Lee Miller, 1927 - New York: A classically beautiful young woman, she is discovered by Conde Nast, hits the cover of Vogue and is immortalized by Steichen, Hoyningen-Huene, Horst and other famous photographers. Lee Miller, 1929 - Paris: Protege and lover of Man Ray, she invents with him the solarization technique of photography, develops into a brilliant Surrealist photographer, and plays the statue in Cocteau's film Blood of a Poet. Lee Miller, 1939-45 - Europe: Living at times with her future husband, the painter Roland Penrose, she becomes a US war correspondent and covers the siege of St Malo and the liberation of Paris. Her photographs of Dachau concentration camp shock the world. These are but three of the many lives of Lee Miller, intimately recorded here by her son, Antony Penrose. Featuring a selection of her finest work, including portraits of her friends Picasso, Ernst and Miro, Penrose's tribute to his mother brings to life a uniquely talented woman and the turbulent times in which she lived. With 116 illustrations

Brett Charles Seiler lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, where he also graduated from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in 2015. Seiler's work has elements of painting, installation, and object art, with a strong emphasis on the use of text and language. Sometimes poetic, nostalgic, or romantic, it is an integral part of his art or stands on its own as a piece as well. In his paintings, the space is indeterminate, the figures are not located and sketchily fleeting, the writing elements seem spontaneous like statements from street art. The colour scheme moves in a narrow spectrum between black, grey, white and brown tones, often using wood. His themes are sexual interaction, oppression, homosexuality, gender, men. Originally from Zimbabwe, a state where human rights violations are commonplace, his work also makes a mark in the struggle for equal sexual orientation in education, media, and institutions. "[My work] is a deep longing for understanding. It is from the point of view of something that I've missed, something that I cannot go back to. It's a process of research." Text in English and German.

KURT JACKSON

A new book about the British landscape painter Kurt Jackson (b. 1961).

This new hardback edition includes many new illustrations. including photographs taken for this new edition. The text has been completely updated.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 4:

One of Kurt Jackson s appealing concepts is that the ocean is one of the last true wildernesses left on the planet. It s an idea that I found very interesting when he explained it to me when we first met in St Just. I took it that he meant a spiritual as well as an ecological or natural wilderness. Jackson s art can thus be seen as an art that is the border region between humanity and nature, between culture and nature, as well as literally tackling that area the coast which is neither land nor sea.

Note that Kurt Jackson is always facing outwards from the land, and looking towards the ocean, not painting with his back to the sea, and looking towards the land (and notice that the many boats and ships and helicopters and such in this area are left out of the paintings, too).

So Jackson s Porth series, about Priest Cove, and all of his sea paintings, are very important in his art in articulating this idea of the ocean as the last wilderness. Have you ever wondered what s out there? is a question that Kurt Jackson asks (it s the title of one of his major paintings, too the centrepiece of the Porth series).

Jackson has repeated the question over a number of related works: the title of two 2004 pieces is The Last Wilderness In Western Europe? This was painted on Jura (in Scotland), and both pictures are consciously emptied of human marks just empty moorland and a delicate blue sky. An earlier picture, part of the Cape series, was entitled Do You Ever Wonder What s Out There? (1999) an unusual composition in the Jackson oeuvre which puts the horizon very high, and focusses on the dark blue ocean flecked with white spray.

Kurt Jackson isn t that interested in many of the connotations of the ocean the moon, time, goddesses, rebirth (though moons do appear in his art from time to time). He s not really interested in religious or pagan or magical symbols in that way. And he s not that interested in shipping, fishing, and all things maritime, like J.M.W. Turner was.

But when Jackson asks a question like have you ever wondered what s out there?, and considers the sea as one of the last wildernesses, that alters the interpretation of his sea paintings. It doesn t apply to all of them, though: in plenty of paintings (and not only the smaller or more modest ones), Jackson is not thinking in terms of big themes. But when he titles a painting Have You Ever Wondered What s Out There? (and writes the title in big letters across the painting), it s clearly intended to resonate in the viewer at a deeper level.

American artist, Joan Jonas' experimental projects in the late sixties and early seventies were essential to the development of contemporary performance, video, and conceptual art. Born in New York in 1936, she is regarded as a pioneer of video art and performance. Her work fuses video, dance, theatre, sculpture, drawing. Her projects have included collaborations with dancers like Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer and composers like Alvin Lucier. She investigates space, perception and time, ritual gestures, symbolic objects and stereotypes (especially female cliches), and the magical role of the narrator who conveys a drama in each action.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, with Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso. Brancusi's influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and land artists.

This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Constantin Brancusi's distinctive scultpural forms, the 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until only the essence was left.

