Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) studied painting before taking up photography in his early twenties. One of the founders of the photography agency Magnum (together with Robert Capa and others), he is best known for the consummate skill with which he captured the most fleeting of scenes.This volume, introduced by Michael Brenson, includes selections from his photographs of France, Spain, America, India, Russia, Mexico and pre-revolutionary China.

The reception of Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a "regular fellow," as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough's painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.

Lying deep within the urban metropolis of Hong Kong, Happy Valley is one of the most iconic racecourses in the world. It is also the chief source of inspiration for a new body of work by American artist Marcel Dzama. Jockeys ride through waves and cathedrals, Chinese symbols pulled from racing paraphernalia adorn the edges of paper, and bats swoop, hunting for prey. Dzama's distinct visions of the racetrack come alive through a series of large-scale paintings and drawings, transposing imagery from his prolific oeuvre into this adrenaline-filled sporting arena. His new works reflect on the culture of horseracing and how the track has become not only a symbol of sport, but also of commerce, class, and wealth. This publication includes a conversation between Dzama and Laila Pedro. Published on the occasion of his solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, Marcel Dzama: Crossing the Line is available in both English only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415080142

A comprehensive introduction to Velazquez's life and art which includes a discussion of all his major works. Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) was one of the towering figures of western painting and Baroque art, a technical master renowned for his focus on realism and startling veracity. Everything he painted was 'treated' as a portrait, from Spanish royalty and Pope Innocent X, to a mortar and pestle. This comprehensive introduction to Velazquez's life and art includes a discussion of all his major works, and illustrates most of Velazquez's surviving output of approximately 110 paintings. The artist's greatest innovation - his unorthodox and revolutionary technique is explored in relation to the styles of certain of his most celebrated contemporaries both in Spain and beyond, including Titian and Rubens. The book concludes with a final chapter on the influence and importance of Velazquez's art on later painters from the time of his own death to the art of recent times including Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and the Impressionists.

This multimedia boxed set presents a sweeping look at work by pioneering German painter Albert Oehlen (b. 1954), one of the most energetic and significant artists working today. Deeply influenced by literature, music, film, and graphic design, Oehlen's paintings are the result of a complex layering of methods, subject matter, and viewpoints. This distinctive set contains a catalogue of the winter 2016--17 exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art as well as an anthology of texts and images edited by Christopher Williams, a poster, and a vinyl record with a new work by composer and musician Michael Wertmuller, reflecting Oehlen's singular approach to art-making and the collaborative nature of this publication. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art (12/04/16-03/12/17)

This book traces the emergence of modernism in art in South Asia by exploring the work of the iconic artist George Keyt. Closely interwoven with his life, Keyt's art reflects the struggle and triumph of an artist with very little support or infrastructure. He painted as he lived: full of colour, turmoil and intensity. In this compelling account, the author examines the eventful course of Keyt's journey, bringing to light unknown and startling facts: the personal ferment that Keyt went through because of his tumultuous relationships with women; his close involvement with social events in India and Sri Lanka on the threshold of Independence; and his somewhat angular engagement with artists of the '43 Group. A collector's delight, including colour plates and black and white photographs, reminiscences and intimate correspondences, this book reveals the portrait of an artist among the most charismatic figures of our time. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of art and art history, modern South Asian studies, sociology, cultural studies as well as art aficionados.

As adults in a fast-paced modern world, many can hardly afford to enjoy the simplest things in life today. With data and technology being at the forefront of our increasingly digital lifestyles, it is becoming almost impossible to make time for pure creativity, imagination, and freedom of expression - unless we start allowing our minds to wander fearlessly into the unknown and celebrate the art of doing nothing, whenever we can. LOST IN REVERIE sets out to capture the magic and mystique of dreamscapes, from the comforting to the unsettling and everything else in between. The book will comprise art and illustration featuring intriguing concepts and styles that explore the realms between the real and surreal; becoming a means of escape from the dreariness of everyday and a beautiful reminder to never stop dreaming.

The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight tells the remarkable story of Moses Ezekiel and his rise to international fame as an artist in late nineteenth-century Italy. Sephardic Jew, homosexual, Confederate soldier, Southern apologist, opponent of slavery, patriot, expatriate, mystic, Victorian, dandy, good Samaritan, humanist, royalist, romantic, reactionary, republican, monist, dualist, theosophist, freemason, champion of religious freedom, proto-Zionist, and proverbial Court Jew, Moses Ezekiel was a riddle of a man, a puzzle of seemingly irreconcilable parts. Knighted by three European monarchs, courted by the rich and famous, Moses Ezekiel lived the life of an aristocrat with rarely a penny to his name. Making his home in the capacious ruins of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, he quickly distinguished himself as the consummate artist and host, winning international fame for his work and consorting with many of the lions and luminaries of the fin-de-siecle world, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, Queen Margherita, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Sarah Bernhardt, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Eleonora Duse, Annie Besant, Clara Schumann, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Alphonse Daudet, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Robert E. Lee, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Isaac Mayer Wise. In a city besieged with eccentrics, he, a Southern Jewish homosexual sculptor, was outstanding, an enigma to those who knew him, a man at once stubbornly original and deeply emblematic of his times. According to Stanley Chyet in his introduction to Ezekiel's memoirs, "The contemporary European struggle between liberalism and reaction, between modernity and feudalism, between the democratic and the hierarchical is rather amply refracted in Ezekiel's account of his life in Rome." Indeed so many of the contentious cultural, political, artistic, and scientific struggles of the age converged in the figure of this adroit and prepossessing Jew.

