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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > General
Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo offers a depth psychological analysis of the art and life of Remedios Varo, a Spanish surrealist painter. The book uses Varo's paintings in a revolutionary way: to critique the patriarchal underpinnings of Jungian psychology, alchemy, and Surrealism, illuminating how Varo used painting to address cultural complexes that silence female expression. The book focuses on how the practice of alchemical psychology, through the power of imagination and the archetypal Feminine, can lead to healing and transformation for individuals and culture. Alchemy, Jung, and Remedios Varo offers the first in-depth psychological treatment of the role alchemy played in the friendship between Varo and Leonora Carrington-a connection that led to paintings that protest the pitfalls of patriarchy. This unique book will be of great interest for academics, scholars, and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, art history, Surrealism, cultural criticism, and Jungian studies.
The only book available on Scottish painting, this book is now in its third edition with a new introduction and final chapter that brings the book up to date with the latest developments in Scottish painting (Richard Wright's win of the Turner Prize 2009). Illustrated throughout, the work is by acknowledged authority on Scottish painting William Hardie. Scottish society has been reflected through the strong colour and energetic brushwork of its artists. The book traces the beginnings of Scottish painting from the foundation of the Foulis Academy in 1753, with William Dyce and Scott Lauder establishing themselves in the south, followed by W Q Orchardson and John Pettie around 1860. European travel ensured Scottish painters were open to new techniques, and the explosion of the Glasgow Boys and then the Colourists onto the scene meant Scotland was respected for its innovation and imagination. Charles Rennie Mackintosh today is still internationally recognised for his work, and the painting of John Byrne, Curister, and Peter Howson bring the book to the present day.
Traditional postcolonial scholarship on art and imperialism emphasises tensions between colonising cores and subjugated peripheries. The ties between London and British white settler colonies have been comparatively neglected. Artworks not only reveal the controlling intentions of imperialist artists in their creation but also the uses to which they were put by others in their afterlives. In many cases they were used to fuel contests over cultural identity which expose a mixture of rifts and consensuses within the British ranks which were frequently assumed to be homogeneous. British Art for Australia, 1860-1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries represents the first systematic and comparative study of collecting British art in Australia between 1860 and 1953 using the archives of the Australian national galleries and other key Australian and UK institutions. Multiple audiences in the disciplines of art history, cultural history, and museology are addressed by analysing how Australians used British art to carve a distinct identity, which artworks were desirable, economically attainable, and why, and how the acquisition of British art fits into a broader cultural context of the British world. It considers the often competing roles of the British Old Masters (e.g. Romney and Constable), Victorian (e.g. Madox Brown and Millais), and modern artists (e.g. Nash and Spencer) alongside political and economic factors, including the developing global art market, imperial commerce, Australian Federation, the First World War, and the coming of age of the Commonwealth.
A celebration of the richness of figurative painting over the last 100 years and a passionate critique of the accepted history of art in the 20th century. Figurative painting is due a reappraisal. In this passionately argued volume the distinguished writer and artist Timothy Hyman cuts a new path through the tangle of twentieth-century art. The World New Made explores the work of more than fifty individual painters, presenting a collective 'Resistance' who together offer a human-centred alternative to the dominance of the Abstract or the Conceptual in conventional narratives of modern art. Structured not as a survey but as in-depth studies of more than 130 specific artworks, this lavishly illustrated book brings these often marginalized artists centre-stage: not just Alice Neel and Balthus, Max Beckmann and Frida Kahlo, but also Marsden Hartley and Charlotte Salomon, Bhupen Khakhar and Jacob Lawrence. A rich cast is brought to life, partly through their own writings. As the author argues, 'All across the world, isolated artists found new idioms for human-centred painting in the midst of modern life.'
Originally published in Dutch to accompany a 2014 exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (now Kunstmuseum Den Haag), this important survey of a pivotal period in the life of Piet Mondrian is now available in English. Drawn to the Cubist work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Mondrian spent two years in Paris, from 1912 to 1914, that led him to begin experimenting with an entirely original abstract style. Using a cubist palette of grey and ochre, the artist transformed the landscapes and architectural facades of his earlier figurative works into compositional structures of increasing complexity and abstraction. Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1914, the artist exhibited the 17 works he had painted during those two significant years in France. This volume maps Cubism's influence on artists working in the Netherlands at that time, and demonstrates Mondrian's central role in bridging the gap between the French Cubists and their Dutch contemporaries. Accompanying over 300 illustrations - including close details of key works - is a chronology by Mondrian expert Hans Janssen tracking the artist's development within the context of its time.
Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain critically analyses the role that visual culture played in the early development of Mass-Observation, the innovative British anthropological research group founded in 1937. The group's production and use of painting, collage, photography, and other media illustrates not only the broad scope of Mass-Observation's efforts to document everyday life, but also, more specifically, the centrality of visual elements to its efforts at understanding national identity in the 1930s. Although much interest has previously focused on Mass-Observation's use of written reports and opinion surveys, as well as diaries that were kept by hundreds of volunteer observers, this book is the first full-length study of the group's engagement with visual culture. Exploring the paintings of Graham Bell and William Coldstream; the photographs of Humphrey Spender; the paintings, collages, and photographs of Julian Trevelyan; and Humphrey Spender's photographs and widely recognized 'Mass-Observation film', Spare Time, among other sources, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain positions these works as key sources of information with regard to illuminating the complex character of British identity during the Depression era.
Humankind: Ruskin Spear is the first book on the painter Ruskin Spear RA (1911-1990) since a brief monograph in 1985. It uses Spear's career to unlock the coded standards of the 20th-century art world and to look at class and culture in Britain and at notions of 'vulgarity'. The book takes in popular press debates linked to the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; the changing preferences of the institutionalized avant-garde from the Second World War onwards; the battles fought within colleges of art as a generation of post-war students challenged the skills and commitment of their tutors; and the changing status of figurative art in the post-war period. Spear was committed to a form of social realism but the art he produced for left-wing and pacifist exhibitions and causes had a sophistication, authenticity and humour that flowed from his responses to bravura painting across a broad historical swathe of European art, and from the fact that he was painting what he knew. Spear's geography revolved around the working class culture of Hammersmith in West London and the spectacle of pub and street life. This was a metropolitan life little known to, and largely unrecorded by, his contemporaries. Tracking Spear also illuminates the networks of friendship and power at the Royal College of Art, at the Royal Academy of Arts and within the post-war peace movement. As the tutor of the generation of Kitchen Sink and of future Pop artists at the Royal College of Art, and with friendships with figures as diverse as Sir Alfred Munnings and Francis Bacon, Spear's interest in non-elite culture and marginal groups is of particular interest. Spear's biting satirical pictures took as their subject matter political figures as diverse as Khrushchev and Enoch Powell, the art of Henry Moore and Reg Butler and, more generally, the structures of leisure and pleasure in 20th-century Britain. Humankind: Ruskin Spear has an obvious interest for art historians, but it also functions as a social history that brings alive aspects of British popular culture from tabloid journalism to the social mores of the public house and the snooker hall as well as the unexpected functions of official and unofficial portraiture. Written with general reader in mind, it has a powerful narrative that presents a remarkable rumbustious character and a diverse series of art and non-art worlds.
A new understanding of Francis Bacon’s art and motivations.
Barbara Whitehead is one of the few artists in Texas who regularly work in woodcuts and linoleum prints. This book showcases the best of her work. Whitehead began her career as an illustrator in 1969 for Bill Wittliff's Encino Press. Her work soon became widely known among collectors and lovers of fine printing. With her late husband, Fred, she established Whitehead and Whitehead Publishing Services, providing book and poster illustrations as well as book production and design. Such Austin-area book printers as David Lindsey, Thomas W. Taylor, and David Holman, and university presses at TCU, SMU, the University of New Mexico, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas, and others used their designs. Barbara Whitehead's work has a boldness and assertiveness about it that is peculiarly Texan, even when her subject matter is not Texas. Among her favorite projects are ""Growing Up in Texas"", a collection of reminiscences, David L. Lindsey's ""The Wonderful Chirrionera"" and ""Other Tales from Mexican Folklore"", and R. G. Vliet's long poem, ""Clem Maverick: The Life and Death of a Country Singer"". After research, she says, ""I go off in another world somewhere and concentrate on the subject I'm working on, and while I'm driving off to the grocery store or something it comes to me."" The Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos houses the Fred and Barbara Whitehead Collection, donated by the Whiteheads and Bill and Sally Wittliff. The collection contains posters, woodblocks and woodblock and linoleum prints, and work from Encino Press. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Barbara Whitehead is a three-time winner of TIL's design award.
