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.

Walking through this parklike area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole....

So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the "Vietnam Veterans Memorial" in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center "Civil Rights Memorial," the Yale "Women's Table, Wave Field" -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age.

"Boundaries" is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. "Boundaries" is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

English art critic John Ruskin was one of the great visionaries of his time, and his influential books and letters on the power of art challenged the foundations of Victorian life. He loved looking. Sometimes it informed the things he wrote, but often it provided access to the many topographical and cultural topics he explored--rocks, plants, birds, Turner, Venice, the Alps. In The Art of Ruskin and the Spirit of Place, John Dixon Hunt focuses for the first time on what Ruskin drew, rather than wrote, offering a new perspective on Ruskin's visual imagination. Through analysis of more than 150 drawings and sketches, many reproduced here, he shows how Ruskin's art shaped his writings, his thoughts, and his sense of place.

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.

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.

Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Literally meaning "pictures of the floating world," ukiyo-e was a particular genre of art that flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries and came to characterize the Western world's visual idea of Japan. In many ways images of hedonism, ukiyo-e scenes often represented the bright lights and attractions of Edo (modern-day Tokyo): beautiful women, actors and wrestlers, city life, and spectacular landscapes. Though he captured a variety of subjects, Hiroshige was most famous for landscapes, with a final masterpiece series known as "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-1858), which depicted various scenes of the city through the seasons, from bustling shopping streets to splendid cherry orchards. This reprint is made from one of the finest complete original sets of woodblock prints belonging to the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in Tokyo. It pairs each of the 120 illustrations with a description, allowing readers to immerse themselves in these beautiful, vibrant vistas that became paradigms of Japonisme and inspired Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Art Nouveau artists alike, from Vincent van Gogh to James McNeill Whistler. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

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.

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. -- .

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.

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.

Though little known outside her native country, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is one of Finland's best-loved artists. Her career, which stretched from the late 1870s to the end of the Second World War, encompassed both Impressionism and Modernism. This book records an exhibition that marks the first time her works have been seen in the UK since she exhibited in London herself in 1890. It presents the full range of her exceptional paintings and drawings, with 70 works in all genres, including portrait, landscape and still-life. Schjerfbeck's technique, her social and cultural context and her legacy are all examined in depth by the authors. The book also explores the role of the masquerade in Schjerfbeck's work, and the impact of old-master paintings on her practice.

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.

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.

The Art of Eliza Ivanova is an evocative, edgy, and beautiful book filled with the work of this exciting artist. A graduate of the California Institute of Arts, Bulgarian-born Eliza now lives in San Francisco where she created much of the art on these pages. She produces effortless movement with her sketched lines and animation-influenced dynamic touches. Well known for her portraits and figures of women and children, Eliza's style is distinctive and rich in detail. In addition to a gallery filled with a mix of old favorites, new creations and bespoke commissions for this book, you will be invited into Eliza's world. Enter her studio to discover her workspace and favorite tools. Eliza also shares techniques with us in step-by-step workshops to help us capture some of that dynamic movement that infuses her work. Both aspiring and established artists will benefit from Eliza's technical tips and words of wisdom about life, work, and more.