"Catherine Cusset's book caught a lot of me. I recognised myself" DAVID HOCKNEY "A perfect short expose of Hockney's life as seen through the eyes of an admiring novelist" Kirkus Reviews "Hers is an affirming vision of a restless talent propelled by optimism and chance" New York Times With clear, vivid prose, this meticulously researched novel draws an intimate, moving portrait of the most famous living English painter. Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney had to fight to become an artist. After leaving home for the Royal College of Art in London his career flourished, but he continued to struggle with a sense of not belonging, because of his homosexuality, which had yet to be decriminalised, and because of his inclination for a figurative style of art, which was not sufficiently "contemporary" to be valued. Trips to New York and California - where he would live for many years and paint his iconic swimming pools - introduced him to new scenes and new loves, beginning a journey that would take him through the fraught years of the AIDS epidemic. A compelling hybrid of novel and biography, David Hockney: A Life offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is as accessible as it is compelling, and whose passion to create has never been deterred by heartbreak or illness or loss. Translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.

The first book highlighting the historical roots and contemporary implications of the silhouette as an American art form Before the advent of photography in 1839, Americans were consumed by the fashion for silhouette portraits. Economical in every sense, the small, stark profiles cost far less than oil paintings and could be made in minutes. Black Out, the first major publication to focus on the development of silhouettes, gathers leading experts to shed light on the surprisingly complex historical, political, and social underpinnings of this ostensibly simple art form. In its examination of portraits by acclaimed silhouettists, such as Auguste Edouart and William Bache, this richly illustrated volume explores likenesses of everyone from presidents and celebrities to everyday citizens and enslaved people. Ultimately, the book reveals how silhouettes registered the paradoxes of the unstable young nation, roiling with tensions over slavery and political independence. Primarily tracing the rise of the silhouette in the decades leading up to the Civil War, Black Out also considers the ubiquity of the genre today, particularly in contemporary art. Using silhouettes to address such themes as race, identity, and the notion of the digital self, the four featured living artists--Kara Walker, Kristi Malakoff, Kumi Yamashita, and Camille Utterback-all take the silhouette to unique and fascinating new heights. Presenting the distinctly American story behind silhouettes, Black Out vividly delves into the historical roots and contemporary interpretations of this evocative, ever popular form of portraiture. Published in association with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Album Picabia is an inspiring, artistic chronicle of Francis Picabia's life (1879-1953) as seen through the eyes of his last wife and creative protegee, Olga Mohler Picabia. Begun in 1936, four years before their marriage, and left unfinished in 1951, two years before Picabia's death, the album is a collection of souvenirs, sketches, newspaper clippings, photographs, and annotations that document the artist's public and private lives with acute affection and appreciation. This rich visual account grants us entry into one of the greatest, yet one of the least known, creative and romantic partnerships of the 20th century. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

From long lost paintings to ephemeral sculptures; from whimsical performances to iconic public murals; and from independent films to landmark design objects, the surprising and provocative contents of Moving Focus, India have been provided by a varied group of experts. A first of its kind, this book invited 54 artists, curators, historians and writers to each create a list of five works of art, made at any time since 1900, by artists living in India or identifying as part of its diaspora. With over 250 individual nominations, including artists whose works have been exhibited at venues as various as Houghton Hall (Anish Kapoor, 2020), the Asia Society Museum, New York (MF Husain, 2019) and the Piramal Museum of Art, Mumbai (SH Raza, 2018), the exercise produced thrilling and unexpected choices across many mediums. Drawing from a wide range of private and public collections, the selections reveal the diversity and inclusiveness of today's art scene: an art scene that has embraced the progressive changes evident in society at large. In addition to these lists, the book includes reflections on collecting, curating and canon-formation from a range of important voices, by way of a roundtable discussion and a series of essays. Spread over two volumes and marked by an innovative and fresh design sensibility, whether you are familiar with modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent or looking for an introduction, Moving Focus, India contains a wealth of information. Lavishly illustrated with over 1,000 archival and freshly commissioned photographs, this book is an important and timely addition to the global art discourse and a key source of reference. Nominated artists include Ramkinkar Baij, Chittaprosad, VS Gaitonde, Amrita Sher Gil, Rummana Hussain, Bhupen Khakhar, Nasreen Mohamedi, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Meera Mukherjee, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Nilima Sheikh, Jangarh Singh Shyam, KG Subramanyan, Vivan Sundaram, Zarina and many more.

A design monograph series on the most remarkable architects, designers, brands and design movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, each book contains a historical-critical essay discussing the life and work of the subject, followed by an illustrated appreciation of groundbreaking work. Charles and Ray Eames were the golden couple of postwar American design. True multimedia pioneers, they worked in furniture design, architecture, print, photography and filmmaking. They imbued the modern twentieth-century aesthetic with originality, colour and freshness, and their ability to mould plastics and plywood with an elegance not previously seen resulted in some of the most influential furniture design of the modern age – witnessed not just in the continuing popularity of their original designs but also in the mass prodcution of countless imitations.

