Featuring works by Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Longo, Proof offers insight into the singularity of vision through which artists can reflect the social, cultural and political complexities of their times. Spanning eras and continents, each of these artists witnessed the turbulent transition from one century to another, experiencing the seismic impacts of revolution, civil rights movements and war. While Goya served church and king, Eisenstein the state, and Longo emerged during the rise of the contemporary art market--the dominant benefactors of each period--they all rose to prominence through developing nuanced practices that challenged expectations. With commissioned essays by journalist, activist and author Chris Hedges, artist Vadim Zakharov and Garage Chief Curator Kate Fowle, plus an interview with Longo, this book is published to accompany the exhibition of the same name.

A comprehensive presentation of the important collection of Barbizon School painting at the National Gallery, London The significant collection of 19th-century French paintings at the National Gallery, London, includes many important works by artists associated with the Barbizon School. In addition to paintings by Courbet, Millet, and Rousseau, there are over twenty works by Corot, including the monumental Italian Woman, or Woman with Yellow Sleeve (L'Italienne) recently acquired from the estate of Lucian Freud. Works by Corot range from an early oil study made in Italy to late studio landscapes. This meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated volume contains entries that examine all aspects of the paintings, from subject and stylistic significance to physical condition and conservation history. Setting the individual works within a broader context, essays explore the impact of plein-air practice; examine the relationship of the Barbizon School to the academic landscape painters and the Impressionists; and trace the history of the passionate collecting of these pictures in Britain well into the 20th century. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, claimed Caspar David Friedrich, but also what he sees in himself . He should have a dialogue with Nature . Friedrich s words encapsulate two central elements of the Romantic conception of landscape: close observation of the natural world and the importance of the imagination. Exploring aspects of Romantic landscape drawing in Britain and Germany from its origins in the 1760s to its final flowering in the 1840s, this exhibition catalogue considers 26 major drawings, watercolors and oil sketches from The Courtauld Gallery, London, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Samuel Palmer, Caspar David Friedrich and Karl Friedrich Lessing. It draws upon the complementary strengths of both collections: the Morgan s exceptional group of German drawings and The Courtauld s wide-ranging holdings of British works. A Dialogue with Nature offers the opportunity to consider points of commonality as well as divergence between two distinctive schools. The legacy of Claude Lorrain s idealizing vision is visible in Jakob Hackert s magisterial view of ruins at Tivoli, near Rome, as well as in a more intimate but purely imaginary rural scene by Thomas Gainsborough, while cloud and tree studies by John Constable and Johann Georg von Dillis demonstrate the importance of drawing from life and the observation of natural phenomena. The important visionary strand of Romanticism is brought to the fore in a group of works centered on Friedrich s evocative Moonlit Landscape and Samuel Palmer s Oak Tree and Beech, Lullingstone Park. Both are exemplary of their creators intensely spiritual vision of nature as well as their strikingly different techniques, Friedrich s painstakingly fine detail contrasting with the dynamic freedom of Palmer s penwork. The most expansive and painterly works include Turner s St Goarshausen and Katz Castle, the luminous simplicity of Francis Towne s watercolor view of a wooded valley in Wales, and Friedrich s subtle wash drawing of a coastal meadow on the remote Baltic island of Rugen. Three small-scale drawings reveal a more introspective and intimate facet of the Romantic approach to landscape: Theodor Rehbenitz s fantastical medievalising scene, Palmer s meditative Haunted Stream, and lastly, Turner s Cologne, made as an illustration for The Life and Works of Lord Byron (1833).