In 1942, Ed Vebell landed with the US Army in North Africa and was recruited by Stars & Stripes, the US armed forces newspaper, as their official staff artist. Daily, he drew illustrations and reported on the progress of World War II throughout Europe. This book offers a selection of his sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs from that time, and presents one artist's view of the war from North Africa, through the campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, the author spent two weeks with the Russians in Berlin, and was then assigned as the courtroom artist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Along the way are Ed's reminiscences about such personalities as famed war correspondent and artist Bill Mauldin, singers Josephine Baker and Edith Piaf, Charles de Gaulle, Gen. Teddy Roosevelt Jr., and many others. Ed also reminisces about his two years photographing backstage at the Folies Bergere in Paris, as well as his time as an Olympic fencer.

Etienne-Jules Marey was an inventor whose methods of recording movement revolutionized our way of visualizing time and motion. Best remembered for his chronophotography, Marey constructed a single-camera system that led the way to cinematography. "Picturing Time, " the first complete survey of Marey's work, investigates the far reaching effects of Marey's inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.
Braun offers a fascinating look at how Marey's chronophotography was used to express the profound transformation in understanding and experiencing time that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Featuring 335 illustrations, "Picturing Time" includes many unpublished examples of Marey's chronophotographs and cinematic work. It also contains a complete bibliography of his writings and the first catalog of his films, photographic prints, and recently discovered negatives.

The first book-length feminist analysis of Eileen Gray's work, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In argues that Gray's unusual architecture and design - as well as its history of abuse and neglect - emerged from her involvement with cultures of sapphic modernism. Bringing together a range of theoretical and historical sources, from architecture and design, communication and media, to gender and sexuality studies, Jasmine Rault shows that Gray shared with many of her female contemporaries a commitment to designing spaces for sexually dissident modernity. This volume examines Gray's early lacquer work and Romaine Brooks' earliest nude paintings; Gray's first built house, E.1027, in relation to Radclyffe Hall and her novel The Well of Loneliness; and Gray's private house, Tempe A Pailla, with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. While both female sexual dissidence and modernist architecture were reduced to rigid identities through mass media, women such as Gray, Brooks, Hall and Barnes resisted the clarity of such identities with opaque, non-communicative aesthetics. Rault demonstrates that by defying the modern imperative to publicity, clarity and identity, Gray helped design a sapphic modernity that cultivated the dynamism of uncertain bodies and unfixed pleasures, which depended on staying in rather than coming out.

Mining a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources, including stoneware jugs, personal correspondence, paintings, inventories, and literature written for the dining room, this study offers a critical and entirely original examination of the function of early modern images for the people who owned and viewed them. The study explores the emergence, functions and material culture of the Antwerp dinner party during the heady days of the mid-sixteenth century, when Antwerp's art market was thriving and a new wealthy, non-noble class dominated the city. The author recontextualizes some of Bruegel's work within the cultural nexus of the dining room, where material culture and theatrical performance met humanist wit and the desire for professional advancement. The narrative also touches on the reception of Northern art in Lombardy, on intersections among painting, material culture, and theater, and on intellectual history.

This book argues that Ford Madox Brown's murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall (1878-93) were the most important public art works of their day. Brown's twelve designs on the history of Manchester, remarkable exercises in the making of historical vision, were semi-forgotten by academics until the 1980s, partly because of Brown's unusually muscular conception of what history painting should set out to achieve. This ground-breaking book explains the thinking behind the programme and indicates how each mural contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life. It shows the important link between Brown and Thomas Carlyle, the most iconoclastic of Victorian intellectuals, and reveals how Brown set about questioning the verities of British liberalism. -- .

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.

Giacometti: Critical Essays brings together new studies by an international team of scholars who together explore the whole span of Alberto Giacometti's work and career from the 1920s to the 1960s. During this complex period in France's intellectual history, Giacometti's work underwent a series of remarkable stylistic shifts while he forged close affiliations with an equally remarkable set of contemporary writers and thinkers. This book throws new light on under-researched aspects of his output and approach, including his relationship to his own studio, his work in the decorative arts, his tomb sculptures and his use of the pedestal. It also focuses on crucial ways his work was received and articulated by contemporary and later writers, including Michel Leiris, Francis Ponge, Isaku Yanaihara and Tahar Ben Jelloun. This book thus engages with energising tensions and debates that informed Giacometti's work, including his association with both surrealism and existentialism, his production of both 'high' art and decorative objects, and his concern with both formal issues, such as scale and material, and with the expression of philosophical and poetic ideas. This multifaceted collection of essays confirms Giacometti's status as one of the most fascinating artists of the twentieth century.

