Discover, or return to, the world's greatest heroic fantasy artist, Frank Frazetta in this landmark art collection entitled, Fantastic Paintings of Frazetta. The New York Times said, "Frazetta helped define fantasy heroes like Conan, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars with signature images of strikingly fierce, hard-bodied heroes and bosomy, callipygian damsels" Frazetta took the sex and violence of the pulp fiction of his youth and added even more action, fantasy and potency, but rendered with a panache seldom seen outside of major works of Fine Art. Despite his fantastic subject matter, the quality of Frazetta's work has not only drawn comparisons to the most brilliant of illustrators, Maxfield Parrish, Frederic Remington, Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth but, even to the most brilliant of fine artists including Rembrandt and Michelangelo and, major Frazetta works sell for millions of dollars, breaking numerous records. This innovator's work has not only inspired generations of artists, but also movies and directors including the Conan films, John Carter of Mars, the sensationally successful Lord of the Rings trilogy, Robert Rodriguez' films including From Dusk Till Dawn, Ralph Bakshi films, the epic, award-winning Game of Thrones series, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, Disney's animated Tarzan films, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and George Lucas' Star Wars series. The Forbes magazine article Schwarzenegger's Sargent led with the line, "Which artist helped make Arnold governor? Frank Frazetta, the Rembrandt of barbarians." J. David Spurlock started crafting this book by reviving the original million-selling 1970s mass market art book, Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta. But, he expanded and revised to include twice as many images and, presents them at a much larger coffee-table book size of 10.5 x 14.625"! The collection is brimming with both classic and previously unpublished works of the subjects Frazetta is best remembered for including barbarians, beasts, and buxom beauties. Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin said, "Though he bears only a passing resemblance to the Cimmerian as Robert E. Howard described him, Frazetta's covers of the Conan paperback collections became the definitive picture of the character... still is." Schwarzenegger said, "I have not been intimidated that often in my life. But when I looked at Frazetta's paintings, I tell you, it was intimidating." Game of Thrones, Conan and Aquaman film star Jason Momoa said, "I am a huge Frank Frazetta fan. Both of my parents are painters, so I'd known Frazetta's paintings, that's what I wanted to bring to life." See the revolutionary art that helped inspire Schwarzenegger, Momoa, the Lord of the Rings films and Game of Thrones: FRAZETTA!

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans Walker Evans (1903-75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans's work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle. Alpers demonstrates that Evans's practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans's dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists-from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner-underscoring how Evans's travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style. A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world-to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter offers a fresh approach to the plays of Nobel Prize laureate Harold Pinter. He is highlighted as an experimental playwright who attempted to free the theatre from the legacy of realism, causality, and motivation. His plays are read in relation to the avant-garde movements in the visual arts and music that flourished in the twentieth century. Scolnicov's new interdisciplinary perspective sets Pinter s dramatic works against a background of the other arts and yields new insights into the themes and structure of the plays, underlining their evolving innovativeness. Such an approach has not been attempted to date, and Pinter s plays are usually discussed in the context of their contemporary drama and theatre. This shift of interpretive focus requires a radical change in the acting technique called for by Pinter s plays. The intermedial reading offered in the book also carries wider implications for the development of theatre studies. Twentieth-century dramatic criticism has lagged behind art criticism and has not been quick enough to develop adequate tools for the analysis of Pinter s experiments with theatrical form. Scolnicov borrows from the ideas of different contemporary art movements, such as hyperrealism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, conceptual art, and abstract art to better understand his work. Pinter also adapted techniques from music, film, and literature, constantly re-defining the limits of dramatic art and theatre in his plays."

The Art of Resistance surveys the lives of seven painters-Ding Cong (1916-2009), Feng Zikai (1898-1975), Li Keran (1907-89), Li Kuchan (1898-1983), Huang Yongyu (b. 1924), Pan Tianshou (1897-1971), and Shi Lu (1919-82)-during China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a time when they were considered counterrevolutionary and were forbidden to paint. Drawing on interviews with the artists and their families and on materials collected during her visits to China, Shelley Drake Hawks examines their painting styles, political outlooks, and life experiences. These fiercely independent artists took advantage of moments of low surveillance to secretly "paint by candlelight." In doing so, they created symbolically charged art that is open to multiple interpretations. The wit, courage, and compassion of these painters will inspire respect for the deep emotional and spiritual resonance of Chinese art. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/art-of-resistance