This new resource assembles 129 Black artists and their magnificent works, highlighting their important contributions to art worldwide. Beginning with the Brooklyn-based artists active during the Works Progress Administration years and continuing with artists approaching their prime today, the collection spans 80 years of art. From highly publicized artists to rising talent, each is tied to Brooklyn in their own way. Artists include Jacob Lawrence, Otto Neals, Onnie Millar, Kehinde Wiley, Dindga McCannon, Melvin Edwards, Dread Scott, Xenobia Bailey, Vivian Schuyler Key, Kay Brown, Russell Frederick, and many more. Seven chapters highlight overarching themes that connect the artists, besides their Brooklyn connections. A foreword by New York City's "first lady," Chirlane McCray, marks the importance of Brooklyn's Black creators within the city's art community.

Eric Gill (1882-1940) is one of the twentieth century's most controversial artists. This illustrated introduction focuses on the clarity of Gill's drawn and cut line. It explores his genius as a letter cutter, wood engraver, sculptor and typographer in the light of his refined finished drawings and preparatory sketches. Like all modernists of the early twentieth-century, he used stylised form, explicit sexuality and the influence of other cultures to position himself at the forefront of the avant-garde. An outsider and a radical, Gill nevertheless became one the establishment's favourite artists, with his patrons including the Catholic Church, the Lord Chancellor's office, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Mint, the London Underground, the BBC, the Post Office and the League of Nations. The authors illuminate here the quality, complexities and contradictions of Gill's fascinating life and art.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is arguably Japan's most famous living artist. Her originality, innovation and powerful desire to communicate have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades. During this time, Kusama has explored painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance and installation, as well as product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition she has recently achieved. Now in her eightieth year, she continues to make art, extending the range of her large-scale, dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-painting extensive series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings. Kusama has exhibited widely around the world, including representing Japan at the Venice Biennale, and her work is in many major collections. Accompanying the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist's work to be staged in the UK, this lavishly illustrated book features an introductory essay by Tate curator Frances Morris as well as four other substantial essays by leading international critics. Topics covered include Kusama's time in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and an exploration of her art from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Otto Dix fought in the First World War for the better part of four years before becoming one of the most important artists of the Weimar era. Marked by the experience, he made monumental, difficult and powerful works about it. Whereas Dix has often been presented as a lone voice of reason and opposition in Germany between the wars, this book locates his work squarely in the mainstream of Weimar society. Informed by recent studies of collective remembrance, of camaraderie, and of the popular, working-class socialist groups that commemorated the war, this book takes Dix's very public, monumental works out of the isolation of the artist's studio and returns them to a context of public memorials, mass media depictions, and the communal search for meaning in the war. The author argues that Dix sought to establish a community of veterans through depictions of the war experience that used the soldier's humorous, grotesque language of the trenches and that deliberately excluded women and other non-combatants. His depictions were preoccupied with heteronormativity in the context of intimate touch and tenderness between soldiers at the front and with sexual potency in the face of debilitating wounds suffered by others in the war.

An exceptionally thoughtful and well-written biography of one of the most influential studio potters in Britain Widely recognized as the father of studio pottery, Bernard Leach (1887-1979) played a pioneering role in creating an identity for artist potters in Britain and around the world. Born in the East (Hong Kong) and educated in the West (England), throughout his life Leach perceived himself as a courier between the disparate cultures. His exquisite pots reflect the inspiration he drew from East and West as well as his response to the basic tenets of modernism-truth to materials, the importance of function to form, and simplicity of decoration. This outstanding biography provides for the first time a vivid and detailed account of Leach's life and its relation to his art. Emmanuel Cooper, himself a potter of international reputation, explores Leach's working methods, the seams of his pottery, his writings and philosophy, his recognition in Japan and Britain, and his continuing legacy, bringing into sharp focus a complex man who captured in his work as a potter the "still center" that always eluded him in his tumultuous personal life. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Admired for his trompe l'oeil style, American painter William Harnett (1848-1892) was as intellectually ambitious as he was technically skilled. The first scholarly monograph on the artist, William Harnett's Curious Objects details Harnett's career-long effort to position still life as a serious art. Nika Elder elevates the significance of Harnett's academic training and questions his apparent turn away from it. Reading his still lifes in relation to wartime visual culture, literary realism, museum display, and industrial design, she shows how Harnett experimented with inanimate objects and pictorial techniques to represent the human condition without depicting the human body. His paintings illustrate late nineteenth-century American material culture, but they also represent Reconstruction, interiority, death and life, and the imagination. By engaging such lofty themes, Harnett reimagined history painting for the modern era. His work thus locates Gilded Age art and culture in the long shadow of the Civil War and its politics.