In this pioneering study, Marion Arnold explores the connections,
hitherto hidden or neglected, between women and art in South
Africa. By doing so, she recovers the rich histories of South
African women artists and celebrates their creativity in the visual
arts. In a series of related essays teeming with fresh insights,
Marion Arnold asks new questions about the ways women have
portrayed themselves, depicted landscapes, painted images of plants
and sculpted the body. She examines, too, portraits of women (both
black and white) in service and the long history of representations
(usually by men) of the female 'other'. Throughout the book, the
connections Marion Arnold makes between ideas, artists and their
works are always illuminating and often unexpected. Here are not
only familiar names viewed afresh - such as Maggie Laubser, Irma
Stern, Helen Sebidi and Jane Alexander - but lesser-known artists
who are rediscovered and brought to life.
From Spain comes this striking collection of paintings reflecting a sensibility lying at the core of Spanish gay culture. The artist excells at a photorealist style - homoerotic, thoughtful and moodful, these paintings with their blend of subtle coloration are totally about today.
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century. Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production. Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.
Play and the Artist's Creative Process explores a continuity between childhood play and adult creativity. The volume examines how an understanding of play can shed new light on processes that recur in the work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi. Both artists' distinctive engagement with popular culture is seen as connected to the play materials available in the landscapes of their individual childhoods. Animating or toying with material to produce the unforeseen outcome is explored as the central force at work in the artists' processes. By engaging with a range of play theories, the book shows how the artists' studio methods can be understood in terms of game strategies.
In How to See, David Salle explores how art works and how it moves us, informs us and challenges us. This internationally renowned painter's incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide range of Salle's friends and contemporaries-from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein and Alex Katz-How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres. Salle writes with humour and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the reader develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result is a master class on how to see with an artist's eye.
This book is a significant re-thinking of Duchamp's importance in the twenty-first century, taking seriously the readymade as a critical exploration of object-oriented relations under the conditions of consumer capitalism. The readymade is understood as an act of accelerating art as a discourse, of pushing to the point of excess the philosophical precepts of modern aesthetics on which the notion of art in modernity is based. Julian Haladyn argues for an accelerated Duchamp that speaks to a contemporary condition of art within our era of globalized capitalist production.
This book explores the issue of cultural mobility within the interwar network of the European avant-garde, focusing on selected writers, artists, architects, magazines and groups from Poland, Belgium and Netherlands. Regardless of their apparent linguistic, cultural and geographical remoteness, their mutual exchange and relationships were both deep and broad, and of great importance for the wider development of interwar avant-garde literature, art and architecture. This analysis is based on a vast research corpus encompassing original, often previously overlooked periodicals, publications and correspondence gathered from archives around the world.
The work of Alex Colville, O.C. (1920-2013), one of the great modern realist painters, combines the Flemish detail of Andrew Wyeth, the eerie foreboding of George Tooker and the anguished confrontations of Lucian Freud. Behind the North Americans stands their common master, Edward Hopper. Colville's works are in many museums in Canada and Germany. He has affinities with Max Beckmann and appeals to the German "secondary virtues": cleanliness, punctuality, love of order. In a long life he resolutely opposed the fashionable currents of abstract and expressionistic art. In contrast to Jackson Pollock's wild action painting, Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection. As Jeffrey Meyers writes: I spent several days with Colville on each of three visits from California to Wolfville. I received seventy letters from him between August 1998 and April 2010, and kept thirty-six of my letters to him. He sent me photographs and slides of his work and, in his eighties, discussed the progress and meaning of the paintings he completed during the last decade of his life. His handwritten letters, precisely explaining his thoughts and feelings, provide a rare and enlightening opportunity to compare my insights and interpretations with his own intentions and ideas. He also discussed his family, health, sexuality, politics, reading, travels, literary interests, our mutual friend Iris Murdoch, response to my writing, his work, exhibitions, sales of his pictures and of course the meaning of his art. His letters reveal the challenges he faced during aging and illness, and his determination to keep painting as health difficulties mounted. He stopped writing to me when he became seriously ill two years before his death. In this context the late paintings, presented in colour in this book, take on a new poignancy.
