Louise Jopling: A Biographical and Cultural Study is the first in-depth study of this nineteenth-century painter who was among the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists (in 1902). In part an engaging biography of a compelling celebrity figure and social campaigner in Victorian England, Patricia de Montfort's book interweaves a vivid and rounded portrait of this Manchester-born artist, teacher, and author with insightful analysis of Jopling's artwork and the aristocratic-bohemian social milieu that she inhabited. Painted by Whistler and Millais, Jopling herself portrayed Victorian-era celebrities like the actress Lillie Langtry and her patrons included members of the de Rothschild banking family. Her work also included figure compositions, interiors, landscape and genre scenes. Drawing upon Jopling's unpublished diaries, notebooks and correspondence as well as her 1925 memoir Twenty Years of My Life, de Montfort's study opens the way for a twenty-first century rediscovery of this now little-known artist, who combined professional artistic practice with social activism, against the backdrop of an often troubled private life. The full scope of Jopling's artistic endeavours are discussed in relation to the cultural framework for fin de siecle working women, as are her progressive views on education and women's suffrage.

Andre Kertesz is one of four new titles being published in Autumn 2007 in Thames & Hudson's acclaimed 'Photofile' series. Each book brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Handsome and collectable, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

Relegated to the Crypt of the Capitol building for 76 years, the Portrait Monument has stood in the Rotunda since 1997. Often referred to as the Suffrage Statue, it memorializes pioneering feminists Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and is the sole sculptural representation of women in the Rotunda. From its conception by sculptor Adelaide Johnson as three separate busts to its laborious execution and celebrated placement in the Rotunda, the seven ton sculpture has provoked frustration, jubilation and hullabaloo. Drawing on diaries, letters, newspapers and historic photos, this first-ever history of the monument explores the controversy, myths and artistry behind this neoclassical yet unconventional work of art.

In 1802, at the age of 26, Joseph Mallord William Turner became the youngest ever member of the Royal Academy. A prolific painter and watercolourist, his paintings began by combining great historical themes with the inspired visions of nature, but his experimentation with capturing the effects of light led him swiftly towards an unusual dissolution of forms. Turner was a constant traveller, not only within the British Isles but also throughout Europe, from the Alps to the banks of the Rhine, from northern France to Rome and Venice. His death in 1851 revealed not only his zealously guarded private life but also a will that left both his fortune and more than thirty thousand drawings, watercolours and paintings to the nation. In this profusely illustrated book, Olivier Meslay invites us to follow the development of Turner's incandescent art, a bridge between Romanticism and Impressionism and one of Britain's most remarkable contributions to art history.

This is a fundamental reassessment of the work of William Holman Hunt, and the first critical text to reproduce his pictures in colour and set him on an international stage. Introducing a new critique of the autobiography and drawing on hundreds of private letters, drawings and paintings, the author depicts a radical man of his times, deeply troubled by the pivotal concerns of the materialist age - the isolation of the individual, the collapse of faith and the status of art - and seeking solutions through a systematic testing of the extremes of painting. A close examination of the pictures, including neglected later works, combined with recent scientific research relate the physical act of painting, and the paint, back to the body of the artist. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this book answers the longstanding lack of any monograph on Hunt and will make compelling reading for undergraduate and graduate students of History of Art, Victorian Studies, English Literature and Religious Studies, as well as curators, conservators and the artist's many admirers. -- .

Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemars Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists before it was censored during the era of Soviet realism. This volume introduces Markov as an innovative and pioneering art photographer and assembles, for the first time, five of his most important essays. The translations of these hard-to-find texts are fresh, unabridged, and authentically poetic. Critical essays by Jeremy Howard and Irena Buzinska situate his work in the larger phenomenon of Russian 'primitivism', i.e. the search for the primal. This book challenges hardening narratives of primitivism by reexamining the enthusiasm for world art in the early modern period from the perspective of Russia rather than Western Europe. Markov composed what may be the first book on African art and Z.S. Strother analyzes both the text and its photographs for their unique interpretation of West African sculpture as a Kantian 'play of masses and weights'. The book will appeal to students of modernism, orientalism, 'primitivism', historiography, African art, and the history of the photography of sculpture.

Sung closely examines William Blake's extant engraved copper plates and arrives at a new interpretation of his working process. Sung suggests that Blake revised and corrected his work more than was previously thought. This belies the Romantic ideal that the acts of conception and execution are simultaneous in the creative process.

"Looking for Alfred" documents Johan Grimonprez's prize-winning film of the same name, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock in the form of a search for the perfect Hitchcock doppelganger and vignettes starring those multiple would-be Hitchcocks, reenacting his cameos. Casting calls and screen tests in London, Rotterdam, Los Angeles and New York are documented in film stills and photos. (Professional Hitchcock impersonator Rob Burrage says, "I thought I was safe until you guys came along, digging up all those other Hitchcock look-alikes. Now we will have to find ways of disposing of them.") Line-readings from Truffaut's famous 1960s interview with the master and scenes in which Hitchcock acted as an extra are further grist for the mill. Beyond the work's mockumentary structure, Grimonprez evokes the Hitchcockian universe uncannily, and connects back--through the recurring motif of a man in a suit and a bowler hat--to another great modern auteur, Rene Magritte.