Francesco Radino (Bagno a Ripoli, Florence, 1947) is one of the masters of contemporary Italian photography. Participating in the developments of research photography on the contemporary landscape, over the course of fifty years he developed an intimate way of exploring reality in its profound economic, historical, social and cultural transformations. The volume contains the most significant works of his rich production, accompanied by numerous critical interventions and writings by Radino himself. Contributions by: Roberta Valtorta, Giovanni Arpino, Giovanna Calvenzi, Paolo Cognetti, Eleonora Fiorani, Antonella Pelizzari, Urs Stahel, Fabrizio Trisoglio, Mauro Zanchi, Francesco Radino. Text in English and Italian.

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.

'Rich and funny' Julian Barnes, Guardian

'Poirier's hugely enjoyable, quick-witted and richly anecdotal book is magnifique' The Times

A captivating portrait of those who lived, loved, fought, played and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences us today.

After the horrors of the Second World War, Paris was the place where the world's most original voices of the time came - among them Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Juliette Greco, Alberto Giacometti, Saul Bellow and Arthur Koestler. Fuelled by the elation of the Liberation, these pioneers hoped to find an alternative to the Capitalist and Communist models for life, art and politics - a Third Way.

Agnès Poirier transports us to a time when Paris was at the heart of all that was new and brave and controversial, skilfully weaving together a collage of images and destinies.

This book examines the domains of public space and the private, domestic realm and the interstices between them by focusing on ways that women enter the public arena while using the domestic politics of the private one to propel them forward in their cause for social justice, equality, and citizenship. The subject is unique not only in its focus on the visual culture of first-wave feminists in Edwardian England with a comparator analysis, where appropriate, on feminist developments in France, but also in its attention to women's movements into the public arena in the late 20th/21st century more globally in the context of how they continue to honor this first-wave suffrage history. Women's bodies were and are at the center of every debate on women's rights worldwide. The present study connects the hard work of women activists in the streets of London, Paris and beyond in making their desires known.

'Inside Photography', a collaboration between the writer/editor, David Brittain and graphic artist, Clinton Cahill, is a book of interviews that sheds light on the art photography magazine. Inciteful and often irreverent, the book demonstrates how this critically overlooked type of publication can be an invaluable resource for creative and historical investigations.

An illustrated biography of the celebrated artist James Ensor The Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) was a major figure in the Belgian avant-garde of the late 19th century and an important precursor to the development of Expressionism in the early 20th century. Daring and socially engaged, Ensor included political, religious, historical, and autobiographical themes in his works. He is known for brightly colored depictions of masked skeletons, seascapes, and carnivals, which frequently tend toward the macabre or grotesque. Structured like a biography, this book explores Ensor's life and art year by year. Chapters are illustrated with Ensor's masterpieces as well as archival photographs and previously unpublished letters.

Awarded an Honourable Mention by the Association for Israeli Studies. Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of "civilian militarism", Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers. This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim’s artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim’s work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.

Explores contemporary art that challenges deadly desires for mastery and dominion. Amid times of emboldened cruelty and perpetual war, Rosalyn Deutsche links contemporary art to three practices that counter the prevailing destructiveness: psychoanalytic feminism, radical democracy, and war resistance. Deutsche considers how art joins these radical practices to challenge desires for mastery and dominion, which are encapsulated in the Eurocentric conception of the human that goes under the name "Man" and is driven by deadly inclinations that Deutsche calls masculinist. The masculinist subject-as an individual or a group-universalizes itself, claims to speak on behalf of humanity, and meets differences with conquest. Analyzing artworks by Christopher D'Arcangelo, Robert Filliou, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, James Welling, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Deutsche illuminates the diverse ways in which they expose, question, and trouble the visual fantasies that express masculinist desire. Undermining the mastering subject, these artworks invite viewers to question the positions they assume in relation to others. Together, the essays in Not-Forgetting, written between 1999 and 2020, argue that this art offers a unique contribution to building a less cruel and violent society.

This book offers a general historical overview of the Dada movement and presents the individual destinies of some of its major players against the background of the historical, political, and cultural trends which dominated the twentieth century in Europe as well as in America. The author discusses in depth the reciprocal interaction between Dada as an avant-garde movement and its environment, as well as a number of the emerging phenomena born during this interactive process. Dada is viewed as a complex phenomenon dominated by the emergence of hard-to-extrapolate effects; one hundred years of history enable us to ascertain the depth and the extent of this extremely significant socio-cultural event which was Dada and its relevancy to our post-modern and in the future-perhaps-post-human societies.