Dickson Yewn is the quintessential modern-day literatus. His contemporary jewellery is a crystallisation of thousands of years of Chinese material history. Square rings rub shoulders with antique porcelain forms, shapes taken from Ming furniture and the geometric latticework found in Chinese architecture. Yewn focuses on these traditional Chinese motifs, but also understands the significance of different materials. Wood, one of the five elements in Chinese philosophy, is present in most of his collections. To wear a contemporary jewel by Dickson Yewn is to delve back into China's works of art and its history, blended with a contemporary twist. This new monograph of his work details the inspiration Yewn has drawn from the Imperial court, exploring its influence on the art of jewellery, from silks, embroidery, painting, architecture and cloisonne enamel to courtesan culture. Beautiful, detailed illustrations and photographs highlight Yewn's fealty to the artisanal techniques employed by the Imperial courts. Esteemed jewellery writer Juliet Weir-de La Rochefoucauld invites the reader to explore the deeper symbolism behind Yewn's jewels.

Tracey Emin has undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis from a young, unknown artist into the 'bad girl' of the Young British Art (yBA) movement, challenging the complacency of the art establishment in both her work and her life. Today she is arguably the doyenne of the British art scene and attracts more acclaim than controversy. Her work is known by a wide audience, yet rarely receives the critical attention it deserves. In Art Into Life: Essays on Tracey Emin writers from a range of art historical, artistic and curatorial perspectives examine how Emin's art, life and celebrity status have become inextricably intertwined. This innovative collection explores Emin's intersectional identity, including her Turkish-Cypriot heritage, ageing and sexuality, reflects on her early years as an artist, and debates issues of autobiography, self-presentation and performativity alongside the multi-media exchanges of her work and the tensions between art and craft. With its discussions of the central themes of Emin's art, attention to key works such as My Bed, and accessible theorization of her creative practice, Art into Life will interest a broad readership.

To their children, Karl and Anna were ordinary people. To the rest of the world they were the extraordinary faces immortalized by Andrew Wyeth. Their story shows they were also far more complicated. Reflecting unprecedented access granted to the author by the Kuerner family, this compellingly readable book sheds light on the complex impacts the Kuerners had on Andrew Wyeth. Even as a young boy growing up in Pennsylvania's rural Brandywine Valley, he was fascinated by his intriguing neighbors, and they would be a major source of Wyeth's inspiration for more than seventy years. Karl Kuerner, hardened by poverty and his service in the German Army during World War I, faced demons of anger and frustration. Anna had her own battles, sometimes wandering the farm muttering to herself in German, between periods in the insane asylum. Included are family photos as well as color images of some of the major Wyeth paintings that the Kuerners and their farmscape inspired.

The Simple Life (1981) was Fiona MacCarthy's first book, written while she was the Guardian's design correspondent (and before her acclaimed lives of Eric Gill, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones.) It tells of a venturesome effort to enact an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds. The leader of this endeavour was progressive-minded architect Charles Robert Ashbee, who in 1888 founded the Guild of Handicraft in Whitechapel, specialising in metalworking, jewellery and furniture and informed by the desire to improve society. In 1902 Ashbee and his East London comrades removed the Guild to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, hoping to construct a socialistic rural idyll. MacCarthy explores the impact of the experiment on the lives of the group and on the little town they occupied - tracing the Guild's fortunes and misfortunes, hilarious and grave, and the many fellow idealists and artists who were involved (among them William Morris, Roger Fry, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.)

What were Montmartre and Montparnasse really like in their hey-day, roughly between 1904, when the youthful Picasso had just arrived on the Hill of Martyrs, and 1920, when Amedeo Modigliani, justly called `the prince of Bohemians', died of consumption and dissipation in Montparnasse? This book, written by an Englishman who lived in Montmartre for 30 years and knew its famous habitue intimately, gives a vivid description. It reveals the truth behind the many legends, is packed with authentic stories about writers and painters whose name are now household words, and contains much hitherto unpublished information about the life and career of Modigliani obtained from his family and friends. Much of the text was written in Montmartre amid the scenes described, and after personal consultation with survivors of the great days when Frede presided over the Lapin Agile and Libion, patron of the Cafe de la Rotonde, was beginning to rival him in Montparnasse. It is the most complete account which has yet been written in English of the birth of Cubism and other contemporary movements in modern painting, and of the lives and loves who started them.

I am glad I am alive to witness these things; giving words to this life of sensations is a relief. Smell the flowers while you can. Close to the Knives is the artist, writer and activist David Wojnarowicz's extraordinary memoir. Filthy, beautiful, and sharp to the point of piercing, it is both an exploration of the world seen through the eyes of an artist, and a moving portrait of a generation living, grieving, and dying through the AIDS crisis. It is a triumphant hymn of resistance, and a dizzying celebration of the joys of seeing and living in the world.

