'I have never read such a stimulating short guide to art' Lynn Barber, Sunday Times Now Grayson Perry is a fully paid-up member of the art establishment, he wants to show that any of us can appreciate art (after all, there is a reason he's called this book Playing to the Gallery and not 'Sucking up to an Academic Elite'). Based on his hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures and full of pictures, this funny, personal journey through the art world answers the basic questions that might occur to us in an art gallery but seem too embarrassing to ask.

Originally published in 1940, this book charts the origins and evolution of academies of art from the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Pevsner expertly explains the political, religious and mercantile forces affecting the education of artists in various countries in Western Europe, and the growing 'academisation' of artistic training that he saw is his own day. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the various historical schools of art instruction and the history of art more generally.

The first English collection of writings by Henry van de Velde, one of the most influential designers and theorists of the twentieth century. Belgian artist, architect, designer, and theorist Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) was a highly original and influential figure in Europe beginning in the 1890s. A founding member of the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, he also directed the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Germany, which eventually became the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius. This selection of twenty-six essays, translated from French and German, includes van de Velde's writings on William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, Neo-Impressionist painting, and relationships between ornament, line, and abstraction in German aesthetics. The texts trace the evolution of van de Velde's thoughts during his most productive period as a theorist in the artistic debates in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Katherine M. Kuenzli expertly guides readers to see how van de Velde's writings reconcile themes of aesthetics and function, and expression and reason, throughout the artistic periods and regions represented by these texts. With introductory discussions of each essay and full annotations, this is an essential volume for a broad range of scholars and students of the history of fine and applied arts and ideas.

This book focuses on the ephemeral architecture built for festivals and shows how these constructions played a role in the development of Western architectural and urban theory. Festival architecture has allowed architects to experiment with new ideas, new forms and new spatial arrangements.
The book is arranged in historical periods from Antiquity to the modern era. The analyses of specific festivals are set in relation to contemporary ideas and theories in architecture and urban design and essays focus on either architecture or urban design. The wealth of illustrations depict many unusual and rarely seen images from European festival tradition. The contributors are well-known architectural historians and art historians.

With contributions from provocative art and architectural historians, this book is a unique exposition of the temporary architecture erected for festivals and the role it has played in developing Western architectural and urban theory. Festival Architecture is arranged in historical periods - from Antiquity to the modern era - and divided between analyses of specific festivals, set in relation to contemporary architecture and urban design ideas and theories. Illustrated with a wealth of unusual and rarely-seen images from the European festival tradition, this is a fascinating outline of the history of festival architecture ideal for postgraduate architecture and urban design students.

First impressions count, especially in Milano. In this unprecedented photographic journey, editor Karl Kolbitz opens the door to 144 of the city's most sumptuous entrance halls, captivating in their diversity and splendor. These vibrant Milanese entryways, until now hidden away behind often restrained facades, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian modernism, mediating public and private space with vivid configurations of color and form, from floors of juxtaposed stones to murals of minimalist geometry. The collection spans buildings from 1920 to 1970 and showcases the work of some of the city's most illustrious architects and designers, including Giovanni Muzio, Gio Ponti, Piero Portaluppi, and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, as well as non-pedigreed architecture of equal impact and interest. The photographs for the publication were exclusively created by Delfino Sisto Legnani, Paola Pansini, and Matthew Billings, each evoking the entryways with individual sensibility and a stylistic interplay of detail shots-such as stones, door handles, and handrails-with larger architectural views. The images are accompanied by outstanding written contributions from Penny Sparke, Fabrizio Ballabio, Lisa Hockemeyer, Daniel Sherer, Brian Kish, and Grazia Signori, together bringing a wealth of architecture, design, and natural stone expertise to guide the reader through the applied materials and fittings as well as the art-historical and social implications of each of the ingressi. As much an architectural city guide as an aesthetic study, the book provides the exact address and an annotated Milan map for all featured entryways, as well as the architect name and date of construction. In the well-documented realm of 20th-century Italian design, Kolbitz has stepped over the threshold and delivered a brand new area of inquiry in Milanese modernism. With the rigor of its multifaceted research, poised photography, and breadth of its featured hallways, this is an invigorating new reference work and an inside look at the city's design DNA across high to low architecture.