Per Fronth is one of Norway’s most distinctive contemporary artists, dynamically redefining the relationship between painting and photography in influential and innovative works. Painting with photography as his raw material, Fronth’s pictorial universe is captivating, bold, controversial, and seductive. Central to Fronth’s overall artistic practice are the challenging aspects of the human condition. Fronth produces large-format artworks in series and different disciplines that are politically, environmentally, socially, and highly emotionally charged: from the war zones in Afghanistan, to the indigenous peoples’ fight for their own land in the Amazonas region, and back to his own life, in native Norway, where he explores visual narratives of innocence and the coming of age. In his most recent project Fronth creates controversy by introducing paid product placement into his artworks already acquired by museums. In doing so he elevates the discussion as to what art’s value — and the value of art — is. Text in English and Norwegian.

Born into a large, musical, and bohemian family in London, the British artist John Craxton (1922-2009) has been described as a Neo-Romantic, but he called himself a "kind of Arcadian". His early art was influenced by Blake, Palmer, Miro, and Picasso. After achieving a dream of moving to Greece, his work evolved as a personal response to Byzantine mosaics, El Greco, and the art of Greek life. This book tells his adventurous story for the first time. At turns exciting, funny, and poignant, the saga is enlivened by Craxton's ebullient pictures. Ian Collins expands our understanding of the artist greatly-including an in-depth exploration of the storied, complicated friendship between Craxton and Lucian Freud, drawing on letters and memories that Craxton wanted to remain private until after his death.

Ronnie Wood is one of the foremost rock guitarists in the world, but his artistic talents extend beyond music. Throughout his stellar musical career from The Birds to the Faces and the Rolling Stones, Ronnie has never lost his passion for painting, drawing and sculpture. Exuding the same irrepressible energy as Ronnie himself, Ronnie Wood: Artist is the first ever comprehensive collection of his paintings and other artworks, created to mark the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The bright, bold volume brings together the fruits of a lifetime in the arts, brimming with six decades of memorable and diverse work, from his art college portfolio (he studied alongside Pete Townshend) to the intimate work of his personal life today. Inside, a generous selection of his Stones work, including rare watercolours of Mick, Keith and Charlie backstage, meets acrylics of contemporaries Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck and Keith Moon. Portraits of formative jazz innovators Count Basie, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday sit alongside blues heroes Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy. Paintings of Hollywood's elite - Paul Newman, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe - juxtapose real-time fashion sketches of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell and deft pastel compositions from his residency at the Royal Ballet. The artist himself provides the captions and insights into the thought and motivation behind each piece. With an introduction by Emmanuel Guigon (director of the Museu Picasso, Barcelona, where Ronnie will be beginning a residency in 2018) and an afterword by none other than Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood: Artist exists where fine art and rock 'n' roll collide. This extensive and eclectic collection offers unique insights into the entire world of Ronnie Wood, and, with close to 400 works, is a fitting testament to the artistic range and ambition of rock 'n' roll's most successful artist

Susan Herbert's delightful feline reimaginings of famous scenes from art, theatre, opera, ballet and film have won her a devoted following. This unprecedented new compilation of her best paintings provides an irresistible introduction to her feline world. An array of cat characters take the starring roles in a variety of instantly recognizable settings. The masterpieces of Western art retain their distinctive styles while being cleverly filled with furry faces and pussycat tails. Cats then take to the stage in Shakespearean dramas and lavishly staged opera productions. The final stop is Hollywood, where cats are cast in everything from big-budget epics to cult classics, emulating the timeless glamour of the golden age of cinema. From Botticelli's Birth of Venus through Puccini's Tosca to James Dean and Lawrence of Arabia, Susan Herbert's brilliantly observed feline dramatis personae are a joy to discover.

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media-photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm-both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.

