The paintings of Wei Xiong's 'Unaltered Landscapes' are exuberant, mythic and boundless in their expansiveness and energy. Working with an alternately muted and sometimes bold and colorful palette, Xiong poses a series of questions within these mostly large-scale oil paintings - questions about mortality, our connectivity to the earth, and our often-complex relationship to the divine.

Peter Paul Rubens was one of the most productive and exciting painters of his time, noted for his expressive, emotive and sensual paintings which are now instantly recognizable. Indeed, his voluptuous female figures have given rise to the word 'Rubenesque'. This book explores the life and times of Rubens, from his early studies in Italy through to his apprenticeship in Antwerp and his subsequent outstanding accomplishments as 'the prince of painters and the painter of princes'. It also contains a gallery of 300 of his paintings and drawings, revealing his unparalleled position as an artist, diplomat, scholar, linguist, teacher, art collector and devoted family man.

A collection of fascinating quotations from the legendary artist and graffiti pioneer Futura is a living legend-a world-renowned painter, designer, and photographer who was a pioneer of graffiti art and New York City's "subway school." His radical abstract work in the street and on canvas established him as a central figure in an important art movement that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Rammellzee, Lee Quinones, and Dondi White. Futura-isms is a collection of essential quotations from this fascinating artist. Gathered from four decades of interviews and panel discussions, this memorable selection illuminates Futura's thoughts on legal and illegal art, his influences, fellow artists, and the past, present, and future. He also offers colorful memories of his adventurous life-growing up in New York City, serving in the Navy, touring with The Clash-and reflects on how his experiences have shaped his art. Select quotations from the book: "Graffiti was a way for me to exist. I wanted the world to know my name. I wanted to be somebody." "The essence of what graffiti is . . . is creating this identity and taking it to the public." "My whole life, I think, I've been a nomad." "I was always at home in the subway system." "People say, 'Let's play within the rules.' I say, 'No-let's break the rules a little bit.'"

Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann's importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany's cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany - and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives throughout his life.

Connecting the Dots showcases the remarkable contribution of one designer, Garry Emery, to Australian culture internationally over 60+ years. It publishes a selection of Emery's writings, alongside notes he calls 'ramblings' as well as presenting EmeryStudio's design work. Connecting the Dots collects ad-hoc design thinking, comments, insights, thoughts, quotations, snippets, questions, answers, essays, articles, meditations, opinions, ambiguities, dogmas, observations, ideas, remnants, contradictions, realities, episodes, moments, fantasies, threads, traces, snapshots, ramblings, ruminations, not so many facts, no certainties. 'As this book shows, Emery's work is much more than graphic design. It is the design of alphabets, pages, books, branding and websites, but also of walls, installations, exhibitions, furniture, rooms, postage stamps, car parks, building facades and busy streets. How do we read a page or a poster; how do we find our way around crowded, chaotic cities?' - James Button, writer and editor

LONG LISTED FOR THE WILLIAM MB BERGER PRIZE FOR BRITISH ART HISTORY 2022. A major survey of Dame Laura Knight, first female Royal Academician and popular British artist of the 20th century. Laura Knight (1877-1970) was one of the most famous and popular English artists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1965. In the following decades her realist style of painting fell out of fashion and her work become largely overlooked. A new generation has rediscovered her work, finding a contemporary resonance in her depictions of women at work, of people from marginalized communities and her contributions as a war artist. This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanies a major exhibition at MK Gallery, provides an overview of Knight's illustrious career: from her training at Nottingham Art School at the age of 13 and her time in North Yorkshire and Cornwall, to her visits to traveller communities and a segregated American hospital. It also features her circus, ballet and theatre scenes, paintings of women during the war and her late paintings of nature. The selection of over 160 works combines celebrated paintings with less known graphic and design works, including ceramics, jewellery and costumes that reflect the artist's enduring interest in the everyday activities of people from all walks of life.