Bringing together cultural history, visual studies, and media archaeology, Bruno considers the interrelations of projection, atmosphere, and environment. Projection has long been transforming space, from shadow plays to camera obscuras and magic lantern shows. Our fascination with projection is alive on the walls of museums and galleries and woven into our daily lives. Giuliana Bruno explores the histories of projection and atmosphere in visual culture and their continued importance to contemporary artists who are reinventing the projective imagination with atmospheric thinking and the use of elemental media. To explain our fascination with projection and atmosphere, Bruno traverses psychoanalysis, environmental philosophy, architecture, the history of science, visual art, and moving image culture to see how projective mechanisms and their environments have developed over time. She reveals how atmosphere is formed and mediated, how it can change, and what projection can do to modify a site. In so doing, she gives new life to the alchemic possibilities of transformative projective atmospheres. Showing how their "environmentality" produces sites of exchange and relationality, this book binds art to the ecology of atmosphere.

This volume of edited essays is the first one in English to offer a critical overview of the specific features of Belgian modernity from 1880 to 1940 in a multiplicity of disciplines: literature and poetry, politics, music, photography and drama. The first half of the book investigates the roots of twentieth century modernity in Belgian fin de sicle across a variety of genres (novel, poetry and drama), not only within but also beyond the boundaries of Symbolism. The contributors go on to examine the explosion of Belgian culture on the international scene with the rise of the avant-gardes, notably Surrealism: and the contribution made in minor genres, such as the popular novels of Simenon and Jean Ray, and the Tintin comics of Herg.

'It is right that, after more than one hundred years, she should have her say' John Carey, Sunday Times

Twelve days before her twenty-fourth birthday, on the foggy morning of Saturday 12 January 1901, Ida Nettleship married Augustus John in a private ceremony at St Pancras Registry Office. The union went against the wishes of Ida's parents, who aspired to an altogether more conventional match for their eldest daughter. But Ida was in love with Augustus, a man of exceptional magnetism also studying at the Slade, and who would become one of the most famous artists of his time.

Ida's letters - to friends, to family and to Augustus - reveal a young woman of passion, intensity and wit. They tell of the scandal she brought on the Nettleship family and its consquences; of hurt and betrayal as the marriage evolved into a three-way affair when Augustus fell in love with another woman, Dorelia; of Ida's remarkable acceptance of Dorelia, their pregnancies and shared domesticity; of self-doubt, happiness and despair; and of finding the strength and courage to compromise and navigate her unorthodox marriage.

Ida is a naturally gifted writer, and it is with a candour, intimacy and social intelligence extraordinary for a woman of her period that her correspondence opens up her world. Ida John died aged just thirty of puerperal fever following the birth of her fifth son, but in these vivid, funny and sometimes devastatingly sad letters she is startlingly alive on the page.

In February 1972 Henry Moore's sculpture studios in the English countryside at Much Hadham were filled with the preparations for his retrospective exhibition at Florence. In search of peace and quiet, he went into a smaller room overlooking the fields where a local farmer grazed his sheep. The sheep came very close to the window, attracting his attention, and he began to draw them. Initially he saw them as nothing more than four-legged balls of wool, but his vision changed as he explored what they were really like - the way they moved, the shape of their bodies under the fleece. They also developed strong human and biblical associations, and the sight of a ewe with her lamb evoked the mother-and-child theme - a large form sheltering a small one - which has been important to Henry Moore in all his work. He drew the sheep again that summer after they were shorn, when he could see the shapes of the bodies which had been covered by wool. Solid in form, sudden and vigorous in movement, Henry Moore's sheep are created through a network of swirling and zigzagging lines in the rapid and (in Moore's hands) sensitive medium of ballpoint pen. The effect is both familiar and monumental; as Lor

The story of a new style of art-and a new way of life-in postwar America: confessionalism. What do midcentury "confessional" poets have in common with today's reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work-always ongoing, never complete-to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed-with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of "confessional performance" unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors-and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts.

Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and how does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them? These are some of the questions posed by major feminist art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock, in her latest installation of the virtual feminist museum. In closely-read case studies, we encounter artworks by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Alina Szapocznikow, Anna Maria Maiolino, Vera Frenkel, Sarah Kofman and Chantal Akerman to explore trauma and bereavement, fatal illness, first- and second-generation Holocaust experience, migration, exile and the encounter with political horror and atrocity. Offering a specifically-feminist contribution to trauma studies, and a feminist psychoanalytical contribution to the study of contemporary art, this volume continues the conceptual innovations that have been the hall-mark of Pollock's dedicated exploration of feminist interventions in art's histories. -- .

This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on primary material from the Bibliotheque nationale de France and from Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production, Thematics and Reception-Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present) to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for diametrically opposed political or religious purposes. The author argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the periods that popularised these forms have certain common features related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinee increases our understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.

