Cv/VAR 156 presents a study by Anne Blood the pioneering artist Kurt Schwitters (b. June 20, 1887, Hannover, d.January 8 1948 Lendal) which reviews an exhibition 'Kurt Schwitters in Britain at Tate Britain, January to May 2013. The author explores the collection of 150 collages at the Tate and focuses on 'Merzbau', a late work created in a barn at Elterwater, wherte Schwitters was exiled, a complex internal sculpture integrated in a wall, forerunner of the modern concepts of art and installation.

A beautifully packaged collection of Tove Jansson's classic Moomin artwork showcased alongside warm, witty and mindful quotes from the original books and characters. Packed full of stunning artwork from the Moomin archive including book covers, illustrations and a detailed map of Moominvalley, this book is a wonderful introduction to the magical world of the Moomins and a must-have for any Moomin fan. Printed on sturdy, high-quality A4 card, each picture can be pulled out and framed, or the book can be read from start to finish to give a history of the Moomins and their unique world. Tove Jansson's art, creative vision and philosophy have led her to become one of the world's most treasured children's authors and illustrators. Born in Helsinki to artist parents, she worked as a celebrated artist, author, and political cartoonist, but she is best known as the creator of the Moomins, the charming and quirky inhabitants of Moominvalley whose lives are filled with adventure, warmth and kindness. Publishing to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Moomins, this gorgeous gift book is peppered with inspirational quotes and additional info alongside the artwork, and will appeal to collectors and new fans alike.

Celebrated artist David Medalla (b.The Philippines 1942) gives an extensive interview to Cv/VAR, in which he discusses his advent to the literary and art scenes of Paris and London at a significant point of change in 1960. He recalls his introduction in Paris by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duncan and Gaston Bachelard, who admired his original kinetic sculpture, The Bubble Machine. Arriving in London in 1963 he joined Paul Keeler to operate Signals Gallery, exhibiting European and South American artists such as Jesus Rafael Soto and Vassilakis Takis, in groundbreaking manifestations. Medalla went on to form the Exploding Galaxy, a seedbed of performance art based in a house at London's Ballspond Road. A protean spirit of wide influence over five decades as a poet and visionary creator, Medalla has continued his extraordinary path. Following a recent show in Berlin Medalla will next be seen in 'Migration' a six month long survey starting in January 2012 at Tate Britain.

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

For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.

Juan Davila is a painter who passionately believes in using art to facilitate social change. Davila was born in Santiago, Chile, and moved to Australia in the 1970s to escape the violent totalitarian regime of Pinochet. His work had an immediate impact on the Australian art scene and he has since become one of Australia's most respected and creative artists and is represented in all State and National art museums. His work addresses international issues, especially with reference to Latin American and Australian themes, and he draws on his own experiences of repression and loss suffered during Chile's dark history. Davila's art - beautiful, complex, confronting and provocative - sets to counter indifference in the community and spark intellectual discourse on many issues in the international political landscape - terrorism, refugees, political and social rights and undemocratic governments.

Sketching and carving both visualize and memorize a given image, but within Nowau culture the manner in which this is achieved in a canoe prowboard is entirely different than in a conventional drawing. When studying the impressive ceremonial canoes of Kitawa, in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, G.M.G. Scoditti became struck by the absolute predominance of the artist's mind in the process of creating images: all its stages, its uncertainties and experimentation, must unfold within its silent, rarefied space. Only once fully formed can the image be revealed to the village in material form. Reflecting on the absence of orthographic writing within Nowau culture, and finding parallels with poetic and musical composition, Scoditti gained further insight into the Nowau processes of creation through the critiques the Kitawan carvers made of his own fieldwork sketchbooks. Spurred on by their curiosity, the anthropologist handed over his art materials to the master carvers to make their own drawings on paper or cardboard. Traditional pigments used on the polychrome canoe prowboards were added to the unfamiliar media of watercolour, acrylic, coloured pencils and ballpoint pen. Three-dimensional ornamentation became two-dimensional as images of self-decoration and huts were added to those of prowboards. This exercise was all the more fascinating given the prohibition of drawing on the surface of the wood before carving. On return to Italy, further graphic dialogues unfolded when an architect and an artist from the tradition of Italian Abstraction responded with their own intriguingly different interpretations of the canoe prowboard and its relationship to the Nautilus shell. All these drawings are brought together in this book, along with Scoditti's own sketches from fieldwork and ethnographic collections in Newcastle upon Tyne and Rome. 'The fieldworker's or museum ethnographer's sketches are never going to be quite the same. Through the double filter of Kitawan philosophy and Scoditti's ruminations, the apparently simple triad of sketch - drawing - carving opens out into a discourse on the creative mind. The Kitawan creator - here primarily the male carver - does not have to demonstrate how he creates, and what springs from these pages have a fascination of their own. Several distinctive hands, Kitawan and Italian, reflect from different interpretive and professional vantage points on the very process of drawing through doing exactly that, drawing. The result are images that delight and challenge, sensitively assembled, beautifully reproduced. An extraordinary record of creativity, and a rare corpus of visual memorials.' - Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

This volume commemorates the 100th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death. Major van Gogh scholars present essays that reexamine the painter's place in the art world of his time, the phenomenal growth in his reputation, and his influence on later art movements and individual artists. At the time of his death and for some years after, there was a question as to whether van Gogh's approach would gain recognition. Today, he is seen as one of the most popular and recognized of the world's artists, and his impact on 20th-century art is unquestioned. How and why this occurred is a major theme throughout this essay collection.

Among the topics examined are iconography; van Gogh's poetry as well as the literature that influenced him and that he, in turn, influenced; psychological and religious aspects of van Gogh's painting and self-imaging; and how van Gogh has been interpreted. A section on his legacy in art concludes this major reassessment of van Gogh's place in art history. An important collection for art scholars and researchers as well as public library patrons.

B is for Mutant? Z is for Secret? Bill Woodrow's unique alphabet offers a glimpse into a playful and endlessly inventive artistic mind. Part sketchbook, part riddle, this small clothbound book presents Woodrow's weird and whimsical look at letters that turns the ordinary on its head. One of Britain's foremost sculptors, Woodrow (b. 1948) is best known for his transformations of everyday objects into new forms; like those works, the deceptively simple illustrations in this alphabet unravel the common-place to suggest surprising new meanings.

This substantial monograph on the respected German Concrete artist features a selection of floor and skirting-board paintings from the late 60s and 70s, large-scale and multi-media architectural paintings, furniture, abstract geometric oils and acrylics and sculptural wall-works. A serious study of post-Constructivist color and space.