts European masterworks. Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It's clear that modern day museums can no longer exist without change-and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings. Quietly held within museum and private collections around the world are hundreds of faces of Black men and women, many of their stories unknown. From paintings of majestic kings to a portrait of a young girl named Isabella in Amsterdam, these models lived diverse lives while helping shape the art world along the way. Then, after hundreds of years of Black faces cast as only the subject of the white gaze, a small group of trailblazing Black American painters and sculptors reached national and international fame, setting the stage for the flourishing of Black art in the 1920s and beyond. Captivating and informative, BLK ART is an essential work that elevates a globally dismissed legacy to its proper place in the mainstream art canon. From the hushed corridors of royal palaces to the bustling streets of 1920s Paris-this is Black history like never seen before.

Cecily Brown (b.1969, London) is one of the most acclaimed painters working today. Her inimitable style shifts effortlessly between abstraction and figuration, confounding our understanding of these painterly modes and conventions. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, this lavishly illustrated catalogue is an in-depth look at one of her most conceptually rich and expressive paintings. Cecily Brown: The Triumph of Death delves deep into this gigantic, multi-panel work, which features the figure of Death riding roughshod over a town and its residents. Inspired by a 1446 Italian fresco housed in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Italy, Brown's The Triumph of Death is the culmination of a fascination with death that has permeated her work for several decades. With an introduction by Sylvain Bellenger and newly commissioned texts by Gavin Delahunty, Catherine Foulkrod and Sergio Risaliti, as well as featuring a set of related, previously unseen drawings, the book provides unparalleled analysis of this extraordinary work. Text in English and Italian.

Considered on of the most important religious structures of the twentieth century, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence was regarded by Matisse himself as his great masterpiece. He dedicated four years to the creation of this convent chapel on the French Riviera, and the result is one of the most remarkable and comprehensive ensemble pieces of twentieth-century art. Every element of the chapel bears the artists touch, from the vivid Mediterranean hues of the stained glass windows to the starkly powerful murals; even the vestments and altar were designed by Matisse. This beautifully illustrated volume captures the chapel in exquisite detail, allowing an unparalleled view of this iconic and sacred space. With stunning new photography that captures the dramatic effects of the changing light in the building throughout the day, this book is the first to present the experience of being within the chapel exactly as Matisse himself envisaged it, while Marie-Therese Pulvenis de Selignys authoritative and insightful text explores the extraordinary story of the chapels creation and the challenges faced by the 77-year-old artist in realising his great vision."

Pepin Press Art Portfolios contain 8 high-quality art reproductions printed on 200 gsm watercolour paper or satin coated art paper. These papers are non-ageing, manufactured from chlorine-free pulp by FSC and PEFC certified mills. The prints are enclosed in hardback portfolio covers made of premium paperboard with inner end papers along with flaps for further protection. The portfolios have a high-quality cloth spine (made of rayon, a plant-based fiber) and a cotton ribbon closure. All images reproduced come from our own archives, except for the van Gogh and Monet volumes. In our selections we have sought to combine complimentary images, striking a balance between the familiar and those lesser known. Alongside traditionally famous images many uncommon but delightful drawings and prints can also be found.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi's exciting exhibition programme explores the enduring dialogue between Eastern and Western artistic expression. Abstraction and Calligraphy brings together a rich array of works, from 10th-century ceramics from Samarkand to paintings and drawings by Kandinsky, Matisse, Miro, Twombly and other modern masters. The ways in which these artists respond to Eastern calligraphic traditions enriches our understanding of the dynamic between modern art in the West and long-established forms from Asia and the Near East.

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miro (1893-1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction. Over the course of his prodigious output, Miro evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of "bourgeois" art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, arranged in elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miro moved towards Surrealism, and, despite never fully identifying with the movement, emerged as one of its most celebrated practitioners with techniques including automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In later years, he diversified his media further, working with ceramics, textiles, and even proposing sculptures made of gas. Through his vivid colors, dreamlike fantasies, and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the numerous strands of Miro's kaleidoscopic oeuvre to introduce his fascinating career, its interaction with major modernist movements, and how it made him into a modernist legend. 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

This is a story about rivalry among artists. Not the kind of rivalry that grows out of hatred and dislike, but rather, rivalry that emerges from admiration, friendship, love. The kind of rivalry that existed between Degas and Manet, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon. These were some of the most famous and creative relationships in the history of art, driving each individual to heights of creativity and inspiration - and provoking them to despair, jealousy and betrayal. Matisse's success threatened Picasso so much that his friends would throw darts at a portrait of his rival's beloved daughter Marguerite, shouting 'there's one in the eye for Matisse!' And Willem de Kooning's twisted friendship with Jackson Pollock didn't stop him taking up with his friend's lover barely a year after Pollock's fatal car crash. In The Art of Rivalry, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee explores how, as both artists struggled to come into their own, they each played vital roles in provoking the other's creative breakthroughs - ultimately determining the course of modern art itself.