This title was first published in 2003. The artist Paula Rego was born in Portugal but has lived in Britain since 1951. In this well-illustrated book, Maria Manuel Lisboa explores the background behind Rego's decision to leave the land of her birth and, in doing so, provides fascinating insights into Rego's persistent portrayal of uneasy and predatory relations between men and women. Looking back over the national, religious and sexual politics of Portugal during Rego's childhood under the shadow of the Salazar dictatorship and subsequently, Lisboa locates the origins of the artist's preoccupation with power and powerlessness, violence and abuse within the political and ideological status quo of Portugal, past and present. Lisboa's clear and thoughtful analysis offers an ambitious contribution to the study of patriarchy, Catholicism and Fascism and their expression in the work of this artist.

This title was first published in 2002: JArg Breu belonged to the generation of German Renaissance artists that included DA1/4rer, Cranach, GrA1/4newald, Altdorfer, and, in his own city of Augsburg, Hans Burgkmair the Elder. His art registered the early reception of Italian art in Germany and spanned the dramatic years of the Reformation in Augsburg, when the city was riven with social and religious tensions. Uniquely, for a German artist, Breu left a diary chronicling his reaction to the massive social and cultural forces that engulfed him, including his own conversion to the Protestant cause. His story is representative of the condition of many artists during the Reformation years living through this watershed between two cultural eras, which witnessed the transfer of creative energies from religious painting to secular and applied forms of art. In this wide ranging and original study, Andrew Morrall examines the effect of these events on the nature and practice of JArg Breu's art and its reception, not just in his own period, but right up to the present day.

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550 and 1568) is a classic of cultural history. A monumental assembly of artists' lives from Giotto to Michelangelo, it paints a vivid picture of the progress of art in the hands of individual masters. This illustrated standalone edition of Vasari's Life of Raphael offers a new translation of this rich and remarkable 'Life', elegantly rendering Vasari's literary text in modern terms. A work of authoritative skill and precision, the translation preserves Vasari's compelling narrative, while beautifully reproduced illustrations bring it newly to life. Editors Paul Joannides and Rick Scorza bring together the original and expanded Italian editions of 1550 and 1568, with succinct commentary drawing upon their expert knowledge of Raphael's career.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.

Paul Gauguin achieved a high public profile during his lifetime, and was one of the first artists of his generation to achieve international recognition. But his prominence has always had as much to do with the dramatic events of his life - his self-imposed exile on a remote South Sea island, his turbulent relationships with his peers - as with the appeal of his art. Belinda Thomson gives a comprehensive and accessible account of the life and work of one of the most original artists of the late nineteenth century. Gauguin's work - painting, sculpture, prints and ceramics - is discussed in the light of his public persona, his relations with his contemporaries, his exhibitions and their critical reception. His private world, beliefs and aspirations are revealed through his extensive cache of journals, letters and other writings. Fully updated throughout, drawing on the insights of thirty years of scholarship since its first edition, Thomson's text remains the best introduction to this controversial and often contradictory artist.

In 1954, following her death, Frida Kahlo's possessions were locked away in the Casa Azul in Mexico City, her lifelong home. Half a century later, her collection of clothing, jewellery, cosmetics and other personal items was rediscovered. Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up offers a fresh perspective on the life story of this extraordinary artist, whose charisma and entirely individual way of dressing made her one of the most photographed women of her time. Specially-commissioned photographs show her distinctive Mexican outfits alongside her self-portraits, an unprecedented pairing that is enriched by iconic images taken in her lifetime.

Spanning the worlds of Portraiture, Landscape, The Nude, Abstraction and Still Life, Alexander Newley's project fuses the Fine Art traditions of patient observation and draughtsmanship with the transcendental intuitions of the mystic. 'For me, art is a moral activity,' he says, 'a straining after the highest virtue of beauty and enlarged consciousness. As such, all art is essentially religious, even when it shows us the ugliness of a fallen world.' Complementing the images is Newley's personal reminiscence, placing each work in a fascinating narrative of self-becoming -and an often-dogged determination to stay true to his calling. The result is a unique account of an artist's journey in his own words, firmly setting before us a body of work that continues to evolve and explore, always affirming a uniquely 'human' future.