Positioning Alice Neel as a champion of civil rights, this book explores how her paintings convey her humanist politics and capture the humanity, strength, and vulnerability of her subjects   “One of the most ambitious and thorough collections of Neel’s work to date.�—Allison Schaller, Vanity Fair   “For me, people come first,� Alice Neel (1900–1984) declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.� This ambitious publication surveys Neel’s nearly 70-year career through the lens of her radical humanism. Remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, visibly pregnant women, and members of New York’s global diaspora reveal that Neel viewed humanism as both a political and philosophical ideal. In addition to these paintings of famous and unknown sitters, the more than 100 works highlighted include Neel’s emotionally charged cityscapes and still lifes as well as the artist’s erotic pastels and watercolors. Essays tackle Neel’s portrayal of LGBTQ subjects; her unique aesthetic language, which merged abstraction and figuration; and her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity. The authors also explore Neel’s highly personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood while reasserting her place in the broader cultural history of the 20th century. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (March 22–August 1, 2021)   Guggenheim, Bilbao (September 17, 2021–January 30, 2022)   de Young Museum, San Francisco (March 12–July 10, 2022)

This book explores the effects of the Instagram platform on the making and viewing of art. Authors Lachlan MacDowall and Kylie Budge critically analyse the ways Instagram has influenced artists, art spaces, art institutions and art audiences, and ultimately contemporary aesthetic experience. The book argues that more than simply being a container for digital photography, the architecture of Instagram represents a new relationship to the image and to visual experience, a way of shaping ocular habits and social relations. Following a detailed analysis of the structure of Instagram - the tactile world of affiliation ('follows'), aesthetics ('likes') and attention ('comments') - the book examines how art spaces, audiences and aesthetics are key to understanding its rise. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design, digital culture, cultural studies, sociology, education, business, media and communication studies.

This book is the first full-length assessment of the paintings of Tal R (b. 1967), an Israeli-born Danish artist whose enigmatic work offers intersections of personal experience and wider history through a visual jigsaw, finely balanced between representation and abstraction, of what the artist terms 'Kolbojnik', a Hebrew term for leftovers.

Tal R's paintings are exceptionally idiosyncratic yet informed by an expansive view of the history of painting, with a diverse range of references including Fauvism, Symbolism and folk art. To the casual observer, his works depict amalgams of people, places and things. But deeper scrutiny reveals them as complex conceptual playgrounds where these seemingly simple categories are exploded and examined as 'construction' sites of both literal material (including collage, photography and sculpture) and meaning. For all students and lovers of painting, Tal R's works, like those of Chris Ofili or Laura Owens, have cleared a pathway for painting to continue after modernism and postmodernism without apology, beyond the worn out 'death of painting' mantra.

Terry R. Myers text offers an authoritative account of the twists and turns that path has taken so far.

Illuminating the dark side of the American century, The Monster Show uncovers the surprising links between horror entertainment and the great social crises of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop-cultural counterpart to surrealism, expressionism, and other twentieth-century artistic movements.

Skal explores a broad landscape of cultural expression—from painting, photography, and theater to television, comic books, and novels. Ultimately focusing on film, he examines the many ways in which this medium has played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control engendered by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children and mutants that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in body-transforming special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the AIDS epidemic and a renewed fascination with vampires; and much more. With a new Afterword by the author that looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, The Monster Show is a thought-provoking inquiry into America's obsession with the macabre.

The Quest for Gold is an edited version of writings by visionary Andrew Fekete - a painter, architect, poet and writer, who died in 1986 from an Aids-related illness. Andrew, flaneur, walked the city; he was a man whose writings, to adapt the words of Baudelaire, serve as a mirror as vast as the crowd itself. This anthology, collated by his brother Peter, comprises key works from Andrew Fekete's opus, and deals with his development as an artist, his visions and his experiment in Jungian alchemy - the intentional creation of visionary experiences to manifest unconscious archetypes to consciousness. The title is taken from an autobiographical novella that Andrew wrote in 1982, with extracts from his diaries also provided. The culmination of the anthology is the poem Punishment for the Transgressors in which Andrew confronts his impending death, thereby illustrating the connection between art and life. The work, which is open to multiple interpretations, is witty and entertaining, dramatic and engaging, full of deep sentiment and self-reflection. We journey with Andrew in his Quest for Gold that occurs against the background of his sexuality and his membership of the gay community. We see into the mind of a man undertaking an experiment in the exploration of what Jung calls the contents of the collective unconscious in an attempt at self-healing and expansion of consciousness. You can find out more about Andrew Fekete at www.andrewfekete.net and see a retroscpective of his work at the Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool until April 2017.

Kurt Jackson's Botanical Landscape is a new collection of poems, paintings, drawings, sculptures and printmaking by the artist and staunch environmentalist: responses to his engagement with and rich experience within the natural world of flora. From day-to-day plants - weeds, the flowers in the hedge, familiar trees and the vegetable garden - to the more unusual, twisted forms and strange fruit of the undergrowth, Jackson's works celebrate the staggering diversity of the plant kingdom. For the art enthusiast, the naturalist, the gardener and the armchair horticulturist, Kurt Jackson's Botanical Landscape maps a particularly expressive communion with nature and offers a unique and beguiling interpretation of the natural world.