Frida Kahlo is undoubtedly one of the most innovative and influential painters of the 20th century and is widely considered a style icon thanks to her eclectic taste and love for colour, print and hauls of jewellery. From a young age, Kahlo forged her own path, overcoming polio as a child, and stoically battling the after-effects of a tragic road accident that left her with lifelong injuries. Pocket Frida Kahlo Wisdom is an inspiring collection of some of her best quotes on love, style, life, art and more, and celebrates the Mexican icon's immense legacy. Some quotes from Frida Kahlo: 'Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.' 'The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.' 'I must fight with all my strength so that the little positive things that my health allows me to do might be pointed toward helping the revolution. The only real reason for living.' 'I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.'
How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects-radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism-abstract, non-objective art-to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.
Francis Bacon is considered one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. A major exhibition of his paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts, planned for 2020 but postponed because of the pandemic, explores the role of animals in his work – not least the human animal. Having often painted dogs and horses, in 1969 Bacon first depicted bullfights. In this powerful series of works, the interaction between man and beast is dangerous and cruel, but also disturbingly intimate. Both are contorted in their anguished struggle, and the erotic lurks not far away: ‘Bullfighting is like boxing,’ Bacon once said. ‘A marvellous aperitif to sex.’ Twenty-two years later, a lone bull was to be the subject of his final painting. In this fascinating publication – a significant addition to the literature on Bacon – expert authors discuss Bacon’s approach to animals and identify his varied sources of inspiration, which included wildlife photography and the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge. They contend that, by considering animals in states of vulnerability, anger and unease, Bacon was able to lay bare the role of instinctual behaviour in the human condition. Images below, left to right: Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Fragment of a Crucifixion, 1950. Oil and cotton wool on canvas, 140 x 108.5 cm. Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo Hugo Maertens Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for Portrait (with Two Owls), 1963. Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 144.8 cm. Private collection. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Man with Dog, 1953. Oil on canvas, 152 x 117 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox Jr, 1955, inv. K1955:3. Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd All images © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2020.
Circle: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere." Circle means perfection, cyclicity, superiority of the divinity, but also instability and movement. In nature soap bubbles are spherical and internal trees' rings are circular; the legend tells that Giotto drew a perfect O, while perfection is tangible on Michelangelo's Tondo Doni and Botticelli's Vergine col Bambino. King Arthur's knights were pairs around a round table, and nowadays people sit in circle to make a decision or watch a show. Bruno Munari selects and describes in this little, extraordinary encyclopedia, several uses of this fascinating and mysterious form, unstable and hieratic at the same time. Square: Square has much importance in man's life: a lot of churches, monuments, games (like chess), and fonts are square-based. But man seems not to realise it... one more time Bruno Munari amazes us with an historical, anthropological, scientific square book. Triangle: From the vegetable structure of the coconut to the diagram of human settlements by Le Corbusier, one can frequently find the shape of the equilateral triangle in many different occurrences, both in a natural environment and in artificial works. Along with the circle and the square, the equilateral triangle is one of the three basic forms, and is suitable to be combined in modular frameworks to generate a structured field in which endless other combinatorial forms may be constructed. From classical Arab and Japanese decorations to the contemporary architecture of Buckminster Fuller and Wright, the familiarity with the equilateral triangle, in all its formal and structural resources, generates curious and fascinating experimentations. After the books of the same collection dedicated to the circle and the square, a new reprint by Bruno Munari about the many uses of this evocative shape throughout the centuries. These studies were originally published in 1976 in the series Quaderni di design, curated by Munari himself for Zanichelli.
Presenting unique and in-depth collaborations and editions with leading contemporary artists, Parkett has been the foremost international journal on art for nearly two decades. Plus, the issue features a special Parkett Inquiry: "Learning from Documenta?" Parkett #65 will feature three of today's most exciting mid-career painters: John Currin, Laura Owens, and Michael Raedecker. |
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