Nicolas Eekman (1889-1973) is the heir of the great creators of his native Flanders, from Jerome Bosh to James Ensor, as well as one of the representatives of the School of Paris. Born in Brussels where he studied architecture, he turned to painting and exhibited for a few years in Holland before settling in Paris in 1921. Close to his compatriot Mondrian with whom he exhibited at the Jeanne Bucher gallery (1928), he is also closely linked to the artists Jean Lurcat, Marcoussis, Max Jacob, Lipchitz, and later with Moise Kisling and Frans Masereel. Influenced by Cubism to which he devoted a few outstanding years, he gradually returned, in the 1930s, to realism and then from the 1950s turned to the fantastic, reviving the Flemish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Author of an abundant painted work, he is also a renowned draftsman, illustrator and engraver whose works have been collected by numerous print studios (Brussels, Hanover, Berlin, Hamburg, Basel, Budapest). Text in English and French.

The art of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) epitomises the angst at the heart of the modern human condition. His dramatic images of screaming figures and distorted anatomies are painted with a richly gestural technique, alluding to such old masters as Titian, Velazquez and Rembrandt. Displaying repressed and raw emotion, his body of work includes portraits of Lucian Freud and John Deakin."

Starting with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and ending with Matthew Barney, nearly every prominent figure in Modern art is represented in vibrant double-page spreads that show how these artists redefined norms and challenged tradition. Fascinating biographical and anecdotal information about each artist is provided alongside large reproductions of their most celebrated works, stunning details, and images of the artists themselves. From the Impressionists to the Surrealists, Cubists to Pop artists-readers will find a wealth of information as well as hours of enjoyment learning about one of the most popular and prolific periods in art history.

A representation of the principle styles and themes that emerges from Harry Bertoia's printmaking and structure work.

A Shepherd's Life centres on Jenny Armstrong, born in 1903 at the farm of Fairliehope, who spent her life working as a shepherdess in the Pentland Hills. In a series of remarkable paintings made over twenty years and based on close observation, Victoria Crowe, one of Scotland's foremost painters, pays tribute to the life and work of this exceptional woman. In spite of their different ages and backgrounds, the two women came to value each other's company and it was through the shepherdess that the artist learned how to interpret the surrounding landscape. At the same time the paintings depict an ancient way of living that has been long in the decline and which, at the start of a new millennium, may be finally disappearing.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) occupies a prominent position in Canada's national culture and has become a celebrated icon for his magnificent landscapes as well as for his brief life and mysterious death. The shy, enigmatic artist and woodsman's innovative painting style produced such seminal Canadian images as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, while his untimely drowning nearly a century ago is still a popular subject of fierce debate.

Originally a commercial artist, Thomson fell in love with the forests and lakes of Ontario's Algonquin Park and devoted himself to rendering the north country's changing seasons in a series of colourful sketches and canvases. Dividing his time between his beloved wilderness and a shack behind the Studio Building near downtown Toronto, Thomson was a major inspiration to his painter friends who, not long after his death, went on to change the course of Canadian art as the influential - and equally controversial - Group of Seven.

Shizuko Yoshikawa (born 1934 in Japan, based in Switzerland) was one of the first and few Japanese students at the Ulm Hochschule fur Gestaltung, known as the postwar "Bauhaus." She later married the renowned designer Josef Muller-Brockmann (1914-1996), a pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design, and moved to Switzerland, where she became an artist and a member of the second generation of concrete art. Amongst the very few women belonging to this art movement, she takes a special position due to her Japanese origins and education. Her work combines the rational concepts of European modern art with the poetry and ease of the intuitional Japanese Zen tradition.

The fashion show and its spaces are sites of otherness, representing everything from rebellion and excess through to political and social activism. This conceptual and stylistic variety is reflected in the spaces they occupy, whether they are staged in an industrial warehouse, on a city street, or out in the open landscape. Staging Fashion is the first collection of essays about the presentation and staging of fashion in runway shows in the period from the 1960s to the 2010s. It offers a fresh perspective on the many collaborations between artists, architects and interior designers to reinforce their interdisciplinary links. Fashion, architecture and interiors share many elements, including design, history, material culture, aesthetics and trends. The research and ideas underpinning Staging Fashion address how fashion and the spatial fields have collaborated in the creation of the space of the fashion show. The 15 essays are written by fashion, interior, architecture and design scholars focusing on the presentation of fashion within the runway space, from avant-garde practices and collaboration with artists, to the most spectacular and commercial shows of recent years, from Prada to Chanel.

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers.

Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways.

Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today.

