Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck

New Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) arrived in London in 1901 and, by the 1920s, had become a leading British modernist, exhibiting frequently with avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This book explores Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes - teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London. Complete with a rich visual chronology of the artist's encounters abroad, alongside over one hundred of Hodgkins' key paintings and drawings, the book is an illuminating journey that moves us from place to place through the writings of a number of distinguished national and international art historians, curators and critics: Frances Spalding (University of Cambridge, England), Alexa Johnston (Auckland-based writer and curator), Elena Taylor (University of New South Wales, Australia), Antoni Ribas Tur (Ara newspaper, Spain), and Julia Waite, Sarah Hillary, Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand).

In 1970s New York City, the abandoned piers of the Hudson River became a site for extraordinary works of art and a popular place for nude sunbathing and anonymous sex. Jonathan Weinberg's provocative book--part art history, part memoir--weaves interviews, documentary photographs, literary texts, artworks, and film stills to show how avant-garde practices competed and mingled with queer identities along the Manhattan waterfront. Artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Alvin Baltrop, Shelley Seccombe, and David Wojnarowicz made work in and about the fire-ravaged structures that only twenty years before had been at the center of the world's busiest shipping port. At the same time, the fight for the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgendered people, spurred by the 1969 Stonewall riots, was dramatically transforming the cultural and social landscape of New York City. Gay men suddenly felt free to sunbathe on the piers naked, cruise, and have sex in public. While artists collaborated to transform the buildings of Pier 34 into makeshift art studios and exhibition spaces, gay men were converting Pier 46 into what Delmas Howe calls an "arena for sexual theater." Featuring one hundred exemplary works from the era and drawing from a rich variety of source material, interviews, and Weinberg's personal experience, Pier Groups breaks new ground to look at the relationship of avant-garde art to resistant subcultures and radical sexuality.

The artist who created the statue for the Lincoln Memorial, John Harvard in Harvard Yard, and The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, Daniel Chester French (1850-1931) is America's best-known sculptor of public monuments. Monument Man is the first comprehensive biography of this fascinating figure and his illustrious career. Full of rich detail and beautiful archival photographs, Monument Man is a nuanced study of a preeminent artist whose evolution ran parallel to, and deeply influenced, the development of American sculpture, iconography, and historical memory. Monument Man was specially commissioned by Chesterwood / National Trust for Historic Preservation. The release will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Chesterwood, his country home and studio, as a public site and with a major renovation of the Lincoln Memorial. The book includes a comprehensive geographical guide to French's public work.

Clifford Webb (1894-1972) was one of Britain's foremost wood engravers and a successful illustrator of children's books, but today his work is often overlooked. Held in high esteem by his peers, he studied under Eric Gill and Walter Sickert, and later taught at St Martin's, but much of his work was either deliberately destroyed or otherwise failed to survive. Now, the renowned wood engraver Simon Brett has painstakingly assembled much of what remains of this extraordinary artist's output for this first book about Webb.

Mariano Fortuny was a visionary designer and artist - best known today for his rich, innovative textiles and opulent dress designs, he was also an accomplished painter, etcher and photographer, as well as a designer of theatrical sets, costumes and lighting, revolutionising the stagecraft of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with his ambitious lighting designs. Fortuny's varied and sumptuous output has acquired almost mythological status in the canon of early twentieth-century Aestheticism. Guillermo de Osma sets out to provide a complete and authoritative account of his life and work.Born in 1871, into a famous family of artists, critics, architects and craftsmen, Fortuny benefitted from an eclectic artistic education, and inherited his father's passion for collecting, as well as his interest in the art and artefacts of the Arabic world. He supplemented this early immersion in the art world with his own `Grand Tour' of Europe's cultural centres, including Paris and Bayreuth, where he was introduced to the work of composer Richard Wagner. Fortuny eventually settled in Venice and, from his studio in the Palazzo Orfei, began to create work in the burgeoning tradition of Aestheticism, rejecting the hierarchies and barriers between the arts and creating 2D artwork as well as furniture, textiles and stage designs for pioneering opera and ballet productions. The `Delphos robe' is perhaps the quintessential Fortuny creation - a dress as work of art, with its origins in progressive theatrical costume design, that went on to be worn by avant-garde figures including Isadora Duncan and was even immortalized by Proust in `Remembrance of Things Past'. Hand-dyed and pleated to a patented design, this figure-skimming robe was considered shocking on its first appearance in 1907 but examples still appear on red carpets today. Bringing together craftsmanship, liberal principles of `rational dress' and a deep immersion in the dress traditions of the Arabic and Classical worlds, it is an iconic garment that transcends fashion.

Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, this gorgeous month-to-view year planner features on its cover a design based on L.S. Lowry's Coming from the Mill, making it a perfect gift or special treat just for you.

Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, this gorgeous month-to-view year planner features on its cover a design based on Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell's iconic Iona Croft, making it a perfect gift or special treat just for you.