Definitive monograph on America's most challenging and influential artist Los-Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy (b.1945) creates Disneyesque installations, sculptures of animal/vegetable/human hybrids and slapstick performances in a purge of a national subconscious. The psycho-sexual desires and anxieties induced by the media and the built environment of contemporary America emerge in his collisions of plastic prosthetic limbs and condiments that stand in for bodily fluids. These works have been variously deployed: through live actions, often documented on video, and more recently in outsized figures and artificial rural environments, combined in overtly sexual ways. McCarthy's work echoes that of European artists such as Joseph Beuys or the Viennese Aktionistes, but gives 'action art' a postmodern twist. This new revised and expanded edition includes contributions by luminaries such as Kristine Stiles, Ralph Rugoff, Massimiliano Gioni and Robert Storr.

Raphael (1483-1520) was for centuries considered the greatest artist who ever lived. Much of what we know about him comes from this biography, written by the Florentine painter Giorgio Vasari and first published in 1550. Vasari's Lives of the Painters was the first attempt to write a systematic history of Italian art. The Life of Raphael is a key text not only for the appreciation of Raphael's own art - whose development and chronology Vasari describes in detail, together with the spectacular social career of the first painter to be mooted, it was claimed, as a Cardinal - but also for its unprecedented attention to theoretical issues.

Covers approximately 250 sales of Old Masters since 1980, with an average of five listings from each sale. There are 2,700 signature examples of 1,700 artists. Three sections following the main body of this volume offer the researcher easy cross-referencing monograms and initials, symbols, and alternate names. The appendix includes supplemental signature information on additional artists whose actual signatures were not available, but whose importance could not be omitted.

'Ought to become a classic. It is an enshrinement of [Meades's] intense baroque and catholic cleverness' Roger Lewis, The Times 'One of the foremost prose stylists of his age in any register . . . Probably we don't deserve Meades, a man who apparently has never composed a dull paragraph' Steven Poole, Guardian 'There are more gems in this wonderful book than I could cram into a dozen of these columns' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph 'Such a useful and important critic . . . He is very much on the reader's side, bringing his full wit to bear on every single thing he writes' Nicholas Lezard, Spectator This landmark publication collects three decades of writing from one of the most original, provocative and consistently entertaining voices of our time. Anyone who cares about language and culture should have this book in their life. Thirty years ago, Jonathan Meades published a volume of reportorial journalism, essays, criticism, squibs and fictions called Peter Knows What Dick Likes. The critic James Wood was moved to write: 'When journalism is like this, journalism and literature become one.' Pedro and Ricky Come Again is every bit as rich and catholic as its predecessor. It is bigger, darker, funnier and just as impervious to taste and manners. It bristles with wit and pin-sharp eloquence, whether Meades is contemplating northernness in a German forest or hymning the virtues of slang. From the indefensibility of nationalism and the ubiquitous abuse of the word 'iconic', to John Lennon's shopping lists and the wine they call Black Tower, the work assembled here demonstrates Meades's unparalleled range and erudition, with pieces on cities, artists, sex, England, France, concrete, faith, politics, food, history and much, much more.

Inspired by the fabled journals in which acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro records his innermost thoughts and unleashes his vivid imagination, Insight Editions has created a replica sketchbook aimed at the director's legion of fans. Similar in design to del Toro's leather-bound volumes, this sketchbook features an inspirational message from the director along with selected examples of his incredible art.

Animals and Artists discusses a selection of modern and contemporary artworks that challenge traditional representations of nonhuman animals, and that expose human viewers to animal otherness. It argues that the individuated and discrete human self in possession of consciousness, rationality, empathy, a voice, and a face, is open to challenge by nonhuman capacities such as distributed cognition, gender ambiguity, metamorphosis, mimicry and avian speech. In traditional philosophy, animals represent all that is lacking in humankind. However, Animals and Artists argues that just because humans frame 'the animal' as a negative term, their binary opposite and everything that they are not, does not mean that animals have no meaning in themselves. Rather, animals in their very unknowability, mark the limits of human thinking. By combining art analysis with poststructuralist, post humanist and animal studies theories as well as scientific research, Elizabeth decentres the human and establishes a new position where differences are embraced. In our current moment of ecological crisis, Animals and Artists brings readers into solidarity with other animal species, among them spiders, silkworms, bees, parrots and octopuses. The book raises empathy for other live forms, drawing attention to the shared vulnerabilities of human and nonhuman animals, and in so doing underlines the power of art to bring about social change. Readers will include animal studies scholars, artists, art historians, Jean Painleve scholars, Surrealist enthusiasts, non-academics who are concerned about the human-animal relationship, the environment or larger identity politics issues.