It was Constantin Brancusi's project to strip away the detritus that had accumulated around sculpture, Henry Moore said, and to offer the pure, simple shape. What Brancusi did was 'to concentrate on very simple shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.'

As well as being a sculptor, Constantin Brancusi was also an accomplished photographer. Quite a few artists (not all of them sculptors) have expressed for Brancusi's photographs, and the way he would set up his sculptures inhis studio and photograph them at particular times of the day, when the lightingwas just right. They are early examples of installation art (and some of the best, too). Andy Goldsworthy said he admired how Brancusi created the right conditions in his studio so that his work 'comes alive at a particular time of the day as the light momentarily touches it'. For Goldsworthy, Brancusi's works were at their best when they were arranged by the sculptor in his studio and photographed. Somehow, it wasn't quite the same when they were displayed in modern art museums (such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in Gotham, which have important Brancusi pieces).

Fully illustrated, including many photos of Brancusi's studio in Paris, and the art of his contemporaries.

The artwork that Vincent van Gogh is famous for was made in a tempest of creativity; a manic, impassioned decade that resulted in extensive output at great personal cost. The artist struggled most of his life with depression and madness, aspiring to create beauty which would, in turn, inspire happiness around the world. From The Potato Eaters to Sunflowers, and The Bedroom to Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh will forever be viewed as the father of Post-Impressionism. Printed with soy-based inks on FSC certified paper, this deluxe wall calendar features large monthly grids that offer ample room for jotting notes, along with six bonus months of July through December of 2022. It also includes moon phases (CST), standard U.S. and international holidays.

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations.

A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.

Finalist, 2021 Writers' League of Texas Book Award Regarded as both a legend and a villain, the critic Dave Hickey has inspired generations of artists, art critics, musicians, and writers. His 1993 book The Invisible Dragon became a cult hit for its potent and provocative critique of the art establishment and its call to reconsider the role of beauty in art. His next book, 1997's Air Guitar, introduced a new kind of cultural criticism-simultaneously insightful, complicated, vulnerable, and down-to-earth-that propelled Hickey to fame as an iconoclastic thinker, loved and loathed in equal measure, whose influence extended beyond the art world. Far from Respectable is a focused, evocative exploration of Hickey's work, his impact on the field of art criticism, and the man himself, from his Huck Finn childhood to his drug-fueled periods as both a New York gallerist and Nashville songwriter to, finally, his anointment as a tenured professor and MacArthur Fellow. Drawing on in-person interviews with Hickey, his friends and family, and art world comrades and critics, Daniel Oppenheimer examines the controversial writer's distinctive takes on a broad range of subjects, including Norman Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, academia, Las Vegas, basketball, country music, and considers how Hickey and his vision of an "ethical, cosmopolitan paganism" built around a generous definition of art is more urgently needed than ever before.

THE ART OF ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

This is the most comprehensive and detailed study of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and is the only full-length exploration of Goldsworthy and his art available anywhere.

Fully illustrated, with a revised text. Bibliography and notes.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON GOLDSWORTHY S LEAFWORKS

It is the leafworks that are the most colourful of Andy Goldsworthy s sculptures. What the leaf sculptures show is how beautiful the colours of nature are: Goldsworthy shows the viewer these subtle colours by contrasting one leaf with another. Maple patch grouped the red/ orange/ yellow of Japanese maple leaves together; Poppy leaves contrasted the red poppy leaves against the mid-green of an elderberry bush; a Stone Wood sculpture of 1992 consisted of poppy leaves wrapped around a hazel branch, the red constrasting vividly with the wet green leaves; Dock Leaves interwove red leaves in green grass stalks. Two sycamore leafworks of 1980 and 1981 are very simple: a leaf black from cow shit is placed against pale Autumn leaves; another leaf, bleached white, is set down on a bed of dark leaves. He pins together two colours of sycamore leaves (sycamore is a favourite Goldsworthy medium) in Sycamore leaf sections (1988), and hangs the line of leaves from a tree. Shot with the sun behind them, the photograph of the leaves shows them glowing green and gold, the two classic colours of poetry and alchemy. The Autumnal colours of course connote nostalgia, decadence, sensuality, Romanticism, time passing, the decay of the year, and so on, all those things John Keats wrote about in his Ode: To Autumn, and in a billion other poets art. Goldsworthy s aim in the leaf pieces, though, draws attention to the fragility and delicacy of leaves, as well as their strength and function. A leaf, after all, is a complex biological factory, so the natural scientists say. There is a whole world in a single leaf, remarked Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy s leafworks do not have a scientific agenda. Rather, they celebrate the presence of leaves, the being-in-the-world of leaves, so to speak.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.