Emerging amid the brutality of World War I, the revolutionary Dada movement took disgust with the establishment as its starting point. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, and New York launched a radical assault on the politics, social values, and cultural conformity which they regarded as complicit in the devastating conflict. Dada artists shared no distinct style but rather a common wish to upturn societal structures as much as artistic standards and to replace logic and reason with the absurd, chaotic, and unpredictable. Their practice encompassed experimental theater, games, guttural sound-making, collage, photomontage, chance-based procedures, and the "readymade," most notoriously Marcel Duchamp's urinal, Fountain (1917). Throughout, the Dadaists considered the visual appearance of their work secondary to the ideas and critiques it expressed. In this sense, Dada may be seen as a fundamental precursor to conceptual art. With a selection of key works from some of the most famous proponents of Dada such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoech, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, this book introduces this urgent, subversive, and determined 20th-century movement and its lasting influence on modern art. 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 History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most famous by Rothko. Throughout, Abstract Expressionists strove to convey emotions and ideas through the making of marks, through forms, textures, shades, and the particular quality of brushstrokes. The movement favored large-scale canvases, and embraced the role of accident or chance. With featured works from 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book introduces the movement which shifted the center of art gravity from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden moment of American art. 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 History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

For Rene Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception-what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation-as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte's painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.

Dada formed in 1916, embedded in a world of rational appearances that belied a raging confusion - in the middle of the First World War, in the neutral centre of a warring continent, fundamentally at the heart of Western art. This book sets out new coordinates in revision of a formation that Western art history routinely exhausts through its characterisation as a 'revolutionary movement' of anarchic cultural dissent, and does so in order to contest the perpetuated assumptions about Dada that underlie the popular myth. Dada is difficult and the response to it is not easy, and what emerge from the theoretical readings developed here are profoundly rational bases to the Dada non-sense that pitted itself against its civilised age, critically and implicitly to propose that Dada courses as vitally today as it did in 1916. The Zurich Dada formation initiated deliberate and strategic cultural engagements that struggled then, as they do now, to cohere in any sense as a 'movement', extreme in their ranges as diametrically hostile oppositionalities. Dada may be given art historically as identifiable along a trajectory of sustained ruptures and seizures, but it confounds all attempts at defined or definitive readings. This book duly offers not a history of Dada in Zurich but theoretical engagements of the emergencies and now the residue of the years 1916-19 - from 'lautgedichte' to laughter, masks to manifestos, chance to chiasmata - rounding to the 'permanent' Dada by which the formation ultimately breaks the containment and deep peace of art historical chronology.

What were Montmartre and Montparnasse really like in their hey-day, roughly between 1904, when the youthful Picasso had just arrived on the Hill of Martyrs, and 1920, when Amedeo Modigliani, justly called `the prince of Bohemians', died of consumption and dissipation in Montparnasse? This book, written by an Englishman who lived in Montmartre for 30 years and knew its famous habitue intimately, gives a vivid description. It reveals the truth behind the many legends, is packed with authentic stories about writers and painters whose name are now household words, and contains much hitherto unpublished information about the life and career of Modigliani obtained from his family and friends. Much of the text was written in Montmartre amid the scenes described, and after personal consultation with survivors of the great days when Frede presided over the Lapin Agile and Libion, patron of the Cafe de la Rotonde, was beginning to rival him in Montparnasse. It is the most complete account which has yet been written in English of the birth of Cubism and other contemporary movements in modern painting, and of the lives and loves who started them.

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning's Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning's writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story "Abyss," a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend. McAra performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning's unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.