Glamour is one of the most tantalizing and bewitching aspects of contemporary culture - but also one of the most elusive. The aura of celebrity, the style of the fashion world, the vanity of the rich and beautiful, and the publicity-driven rites of cafe society are all imbued with its irresistible magnetism. But what exactly is glamour? Where does it come from? How old is it? And can anyone quite capture its magic? Stephen Gundle answers all these questions and more in this first ever history of the phenomenon, from Paris in the tumultuous final decades of the eighteenth century through to Hollywood, New York, and Monte Carlo in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Napoleon to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, from Beau Brummell to Gianni Versace. Throughout, the book captures the excitement and sex appeal of glamour while exposing its mechanisms and exploring its sleazy and sometimes tragic underside. As Gundle shows, while glamour is exciting and magnetic, its promise is ultimately an illusion that can only ever be partially fulfilled.

The Mexican revolution of 1910-1920 gave rise to an artistic explosion that was felt most profoundly in printmaking. The left-wing government viewed art as an important vehicle for education and the promotion of revolutionary values. It established a program to cover the walls of public buildings with murals and set up numerous workshops to produce prints for wide distribution. By the 1930s, Mexico was attracting socially committed artists from all over the American continent and beyond, ready to do battle for a new aesthetic as well as a new political order. Diego Rivera, a key figure in the art of revolution, became one of the most celebrated artists in the world.

Starting with works by Jose Guadalupe Posada, who was adopted by the revolutionaries as the archetypal printmaker for the people, Revolution on Paper features prints by thirty-five artists, including the "Three Greats" of Mexican art of the period--Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The selection includes not only single-sheet artists' prints, but also posters addressing social and political issues, and illustrated books on many different subjects. Images of the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, scenes of poverty, hunger, and oppression, and posters protesting against fascism and the war in Europe contrast with representations of Mexican history and idealized rural life that express what was regarded as typically "Mexican." Introductory essays by Dawn Ades and Alison McClean set Mexican printmaking in its artistic and political context. Concise biographies of the artists, a chronology, and a glossary of printmaking terms complete the book.

Edward Ardizzone RA (1900-79) was one of relatively few British artists who defined the field of illustration for their generation. Although his work as an artist and illustrator was wide-ranging, it is for his illustrated children's books, almost continuously available since they were first published from the late 1930s onwards, that he is best known. This book provides the first fully illustrated survey of Ardizzone's work, analysing his activity as an artist and illustrator in the context of 20th-century British art, illustration, printing and publishing. Copiously illustrated with many previously unpublished images, Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator also contributes more broadly to the current reassessment and investigation of mid-20th-century British art and illustration. Alan Powers (author of the bestselling Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer) has written a critically considered text which draws for the first time on the family's archives, those of Ardizzone's publishers, and conversations with those who knew the artist. This beautiful and enlightening book, which reflects in its design and production values the aesthetic of an artist who was closely involved in the production of his own illustrated books, will be a fascinating read both for specialists as well as for readers who have grown up with the unforgettable characters of Ardizzone's classic children's stories.

This book is based on the artwork of Sue Jane Taylor. She is no stranger to extreme working environments, having worked for over thirty years recording the lives of workers in the North Sea oil industry on sites such as Piper Alpha, Piper B, Forties platforms and recently Murchison in the Northern Seas. Her work now extends to the offshore renewable energy industry. The book brings a unique perspective to the relationship between art, environment and industry while revealing a relatively alien way of life on board a North Sea oil platform. Among other themes it will consider the future of energy in Scotland. The book has an introductory essay by Elsa Cox, Senior Curator of Technology at National Museums Scotland, illustrated by relevant objects from the collections in the National Museum. This is followed by Sue Jane Taylor's artwork, with extended captions.

This is the third of three text books, published in association with the Open University, which offer an innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists.

This is the remarkable story of the colony of artists who were inspired by the people, landscape and light of West Cornwall. Now internationally celebrated, they are forever to be associated with the small fishing ports of Newlyn and St Ives. Arriving from the artists' colonies of France, the Barbizon and Pont-Aven, and the painting schools of London and Paris, they set up their studios in the cottages and net lofts overlooking the sea. Here they painted; their subjects centred on the working life and conditions of the people they lived amongst, and the stark beauty of the rugged Cornish landscape. Challenging the accepted styles of the Victorian masters, their bold work, full of light and colour, often drew upon the working life of the fishermen and their families, recording the tragedies and simple pleasures of their lives. In The Shining Sands, Tom Cross records the life and work of these artists, from the earliest arrivals in the 1870s through to the decade preceding the Second World War. In this period the artists' colony grew into one of the most significant art movements of recent times, the influences of which directly inspired the post-war 'modern' movements, and which reverberate even today. The Shining Sands includes almost 100 colour pictures, and 200 images in all, produced by such artists as Walter Langley, Frank Bramley, Stanhope Forbes, Norman Garstin, Elizabeth Forbes, Lamorna Birch, Laura Knight, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. The author describes the events and circumstances behind the making of many of the paintings, adding a further dimension to our appreciation of these fine works.