Will Eisner's innovations in the comics, especially the comic book and the graphic novel, as well as his devotion to comics analysis, make him one of comics' first true auteurs and the cartoonist so revered and influential that cartooning's highest honor is named after him. His newspaper feature "The Spirit" (1940-1952) introduced the now-common splash page to the comic book, as well as dramatic angles and lighting effects that were influenced by, and influenced in turn, the conventions of film noir. Even in his tales of crime fighting, Eisner's writing focused on everyday details of city life and on contemporary social issues. In 1976, he premiered "A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories," a collection of realist cartoon stories that paved the way for the modern "graphic novel." His 1985 book, "Comics and Sequential Art," was among the first sustained analyses and overviews of the comics form, articulating theories of the art's grammar and structure. Eisner's studio nurtured such comics legends as Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood, Lou Fine, and Jack Cole.

"Will Eisner: Conversations," edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, collects the best interviews with Eisner (1917-2005) from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner's career with in-depth information about his creation of "The Spirit" and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the development of the graphic novel.

The first book to publish the entirety of Franz Kafka's graphic output, including more than 100 newly discovered drawings "The figures he drew stand alone as stories in themselves."-Lauren Christensen, New York Times Book Review "A sensational new book [that] reveals these hitherto hidden artworks for the first time. . . . This valuable volume allows us to see how, for Kafka, word and image walk arm in arm."-Benjamin Balint, Jewish Review of Books The year 2019 brought a sensational discovery: hundreds of drawings by the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) were found in a private collection that for decades had been kept under lock and key. Until now, only a few of Kafka's drawings were widely known. Although Kafka is renowned for his written work, his drawings are evidence of what his literary executor Max Brod termed his "double talent." Irresistible and full of fascinating figures, shifting from the realistic to the fantastic, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the carnivalesque, they illuminate a previously unknown side of the quintessential modernist author. Kafka's drawings span his full career, but he drew most intensively in his university years, between 1901 and 1907. An entire booklet of drawings from this period is among the many new discoveries, along with dozens of loose sheets. Published for the first time in English, these newly available materials are collected with his known works in a complete catalogue raisonne of more than 240 illustrations, reproduced in full color. Essays by Andreas Kilcher and Judith Butler provide essential background for this lavish volume, interpreting the drawings in their own right while also reconciling their place in Kafka's larger oeuvre.

Provides invaluable insight into the life and works of leading Photorealist painter, Richard Estes

This beautifully illustrated book is the first full-length critical study to focus on the watercolours of multitalented British artist and designer Eric Ravilious (1903-1942). Adopting the wide-ranging approach familiar to readers of his previous books on the artist, author James Russell explores the evolution of a remarkable talent. An introductory section offers an intimate portrait of Ravilious, an artist for whom personal relationships, particularly with women, were paramount. It goes on to describe the extraordinary achievements of an all-too-brief career, drawing on new research to seek out artistic influences and examine Ravilious's relationships with fellow-artists, as well as the development of his mark making. There follows the most comprehensive display of Ravilious watercolours yet assembled. Some have never been published, while others are familiar and well loved. Many are explored in short accompanying essays, some with full-bleed images that show details of paintings at full size. These texts are designed to entertain and enlighten, looking at composition, technique, influence and inspiration, or discussing the significance of particular subjects and the people behind the scenes. This is the definitive guide to the luminous, evocative and timeless watercolours of Eric Ravilious, an artist now regarded as one of the finest of the twentieth century.

A fully updated and expanded edition of the definitive study of Phoebe Anna Traquair. This is a compelling account of the life and career of Phoebe Anna Traquair, a leading figure in Britain's Arts and Crafts movement. The new edition features new research about her artistic practice, materials and technique as well as her intellectual life, including her correspondence with John Ruskin. Her total commitment to the place of art in her daily life is revealed alongside new details on her family and social life. Traquair was remarkable for her openness to all types of art, and worked in a range of media including embroidery, enamels, illuminated manuscripts and murals. This new edition features 120 illustrations including new discoveries, as well as some of her most famous and best-loved works. Beautifully illustrated and featuring the artist's own words, this book is at once a fascinating biography and an artistic study of one of Scotland's first professional women artists.

An exhaustive monograph on the work of the multi-media, award winning artist Monica Bonvicini.