Since her death in 2011, the legendary Surrealist Leonora Carrington has been reconstructed and reinvented many times over. In this book, Gabriel Weisz Carrington draws on remembered conversations and events to demythologise his mother, revealing the woman and the artist behind the iconic persona. He travels between Leonora's native England and adopted homeland of Mexico, making stops in New York and Paris and meeting some of the remarkable figures she associated with, from Max Ernst and Andre Breton to Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky. At the same time, he strives to depict a complex and very real Surrealist creator, exploring Leonora not simply in relation to her romantic partners or social milieus but as the artist she always was. A textured portrait emerges from conversations, memories, stories and Leonora's engagement with the books that she read. -- .

This is the most thorough and detailed monograph on the artwork of Raymond Jonson. He is one of many artists of the first half of the twentieth-century who demonstrate the richness and diversity of an under-appreciated period in the history of American art. Visualizing the spiritual was one of the fundamental goals of early abstract painting in the years before and during World War I. Artists turned to alternative spirituality, the occult, and mysticism, believing that the pure use of line, shape, color, light and texture could convey spiritual insight. Jonson was steadfastly dedicated to this goal for most of his career and he always believed that modernist and abstract styles were the most effective and compelling means of achieving it.

No other art movement in history has contained two artists as different as Magritte and Miro. This is because Surrealism was not in origin an art movement, but a philosophical strategy. It was a way of life - a rebellion against the establishment that had given the world the hideous slaughter of the First World War. Instead of trying to analyse the work of the Surrealists, bestselling author and Surrealist artist Desmond Morris concentrates on them as people - as remarkable individuals. What were their personalities, their predilections, their character strengths and flaws? Did they enjoy a social life or were they loners? Were they bold eccentrics or timid recluses? Drawing on the author's personal knowledge of the Surrealists, this book captures their life histories, idiosyncrasies and often-complex love lives, vividly illustrated with images of the artists and their works. The arts of Surrealism were both spectacular and international, shaped by the darkest, most irrational workings of the unconscious. Shocking, witty and always entertaining, Morris's tales illuminate the striking variation in approaches to the Surrealist philosophy, both in the artists' work and in their lives. With 72 illustrations

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead's highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard University, and he continued to espouse Whitehead's processist theories as germane to his art throughout his life. This book examines how Whitehead's process philosophy-inspired by quantum theory and focusing on the ongoing ingenuity of dynamic forces of energy rather than traditional views of inert substances-set the stage for Motherwell's future art. This book will be of interest to scholars in twentieth-century modern art, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and art history.

This book provides a conceptual and global overview of the field of Surrealist studies. Methodologically, the companion considers Surrealism's many achievements, but also its historical shortcomings, to illuminate its connections to the historical and cultural moment(s) from which it originated and to assess both the ways in which it still shapes our world in inspiring ways and the ways in which it might appear problematic as we look back at it from a twenty-first-century vantage point. Contributions from experienced scholars will enable professors to teach the subject more broadly, by opening their eyes to aspects of the field that are on the margins of their expertise, and it will enable scholars to identify new areas of study in their own work, by indicating lines of research at a tangent to their own. The companion will reflect the interdisciplinarity of Surrealism by incorporating discussions pertaining to the visual arts, as well as literature, film, and political and intellectual history.

An intimate look at Ben Nicholson's everyday inspirations Throughout his career, Ben Nicholson (1894-1982) transformed everyday homewares into extraordinary experiments in abstract art. Nicholson's studio was filled with objects that inspired him. From patterned mocha-ware jugs and cut glass goblets to spanners, hammers and chisels, these ordinary personal possessions were a source of almost endless inspiration to the artist. This book brings together for the first time Nicholson's paintings, reliefs, prints and drawings alongside his rarely seen personal possessions and studio tools. It traces how the artist's style developed, from his early traditional tabletop still lifes to his later abstract works. Still life was at the heart of Nicholson's artistic practice. Through these humble items, he began to experiment with form and color. His early works in particular owed inspiration to his father, the painter William Nicholson. The book traces the artistic and personal influences on Nicholson's evolutionary still life style from the 1920s to the 1970s. It explores his time with Winifred Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, as well as his encounters with other Modernist greats, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian. Distributed for Pallant House Gallery

Illuminating reflections on painting and drawing from one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century 'Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light' How does a painter see the world? Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing. 'Among the most important, powerful and influential American painters of the last 100 years ... he's an art world hero' Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine 'Guston's paintings make us think hard' Aindrea Emelife, Guardian