In 1752 Charles-Joseph Natoire, then a highly successful painter, assumed the directorship of the prestigious Academie de France in Rome. Twenty-three years later he was removed from office, criticised as being singularly inept. What was the basis for this condemnation that has been perpetuated by historians ever since? Reed Benhamou's re-evaluation of Natoire's life and work at the Academie is the first to weigh the prevailing opinion against the historical record. The accusations made against Charles-Joseph Natoire were many and varied: that his artistic work was increasingly unworthy of serious study; that he demeaned his students; that he was a religious bigot; that he was a fraudulent book-keeper. Benhamou evaluates these and other charges in the light of contemporary correspondences, critics' assessment of his work, legal briefs, royal accounts and the parallel experiences of his precursors and successors at the Academie. The director's role is shown to be multifaceted and no director succeeded in every area. What is arresting is why Natoire was singled out as being uniquely weak, uniquely bigoted, uniquely incompetent. The Charles-Joseph Natoire who emerges from this book differs in nearly every respect from the unflattering portrait promulgated by historians and popular media. His increasingly iconoclastic students rebelled against the traditional qualities valued by the French artistic elite; the Academie went underfunded because of the effects of war and a profligate king, and he was caught between two competing institutional regimes. In this book Reed Benhamou not only unravels the myth and reality surrounding Natoire, but also also sheds light on the workings of the institution he served for nearly a quarter of a century.

Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer offers a comprehensive reconsideration of Jean Dubuffet's work which contextualizes it within contemporary developments in phenomenology and examines the central role played by questions relating to embodiment in the evolution of his aesthetic thinking and artistic practice. Conceived as an interdisciplinary project and combining phenomenological approaches with detailed visual and linguistic analysis, elucidation of interpictorial and intertextual reference, and extensive archival research, the study examines the development across Dubuffet's work of a core set of cognate themes and formal concerns, charts his many and various shifts in priority and direction, and identifies the constants that drive his tireless experimentation with materials, genre, dimensionality, viewer involvement, visual-verbal interplay, and metareference. Topics explored include: the affinities between Merleau-Ponty's account of the phenomenological reduction and Dubuffet's conception of the functioning of the artwork; Dubuffet's thematisation of the experience of embodiment; the foregrounding of temporality and the exploration of corporeal and associative memory; the testing and transgression of generic boundaries; the experimentation with unconventional materials and with dimensionality; the impact of Dubuffet's reading of scientific theory and of Daoist and Buddhist philosophy on his understanding of man's relationship with his environment; and the central role given to the viewer's physical interaction with the artwork. Perceiving Dubuffet: Art, Embodiment, and the Viewer covers Dubuffet's lengthy career and examines the full range of his pictorial and sculptural oeuvre and the large corpus of aesthetic writings produced between the 1940s and the 1980s.

'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.