A thought-provoking look at Aesthetic painting and its relationship to the changing technological landscape In the 19th century, the Aesthetic movement exalted taste, the pursuit of beauty, and self-expression over moral expectations and restrictive conformity. This illuminating publication examines the production and circulation of artworks made during this unique historical moment. Looking at how specific works of art in this style were created, collected, and exchanged, the book pushes beyond the notion of Aesthetic painting and design as being merely decorative. Instead, work by James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Albert Moore, and others is shown to have offered their makers and viewers a means of further engaging with the rapidly changing world around them. This multifaceted and thought-provoking study provides a radical new perspective on a mode of artistic production, linking it to the era's expanding visual culture and the technological advancements that contributed to it. In a period marked by increasing connectivity, this book shows how art of the Aesthetic movement on both sides of the Atlantic figured into growing global networks. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Modern Art: A Critical Introduction traces the historical and contemporary contexts for understanding modern art movements, and the theories which influenced and attempted to explain them. This approach forgoes the chronological march of art movements and isms in favour of looking at the ways in which art has been understood. It investigates the main developments in art interpretation from the same period, from Kant to post-structuralism, and draws examples from a wide range of art genres including painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. The book includes detailed discussions of visual art practices both inside and outside the museum. This new edition has been restructured to make the key themes as accessible as possible and updated to include many more recent examples of art practice . An expanded glossary and margin notes also provide definitions of the range of terms used within theoretical discussion and critical reference. Individual chapters explore key themes of the modern era, such as the relationship between artists and galleries, the politics of representation, the changing nature of self-expression, the public monument, nature and the urban,

The Victorian Artist, first published in 2003, examines the origins, development, and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910. Analyzing a variety of narrative modes, including gossip, anecdotes, and serialization, as well as the differences among genres - autobiographies, family biographies, biographical histories, and dictionaries - Julie Codell discerns and articulates the multiple, often conflicting identities that were ascribed to artists collectively and as individuals. Her study demonstrates how this body of literature, combined with images of artists' bodies, their works and their studios, reflected anxiety over economic exchanges in the art world, aestheticism, and the desire to tame artists in order to fit them into an emerging national identity as a way of socializing new audiences of readers and spectators. Her book provides a sociological and cultural overview of the art world in Britain in the decades before World War I.

Brett Whiteley was one of the most dynamic and talented artists in the history of Australian art, an artist whose recognition had spread worldwide before his untimely death in 1992. Early in his career he established a name for himself in London, exhibiting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and coming into contact with many British painters - Francis Bacon and David Hockney among others. His early paintings startled critics and fellow artists, but even at that point, two basic subjects were evident: the landscape and the nude, elements which became the mainstay of his oeuvre. At the root of all Whiteley's work was a draughtsmanship of stunning virtuosity, capable of capturing all the poetic arabesque of a river in a single sweeping line of brush and ink, or the erotic curves of the human body in a few searching strokes of charcoal. This volume presents an illuminating evaluation of Whiteley's achievement. Works dating from the 1950s to the last years of his life, illustrated in over 180 colour plates, allow Whiteley's career to be surveyed in its entirety. Barry Pearce, Head Curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, provides a comprehensive overview of Whiteley's life and art; Bryan Robertson offers an impression of the artist's years in London; and Wendy Whiteley, the artist's wife and companion for over three decades, contributes an intimate portrait of the man behind the work. Superbly illustrated and produced, Brett Whiteley: Art & Life is a fitting tribute to one of Australia's most significant artists, a man whose outstanding work excites, amazes and impresses us no less now than it did when first created.

The essays collected here investigate art made by women in South Africa between 1910, the year of Union, and 1994, the year of the first democratic election. During this period, complex political circumstances and the impact of modernism in South Africa affected the production of images and objects. The essays explore the ways in which the socio-political circumstances associated with twentieth-century modernity had a paradoxical impact on women. If some were empowered, others were disadvantaged: while some were able to further their social and cultural development and expression, the advancement of others was impeded. The contributors study the lives and achievements of women - named and un-named, black and white, and from different cultural groups and social contexts - and consider objects and images that are historically associated with both 'art' and 'craft'. In all the essays, gender theory is related to South African circumstances. The volume explores gender theory in relation to twentieth-century visual culture and discusses economic conditions and regional geographies as well as notions of identity. It investigates the influence of educational and cultural institutions, the role of theory on art practice, debates about material culture, the power of nationalist ideologies and the role of feminist theories in a changing country. A wide range of visual images and objects provide the touchstone for debate and analysis - paintings, sculptures, photography, baskets, tapestries, embroideries and ceramics - so that the book is richly visual and celebrates the diversity of South African art made by women.

Hot Art, Cold War - Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources. With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations. This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War - Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences. Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism. This book, together with its companion volume Hot Art, Cold War - Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990,, is a joint initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the editors of the journal Art in Translation at the University of Edinburgh. The journal, launched in 2009, publishes English-language translations of the most significant texts on art and visual cultures presently only available only in their source language. It is committed to widening the perspectives of art history, making it more pluralist in terms of its authors, viewpoints, and subject matter.