Intertwining art history, aesthetic theory, and Latin American studies, Aarnoud Rommens challenges contemporary Eurocentric revisions of the history of abstraction through this study of the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia. After studying and painting (for decades) in Europe, Torres-Garcia returned in 1934 to his native home, Montevideo, with the dream of reawakening and revitalizing what he considered the true indigenous essence of Latin American art: "Abstract Spirit." Rommens rigorously analyses the paradoxes of the painter's aesthetic-philosophical doctrine of Constructive Universalism as it sought to adapt European geometric abstraction to the Americas. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed Torres-Garcia's theories as self-contradictory, Rommens seeks to recover their creative potential as well as their role in tracing the transatlantic routes of the avant-garde. Through the highly original method of reading Torres-Garcia's artworks as a critique on the artist's own writings, Rommens reveals how Torres-Garcia appropriates the colonial language of primitivism to construct the artificial image of "pure" pre-Columbian abstraction. Torres-Garcia thereby inverts the history of art: this book teases out the important lessons of this gesture and the implications for our understanding of abstraction today.

Anatolii Fomenko is a Soviet mathematician with a talent for expressing abstract mathematical concepts through artwork. Some of his works echo those of M. C. Escher in their meticulous rendering of shapes and patterns, while other pieces seem to be more visceral expressions of mathematical ideas. Stimulating to the imagination and to the eye, his rich and evocative work can be interpreted and appreciated in various ways - mathematical, aesthetic, or emotional. This book contains 84 reproductions of works by Fomenko, 23 of them in colour. In the accompanying captions, Fomenko explains the mathematical motivation behind the illustrations as well as the emotional, historical, or mythical subtexts that they evoke. The illustrations carry the viewer through a mathematical world consisting not of equations and dry logic, but of intuition and inspiration.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' and 'The Blue Flower', turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. 'I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire' Edward Burne-Jones Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the prototypical pre-Raphaelite but with a truly individual sensibility. Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful biography charts his life from humble beginnings in Birmingham as the son of an unsuccessful framer, through a transformative period at Oxford, where he met his close friend and collaborator William Morris, and on to the apprenticeship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti that would shape his artistic vision. His work harks back to an Arthurian England - an Arcadia that offered solace against the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and on a deeply personal level provided respite from his ever-present melancholia. This is an illuminating portrait of a fascinating figure - artistic genius, doting father, troubled husband - written with all Penelope Fitzgerald's characteristic sympathy and insight.

Straddling the worlds of fine art, street art and hip-hop, name-dropped on many a rap song, and collected by the likes of Jay-Z and LeBron James, Hebru is a painter, sculptor and designer. He first gained attention as a graffiti artist, tagging walls with colourful depictions of Flyboy a child donning aviator goggles all over the Windy City. Fast-forward to 2021 and his creations, profoundly influenced by Disney and Japanese Super-Flat, are now in museums, as well as in branded goods for A Bathing Ape, Billionaire Boys Club, Adidas Originals, KITH, Neighborhood and a host of other sought-after labels. At the heart of Hebru s work is restoring innocence to the depiction of black youth, often forced into adulthood before their time in the eyes of the law and popular media. Upbeat and life-affirming, Brantley s work not only attempts to normalize images of black children at play, but in his creation of black superheroes, even suggests an entirely new mythology in a cultural landscape often devoid of positive examples. This book will feature the breadth of Hebru s work so far, and is the first monograph on his work. Set out in two parts, this work will examine both the fine art and applied art nature of his work, with both his paintings and his streetwear collaborations receiving pride of place in the design of the book by prominent graphic designer Oliver Munday, currently the art director of The Atlantic Monthly.

Although Anselm Kiefer's work is routinely compared with the Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total work of art" pioneered by Richard Wagner, Disorders at the Borders represents the first time this relationship has been thoroughly investigated. But it is a relationship that involves much more than just aesthetics. Furthermore, it is a highly ambivalent one. The Gesamtkunstwerk was an embodiment of a certain view of nationhood, and nationhood is a concept that Kiefer has spent much of his career rendering thoroughly problematic. But Wagner's innovative, inclusive art form was intended above all as a counter to the individualism that the composer was far from alone in identifying as the besetting sin of modernity, and that was widely thought at the time to be most evident in America. It can thus be contextualized within the long German tradition of counter-Americanism - as, to a large extent, can Kiefer. For whilst he owes his spectacular success in no small degree to the positive reception of his work in America, he has throughout his career displayed a resistance to the artistic influence of that country. Moreover, he and Wagner take a mutual stance regarding a series of questions: can art be separated from society, or the individual arts from each other? Is painting purely visual, and music purely sonic? Do things, in short, ever really exist or operate in isolation? That they answer in the negative to all of these is what, ultimately, connects Kiefer with Wagner.