The most prolific photographer of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), Russell Lee has never been canonised for his iconic images of mid-century America. With this insightful biography, historian and archivist Mary Jane Appel uncovers Lee’s rebellious life, tracing his journey from blue-blood beginnings to self-taught photographer through the body of work he left behind. Lee crisscrossed America’s back roads more than any photographer of his era, living out of his car from 1936 to 1942. Under the guidance of FSA director Roy Stryker, he captured arresting images of dust storms and punishing floods, and chronicled the Second World War home front and the heyday of small-town America—all the while focusing prophetically on themes like segregation and climate change. With more than 100 images spread throughout, Russell Lee speaks not only to the complexity of a pioneering documentary photographer’s work but to a seminal American moment captured viscerally like never before.

The book Art Forms in Nature is a collection of prints, made by the scientist Ernst Haeckel, of an enormous variety of flora and fauna from the sea-including microscopic Radiolaria, starfish and jelly fish-and since Prestel published it in 1998, it has been a favourite with artists, designers, illustrators and anyone who enjoys the wondrous forms of the natural world. Now paper engineer Maike Biederstaedt has transformed Haeckel's transcendent work into a three-dimensional book that allows readers to appreciate Haeckel's vivid colours, exceptional precision and fascination with patterns and geometry. This stunning book features seven pop-ups that allow readers to see nature's brilliance the way that Haeckel did-as marvellous, mathematically based creations that support his theory of the unity of all living things. Certain to appeal to his huge variety of fans, this pop-up version of a timeless classic will be treasured for years to come.

Surrealism is one of the most influential and popular art forms of the last century. It has shaped painting, literature, film, photography, music, theatre, architecture, fashion and design, as well as thinking about politics and culture. The Encyclopedia presents the first comprehensive and systematic overview of surrealism internationally, from its beginnings to the present day. Volume 1 includes overviews of national surrealist movements, surrealism's influence across the visual, applied and performing arts, and analyses of the concepts which underpin surrealism. Volumes 2 and 3 present an A-Z of both the significant and the lesser-known individuals - theorists, critics, novelists, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, designers, painters, collagists, object makers, sculptors, film makers, and photographers - who have made and continue to make surrealism. The volume concludes with a detailed overview of contemporary surrealist practice.

In the ambitious dream of a futurist reconstruction of the universe pursued by the movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which ranged from the arts to the most diverse aspects of life, the renewal of postal communication methods also found its place, with proposals that covered the entire sector, from postcards to letterheads and envelopes, from stamps to interpersonal correspondence. Futurism, in fact, has not limited itself to using the post office network to spread its ideas in every part of the world, but also created a new postal style, conceiving many solutions of modern graphics and even post-postal correspondence via computer and cell phone, made up of synthesis, laconicity, conventional symbolism and abbreviations. The book explores this little-known chapter of Futurism through the material of the Echaurren Salaris Collection, the richest in the world with regard to magazines, posters, books and futurist documents, as well as an indispensable reference for the knowledge of this movement. Text in English and Italian.

An invaluable guide through the intricacies of the first century of modern art, ArtSpoke features the same lucid prose, thought-provoking ideas, user-friendly organization, and striking design as its predecessor, ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords. Chronicling international art from Realism through Surrealism, ArtSpoke explains such popular but often misunderstood movements and organizations as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, the Salon, the Fauves, the Harlem Renaissance, and so on-as well as events ranging from the 1913 Armory Show to Brazil's little-known Semana de Arte Moderna. Concise explanations of potentially perplexing techniques, media, and philosophies of art making-including automatism, calotype, found object, Pictorialism, and Readymade-provide information essential to understanding how artists of this era worked and why the results look the way they do. Entries on concepts that were crucial to the development of modern art-such as androgyny, dandyism, femme fatale, spiritualism, and many others-distinguish this lively guide from any other art dictionary on the market. Also unique to this volume is the ArtChart, a handy one-page chronological diagram of the groups discussed in the book. In addition, there is a scene-setting timeline of world history and art history from 1848 to 1944, overflowing with invaluable information and illustrated with twenty-four color reproductions. Students, specialists, and casual art lovers will all find ArtSpoke an essential addition to their reference shelves and a welcome companion on visits to museums and galleries.