A beautiful and informative gift book devoted to Edward Bawden's representations of England. Edward Bawden (1903-1989) was a printmaker, painter, illustrator and designer. He studied and later taught at the Royal College of art, served as a war artist in WW2 and worked extensively as a commercial artist for companies including London Transport, Fortnum and Mason, Shell-Mex, the Folio Society and Chatto and Windus. Aside from the years he spent in France, the Middle East and North Africa while serving as a war artist, and later visits to Canada and Ireland, Bawden rarely travelled far from home, but found inspiration in the fields and farms of his native Essex, at the seaside, and in classic London scenes: Kew Gardens, the Royal Parks, the Tower of London and St Paul's Cathedral, and the iron-and-glass monuments to Victorian engineering such as Liverpool Street station and the markets in Spitalfields and Smithfield. This book celebrates England as represented by Bawden in 85 works held in the V&A's collection, including prints, posters, drawings, paintings, murals and advertising material. The illustrations include such early pieces as his poster Map of the British Empire for an exhibition in 1924; his mural English Garden Delights, designed for the Orient Line Navigation Company in 1946; illustrations for books including Good Food, The Gardener's Diary and Life in an English Village; advertising work for London Transport, Shell and Fortnum & Mason; the poster Lifeguards, created to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; and a varied selection of linocuts and watercolours. As this book demonstrates, it was England, with its quiet landscapes, its pleasures and pastimes, its history and ceremonies, its traditions and recreations, that was the source of Bawden's finest and most engaging work.

In this in-depth analysis, Peter Muir argues that Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) is emblematic of Henri Lefebvre's understanding of art's function in relation to urban space. By engaging with Lefebvre's theory in conjunction with the perspectives of other writers, such as Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, and George Bataille, the book elicits a story that presents the artwork's significance, origins and legacies. Conical Intersect is a multi-media artwork, which involves the intersections of architecture, sculpture, film, and photography, as well as being a three-dimensional model that reflects aspects of urban, art, and architectural theory, along with a number of cultural and historiographic discourses which are still present and active. This book navigates these many complex narratives by using the central 'hole' of Conical Intersect as its focal point: this apparently vacuous circle around which the events, documents, and other historical or theoretical references surrounding Matta-Clark's project, are perpetually in circulation. Thus, Conical Intersect is imagined as an insatiable absence around which discourses continually form, dissipate and resolve. Muir argues that Conical Intersect is much more than an 'artistic hole.' Due to its location at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris, it is simultaneously an object of art and an instrument of social critique.

Discover art that dared to be different, risked reputations and put careers in jeopardy. This is what happens when artists take tradition and rip it up. ArtQuake tells the stories of 50 pivotal works that shook the world, telling the fascinating stories behind their creation, reception and legacy. The books begin with the rebels who struck out against Victorian conformism, daring painters and sculptors like Manet and Rodin, Van Gogh and Courbet, who experimented with expressionist and realist art styles as well as controversial subjects. Moving into the fin de siecle and the 20th century, we study the truly iconic works and turbulent lives of artists like Munch and Klimt, Picasso and Egon Schiele, whose work into abstraction, surrealism and cubism shocked and scandalized, but ultimately changed the course of western art forever. Moving into the second half of the 20th Century, we see spectacular works of conceptual rebellion, absurdity and political protest, from Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement to Marina Abramovic, whose often visceral and violent works of performance art laid bare the savagery of the patriarchy and the human condition. In the 21st century, we see how iconoclastic creators have pushed the boundaries of art even further, from Banksy to Louise Bourgeoise, from self-destructing paintings to experimental works of computerized art. Complete with beautiful reproductions of their iconic works, as well as a glossary of terms and movements at the back, meet the huge egos, uncompromising feminists, gifted recluses, spiritualists, anti-consumerists, activists and satirists who have irrevocably carved their names into the history of art around the world. In telling the history of modern and contemporary art through the works that were truly disruptive, and explaining the context in which each was created, ArtQuake demonstrates the heart of modern art, which is to constantly question and challenge expectation. This book is from the Culture Quake series, which looks into iconic moments of culture which truly created paradigm shifts in their respective fields. Also available is FilmQuake, which tells the stories of 50 key films that consciously questioned the boundaries, challenged the status quo and made shockwaves we are still feeling today.

There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries.
"Rembrandt's Jews" puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam--which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood--Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented--far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictionsof Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Through his close look at paintings, etchings, and drawings; in his discussion of intellectual and social life during the Dutch Golden Age; and even through his own travels in pursuit of his subject, Nadler takes the reader through Jewish Amsterdam then and now--a trip that, under ever--threatening Dutch skies, is full of colorful and eccentric personalities, fiery debates, and magnificent art.

The first institutional presentation with works by Sven Druhl took place in 2002 under the title Die Aufregung at the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen. The rooms in which the museum presented the then young positions have been used by the Kunstverein Leverkusen Schloss Morsbroich e. V. for many years. Sven Druhl, who is known for his artistic adaptations and remixes, has now returned to this location with his new landscape paintings, which are based purely on virtual models. In the place where his artistic career began, the artist is now showing paintings and bronzes from the past six years. Text in English and German.

Man Ray is one of seven new titles being published this spring 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.