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.

Rosengarten explores the narrative operations of Rego's work by mobilizing both psychoanalytic theory and social history. She confronts, as case studies, three complex figure paintings from different moments in Rego's oeuvre: "The Policeman's Daughter" (1987), "The Interrogator's Garden" (2000), and "The First Mass in Brazil" (1993). The content of the three specimen paintings links them to the political context of the Estado Novo, the fascist-inspired regime that dominated Rego's childhood. Plotting links between the spheres of the political and the personal, Rosengarten throws light on the complex intertwining of state power and parental authority in Rego's work, focusing on the "labour of socialisation and resistance" that Rego's work evinces in relation to the Freudian model of the family romance. Rosengarten unveils the political context of Portugal under Salazar, and the workings of colonial fantasy, Catholic ideology and gender construction. In prodding the inalienable link between love and authority, this study offers a reading of Rego's work that interrogates, rather than subverts, the Oedipal model structuring the patriarchal family.

In this stimulating book, a leading authority on the Spanish master Diego Velazquez discusses this enigmatic artist and explores the mysteries presented by his paintings. The essays collected here, written over the course of Jonathan Brown's distinguished career, include some which are published in English for the first time and one which has never before been published. Two themes unite them. The first concerns the changing relationship between Velazquez and his patron Philip IV, which provides a framework for Brown to interpret the painter's career. The centerpiece of this relationship is Velaquez's masterpiece, Las Meninas, and this painting is the subject of two essays. The second theme is the problem of attributions and the related issue of Velazquez's innovative technique. Since Velazquez was not a prolific painter, questions of authenticity become increasingly contentious. Brown considers this matter in its widest dimensions and participates in the debate about individual attributions. Distributed for the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica

This book deals with the seminal surrealist. It explores Dali's grandiose and grotesque oeuvre. Picasso called Dali "an outboard motor that's always running." Dali thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics - and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination. This publication presents the entire painted oeuvre of Salvador Dali. After many years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret finally located all the paintings of this highly prolific artist. Many of the works had been inaccessible for years - in fact so many that almost half the illustrations in this book had rarely been seen.

A revealing collection of quotations from world-renowned artist Damien Hirst Hirst-isms is a collection of quotations-bold, surprising, often humorous, and always insightful-from celebrated artist Damien Hirst, whose controversial work explores the connections between art, religion, science, life, and death. Emerging in the 1990s as a leading member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Hirst first became famous and gained a reputation as a provocateur with a series of artworks featuring dead and sometimes dissected animals (including a shark, sheep, and cow) preserved in glass tanks filled with formaldehyde. Gathered from interviews and other primary sources and organized by subject, these quotations explore Hirst's early years, family life, and the beginnings of his fascination with art; the major themes of his work; his influences and heroes; his motivation; his process and the boundary-pushing production of his work; and his thoughts on the art world, fame, and money. The result is a comprehensive and nuanced book that sheds new light on a fascinating and important contemporary artist. Select quotations from the book: "The less I feel like an artist, the better I feel." "I like it when people love my art. I like it when people hate my art. I just don't want them to ignore my art." "Painting's like the most fabulous illusion, because there's nothing at stake. Except yourself." "I'm interested in the confusion between art and life, I like it when the world gets in the way." "Sometimes you have to step over the edge to know where it is."

Andersson's works embody a new genre of landscape painting that recalls late nineteenth-century romanticism while also embracing a contemporary interest in layered, psychological compositions. Her panoramic scenes draw inspiration from a wide range of archival photographic source materials, filmic imagery, theater sets, and period interiors, as well as the sparse topography of northern Sweden, where she grew up. The paintings utilize a selection of motifs from throughout her career: barren branches and thick-barked pine trees, domestic interiors, horses, and young women. Resembling still lifes, they further a tradition of quiet, dreamlike domestic scenes by Scandinavian artists such as Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) and Edvard Munch (1863-1944). Part of a self-conscious effort to capture an experience rather than a specific event, the compositions are freer and more abstract. Splendid color reproductions bring the textured brushstrokes, loose washes, and stark graphic lines to life on the page. The book also features a new essay by critically acclaimed author Karl Ove Knausgaard. The Lost Paradise is published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020.