Pamela M. Lee s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.

With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

Pamela M. Lee s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.

With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.

Dame Laura Knight RA (1877-1970) was the first female member to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, submitting Dawn, her now famous painting of two female nudes, as her Diploma Work in 1936. In 1965 the Academy's major retrospective of her work recognised her importance in British art. This autumn an exhibition of Knight's drawings opens at the RA. Drawing was a key part of her practice, and allowed her to capture at speed her various subjects, which include travellers, circus performers, boxers, ballet dancers and ice skaters. Drawing allowed her to capture with immediacy the exuberant life of her models, as well as being a vital recording tool when she witnessed one of the most important events of the twentieth century: the Nuremberg trials. In this new publication on the artist, Annette Wickham and Helen Valentine present the Academy's holdings of her drawings with an in-depth analysis focused on three key subjects within her work: the nude, the working woman and country life.

The ultimate guide to 25 years of contemporary art, as seen through the filter of the world's leading contemporary art magazine frieze A to Z of Contemporary Art charts the dynamic, changing landscape of the contemporary art and culture of the past quarter century. Drawing on frieze magazine's exceptional back catalogue of articles, this book brings together a curated collection of over fifty engaging highlights. It features artist interviews; essays on subjects as varied as museums, photography, pre-historic art and television; and think pieces on broader cultural topics, such as fame, gentrification, nostalgia, and style. The book's content - selected from throughout the magazine's history - offers a guide to this dynamic era of visual culture, revealing the increasing internationalism, popularity, and market dominance of contemporary art.

The Galapagos archipelago in the Pacific Ocean is a place of extraordinary biodiversity, home to species found nowhere else on Earth and synonymous with the discoveries of Charles Darwin. But it is also a place of competing interests: those of the rare animals and plants, the scientists who are trying to conserve them, the settlers from Ecuador seeking a way to support themselves, and the tourists who travel across the world to encounter the astonishing environment. Galapagos is the result of a five-year artists' residency programme set up by the Galapagos Conservation Trust, working with the Charles Darwin Foundation, as a unique way of highlighting some of the complex issues that relate to the islands. Twelve international artists were invited to engage with the Galapagos on their own terms, to mix with the local and the scientific communities, to find inspiration for original new work and eventually to share it with a wide audience. The artworks and essays in this book prompt comparisons with other places in the world that are beset by multiple demands. Artists: Jyll Bradley, Paulo Catrica, Filipa Cesar, Marcus Coates, Dorothy Cross (accompanied by Fiona Shaw), Alexis Deacon, Jeremy Deller, Tania Kovats, Kaffe Matthews, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt) and Alison Turnbull.

This book provides an in-depth and thematic analysis of socially engaged art in Mainland China, exploring its critical responses to and creative interventions in China's top-down, pro-urban, and profit-oriented socioeconomic transformations. It focuses on the socially conscious practices of eight art professionals who assume the role of artist, critic, curator, educator, cultural entrepreneur, and social activist, among others, as they strive to expose the injustice and inequality many Chinese people have suffered, raise public awareness of pressing social and environmental problems, and invent new ways and infrastructures to support various underprivileged social groups.

What Is a Trade? Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India presents sixteen large-scale paintings that explore trade and globalization in India. Fels' conceptual starting point for this exhibition was Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's 1498 voyage to Malabar, India, in search of a direct sea route for the spice trade. What is a Trade? explores the historic and modern-day legacy of that expedition more than 500 years later. In 2004 and 2005, Fels traveled to Kerala (formerly Malabar), India, as a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, to work with local commercial signboard painters on a body of work that examines globalization in India and traces its roots to Vasco's voyage. Most of the signboard painters had formerly worked as billboard painters -- until recently, all billboards in India were hand-painted, but cheaper and more efficient inkjet printers are making the painters obsolete. In light of this trend, Fels and his collaborators created work in the style of traditional hand-painted billboards and Bollywood advertising. The bright colors and strong graphic narratives make visually arresting statements about the historic and contemporary effects of trade and globalization. Greg Bell is curator and collection coordinator, 4Culture; Samuel K. Parker is associate professor, Interdisciplinary arts and sciences, University of Washington, Tacoma.