Elaborate costumes, intricate patterns, and striking figural forms fill the work of Yinka Shonibare, a world-renowned artist who has roots in both London and Lagos, Nigeria. Shonibare's works reflect aesthetic features of the Victorian age, while undertaking a deep exploration and interrogation of issues tied to colonialism and its aftermath. Within the contemporary context of globalization, his work looks to history and provokes concerns of our present moment. Presenting Shonibare's rich work, this exhibition holds particular significance as the Driehaus Museum's first to feature a contemporary artist. Displayed in the context of a Gilded Age house museum, the exhibition includes a range of Shonibare's photographs, sculptures, and installations. Composed by the seasoned museum director and curator Richard P. Townsend, the catalog offers readers critical commentary on how Shonibare's work weaves together themes of the Gilded Age with today's conversations on society, race, and economic issues.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Tiffany's Parrots Transom

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Klimt's Stocklet Freize

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features L.S. Lowry's Coming from the Mill

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Alphonse Mucha's Cowslip. Alphonse Mucha was a defining figure of the Art Nouveau era and is beloved for his images of beautiful women. Cowslip forms the mirror to another of Mucha's artworks, Feather. In both, a woman gazes down at the eponymous object in her hand, though whilst Cowslip shows a brunette, Feather depicts a blonde. Both have the familiar motif of a circle framing the head, which can be seen in many of Mucha's artworks.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Paul Berthon's LAErmitage

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Sketch Books Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed, then foil stamped. The thick paper stock makes them perfect for sketching and drawing. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Wilhelm Lizst's Magnolia Trees

A reevaluation of Matisse that reveals the complex function of his work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself. Accused by his contemporaries of both arid overtheorisation and a hedonistic abandon to the pleasures of color, decried for a preoccupation with the merely decorative, retrospectively consigned to a subsidiary role in an official History of Art that sees the liberation of color from iconic conventions and symbolic associations as the inevitable precursor to the purified color of modernist formalis, Matisse, with his untimely singularity, his break with the History of Art, and the part he played in undoing the image is ripe for the reevaluation undertaken here with great panache by Eric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, who with this volume restore Matisse to his place within the prehistory of contemporary art, while continuing to transform our understanding of the latter. It was Matisse who, with his understanding of the construction of colours as a means of vital expression, continued to exacerbate the fauves' decisive break with Form; in doing so, he also opened up painting to its outside, by cutting out color, and releasing it onto the walls and into architecture by way of a decorativity virtually generalized to the whole environment. With a series of detailed and compelling extended analyses of Matisse's works, we learn how "Matisse-thought" arrived at the magic formula expression=construction=decoration. This volume, the second "case study" in Alliez and Bonne's Undoing the Image, gives us a new Matisse extracted from cliches and stereotypes both popular and learned, revealing the complex function of his work and thought in contemporary art's escape from the image, from traditional forms of art, and even from the art form itself.

Peter Coker: Mind and Matter is a fully-illustrated catalogue presenting a selection of exceptional works by Peter Coker (1926-2004), bringing together pieces spanning the early 1950s through to the mid-1980s. The first publication focusing on Coker's works in over a decade, the catalogue will seek to reassess Coker's contribution to post-war figurative British art. Situating Coker within his contemporary British zeitgeist, Peter Coker: Mind and Matter will also focus on the significance of international artists to Coker's work, particularly Gustave Courbet and Nicolas de Stael. Undertaking modern day pilgrimages across France, Coker toured the sites favoured by the artists he revered, filtering their influence through the specificity of place. Coker was too talented an artist to mimic, but with acute sensitivity and perception, his vision of the world was constantly altered by the art that touched him. Correspondingly, his mode of depiction was subject to an ever-persistent evolution but with the materiality of paint and the primacy of process always at the heart of his practice. In Coker's words: "I think when you see exhibitions...you challenge your own thoughts, you refurbish the mind and eye, you are remoulded." The publication includes an introductory essay, a catalogue of carefully selected works with accompanying descriptions, a chronology, a bibliography, and numerous colour illustrations.

Modernism, referring to the period dating roughly from the late 19th century to 1970, is regarded as a crucial moment in the history of American art. Although Modernist artists adopted a wide range of styles, they were linked by a desire to interpret a rapidly changing society and to cast aside the conventions of representational art. Some, such as Stuart Davis and Joseph Stella, responded to consumerism, urbanism and industrial technology; others, such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe, found inspiration in nature and the Native American culture of the Southwest. This magnificent new book presents the works of the Vilcek Collection, an unparalleled private collection of American Modernist paintings, drawings and sculpture. Art historian Lewis Kachur explores almost 100 rarely seen works by 20 leading artists active during the first half of the last century, while William C. Agee contributes an incisive introduction. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Masterpieces of American Modernism provides an outstanding overview of the radical shift in art driven by this major aesthetic movement.

Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was one of a generation of artists that helped transform painting during the first half of the twentieth century. As a painter, he preferred to work from memory - imaginatively capturing the spirit of a moment and expressing it through his unique handling of colour and unconventional choice of composition. Focusing on Bonnard's work from 1912-47, this book presents a variety of landscapes and intimate domestic scenes which capture the passage of time. These works are the artist's memories creatively reconstructed to convey a sense of sensuality or melancholy. As well as looking at his processes, his reliance on photography and his ability to work on different subjects side-by-side, this book relocates Bonnard in the turbulent history of his times. Although modest and withdrawn, he was a subtle witness to events - both in the wider world and his more intimate circle - that can be seen to define the ways in which he thought about and made his very personal art. Channelling to the heart of Bonnard's position as an artist who maintained continuities with the past while developing an individual expression of his engagement with the world, this sumptuously illustrated book reveals Bonnard's transition from great colourist to Modernist master, and emphasises his place within the story of twentieth-century art.

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two books, poems written in response to a selection of the many reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries. These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined. Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.

Austin Spare was described as the greatest draughtsman in England and was the enfant terrible of the Edwardian art scene but by the time of his death he was living in squalor and all but forgotten. This engaging biography charts the rise and fall of British art's darkest star, who was facinated by mysticism and spirtualism and practised automatic drawing before the Surrealists and developed a unique system of magic. By the 1930s Spare had retreated from fashionable society, living in poverty and obscurity but he never stopped working, only now is his work seen.

Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist's prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonn to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Published in association with the Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27-July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019-January 6, 2020