Digital artist Zheng Wei Gu (AKA Guweiz) shares his anime-inspired world in this beautifully produced and insightful book, leading you through his fantasy world with a portfolio packed with gritty detail and a surreal vibe. Guweiz began drawing when he was 17, inspired by an anime art tutorial on YouTube. Discovering a natural talent, he carried on drawing and quickly amassed a fan-base for his edgy illustration style. Throughout this book, readers will discover his artistic journey from the very beginning, with behind-the-scenes details about how some of his most popular pieces were created. He reveals his secrets for turning influences into truly original digital art, including that all-important narrative that takes drawing and painting beyond the purely visual. Step-by-step tutorials share techniques and tips to help you create these sorts of effects in your art, resulting in images with the depth of detail and intrigue that Guweiz has made his trademark. The artist's unique urban take on the popular manga/anime style is gripping right from the first page, from the surreal take on Japanese lifestyle to the urban fantasy he creates.

Anton van Dalen: Community of Many chronicles the historic artist Anton van Dalen's lifelong visual investigation informed by the influences of war, religion and migration, his devotion to nature, and his dedication to documenting the technological and cultural evolutions within our society across a variety of mediums, from drawing and sculpture to collage and painting. Born in the Netherlands in 1938 to a conservative Calvinist family, Anton witnessed first-hand the terrors of both technological and human destruction during the Second World War. Since he immigrated to New York in 1966 and settled in the East Village, Anton has served as witness, storyteller and documentarian of the dramatic cultural shifts in the neighbourhood through his masterfully honed and singular iconography. Featuring critical essays by John Yau and Tiernan Morgan, this heavily illustrated publication is the first comprehensive monograph on Anton van Dalen's work that provides a language by which to discuss the consequences of human brutality towards nature and our entanglement with technology. Anton has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; and the New-York Historical Society. He has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Exit Art, New York. His Avenue A Cut-Out Theatre has toured since 1995 both nationally and internationally and has been shown at numerous institutions including The Drawing Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and The New-York Historical Society.

Of all the great paintings in the world, Picasso's Guernica has had a more direct impact on our consciousness than perhaps any other. In this absorbing and revealing book, Gijs van Hensbergen tells the story of this masterpiece. Starting with its origin in the destruction of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War, the painting is then used as a weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism. Later it becomes the nucleus of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the detonator for the Big Bang of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. This tale of passion and politics shows the transformation of this work of art into an icon of many meanings, up to its long contested but eventually triumphant return to Spain in 1981.

One of the most powerful painters of our age, Francis Bacon lived and worked for the last thirty years of his life in a modest building in London's South Kensington. After he died in 1992, access was granted to award-winning photographer Perry Ogden to work undisturbed for days on end to produce this riveting record of the house and its contents. In the studio itself, thirty years of inspired artistic endeavor had accumulated unchecked: the slashed and discarded canvases scattered across the floor; the brushes, rags, and tins encrusted with paint; the doors and walls used as impromptu palettes; the piles of photographs of friends and models; the crumpled and torn pages of magazines and books that served as a stimulus for Bacon's work; the notes, sketches, and ideas for paintings jotted down and then cast aside; the last unfinished self-portrait on the easel.

For some of those close to Bacon, the studio was a heroic statement, a work of art in its won right, secretly constructed over many years to distill and give form to his aesthetic intentions. Now in this astonishing book we are invited to take a privileged look around this private space, to become intimate witnesses to the amazing conditions in which Bacon lived and worked, to gain unrivaled insights into how, why, and what he painted.

Accompanying a focused display at The Courtauld Gallery that will bring together for the first time Pieter Bruegel the Elder's only three known grisaille paintings - the Courtauld's Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (which is barred from travel), The Death of the Virgin from Upton House in Warwickshire (National Trust) and Three Soldiers from the Frick Collection in New York - this book will examine the sources, function and reception of these three exquisite masterpieces. The panels will be complemented by prints and contemporary replicas, as well by other independent grisailles in order to shed light on the development of this genre in Northern Europe. Despite his status as the seminal Netherlandish painter of the 16th century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) remains an elusive artist: fewer than forty paintings are ascribed to him. Of these, a dozen are cabinet-sized. These small-scale works offer key insights as they often bear a personal significance for the artist and were sometimes given as gifts to friends and patrons. Presenting these works together for the first time is not only an extraordinary and unprecedented opportunity but it will be extremely revealing, considering their unusual nature in both Bruegel's oeuvre and 16th-century art in general. Monochrome painting in shades of grey was a mainstay of Netherlandish art from the early 15th century, most often present on the wings of altarpieces and preparatory sketches for engravings. In contrast, Bruegel's panels constitute one of the earliest and rare examples of independent cabinet pictures in grisaille, created for private contemplation and enjoyment. This seemingly austere type of painting has often been imbued with religious or political significance. On a purely artistic level, it enabled the painter to showcase his skill by limiting his palette. The publication, which includes a technical investigation of the three panels, will provide the opportunity to reassess the practical aspects of the grisaille technique and the many ways in which this effect was achieved. Indeed, Bruegel's three monochromatic paintings display quite different techniques, raising the question of the painter's intent. This is the latest in the series of books accompanying critically acclaimed Courtauld Gallery displays, following on from Collecting Gauguin (2013), Antiquity Unleashed (2013), Richard Serra (2013), A Dialogue with Nature (2014), Bruegel to Freud (2014) and Jonathan Richardson (2015).