A groundbreaking insight into Gustave Courbet and his bold experiments in landscape painting Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cezanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet's paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet's work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet's native Franche-Comte to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world. The Courbet he discovers is not the celebrated history painter of provincial life, but a committed landscapist whose view of nature aligns him with contemporary developments in geology, history, linguistics, and literature.

In reaction to the widespread pursuit of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Paul Wonner and William "Theophilus" Brown were among the artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who began to re-engage with the visible world, applying the gestural style of action painting to depictions of people, landscapes, and still lifes. Together, the couple aligned themselves with this new direction and became leading practitioners of the style known today as Bay Area Figuration. Over time, both artists' works became less gestural and more overtly representational. Brown became known for his psychologically evocative landscapes with classic bathers, as well as for his lonely urban scenes. Wonner received greatest acclaim for his "baroque" still lifes laden with everyday objects, animals, and flowers. Published to accompany the most comprehensive exhibition of the artists' work ever mounted, this exquisite publication offers an in-depth study of these trailblazing artists. Exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (30 April-27 August 2023) travels to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (14 October 2023-7 Jan 2024); and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (28 January-30 March 2024).

Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibition

Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death.

In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are.

Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

Krzysztof Wodiczko's artistic projects stage a dynamic and vivid encounter between aesthetics, ethics and technology. For almost 40 years, the artist's powerful and extensive body of work has deployed contemporary technologies to engage with the problematics of alterity, social responsibility and urban experience. Believing that 'public art' should perform an ethical interruption of existing social processes and their ideological underpinnings, Wodiczko's critical interventions in the urban environment have addressed issues of urban violence, homelessness, alienation and wartime trauma. Since the 1980s, he has produced large-scale slide and video projections, transforming the facades of official buildings and historical monuments into temporary spaces for critical reflection and public protest. The Public Projections series include: The Grand Army Plaza Memorial Arch, Brooklyn, NY (1983), The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1988), The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989), Bunker Hill Monument, Boston (1998), A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima (1999) and El Centro Cultural, Tijuana, Mexico (2001). By nature, Wodiczko's work is often controversial and the book looks at his development of a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing. The Homeless Vehicle project in New York City, equips nomadic 'evicts' with tools for self-articulation, whilst the elaborate Xenology instruments are designed to empower the 'immigrant' by providing access to speech and figuration in the public realm. Like much of his work, his interrogative designs and portable instruments are animated by a desire to bring the socially opaque into the public sphere of appearances, to restore voice and visibility to those rendered mute within the parameters of the public domain. Krzysztof Wodiczko is the first full-scale study of the artist's work, its ethico-political imperatives, and the diverse interpretive lenses which accompany its theorization. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, and bringing together an array of essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, the book represents the most significant and sustained engagement with the artist's practice to date.

The short intermezzo between the Great War and World War II and especially the “roaring twenties” with their a thrill of speed were a period of radical social change and artistic development, and of vibrant metropolitan life and. Born into a merchant family in the Swiss mountain canton of Glarus, Lill Tschudi (1911–2004) moved to London in 1929 to educate herself at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. She flourished in the imperial capital and soon gained wide recognition for her bold and often colourful modernist linocuts. In the Anglo-Saxon world her reputation as an accomplished printmaker has lasted and her works continue to fetch good prices at auctions in Britain and Australia. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art holds some 120 of her prints in its permanent collection, while she has until to date never been distinguished with a solo exhibition in a public museum in her native Switzerland. This book, published to coincide with the first such display at Graphische Sammlung ETH Zurich, features some 50 of her unique linocuts. Designed as a proper picture book, it shows her refined and expressive compositions with their captivating narrative in full-page plates, which are supplemented by informative essays. Text in English and German.

Painting is a continually expanding and evolving medium. The radical changes that have taken place since the 1960s and 1970s - the period that saw the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist visual language - have led to its reinvigoration as a practice, lending it an energy and diversity that persist today. In Contemporary Painting, renowned critic and art historian Suzanne Hudson offers an intelligent and original survey of the subject: a rigorous critical snapshot that brings together more than 250 renowned artists from around the world, whose ideas and aesthetics characterize the painting of our time. These luminaries include Cecily Brown, Theaster Gates, Josh Smith, Jenny Saville, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Gabriel Orozco, Christina Quarles, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Zhang Xiaogang and many others. Organized into seven thematic chapters exploring aspects of contemporary painting, this is an essential volume for art history enthusiasts, students, critics and practitioners. With 245 illustrations in colour