Cv/VAR series 152 publishes an anthology of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover a broad span, from the Italian Renaissance of Giotto and Antonello da Messina, Leonardo and Michelangelo, progressing to Rubens, Velazquez and Ingres, with essays on William Hogarth, John Constable and John Everett Millais for British Art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, which remain in print; the author sweeps the reader on a fabulous journey of perception, disclosing the strands that bind the continuum of classic and contemporary art.

Explores the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the mid 19th century; and works which figure amongst the most lasting and generally propular in British art. Renowned writer and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the individual artists, their interconnection and previously unpublished material of their intricate links with the social establishment of the time. James Cahill has a special interest in the movement, having studied Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Holman Hunt. He reviews the major exhibition of 150 works at Tate Britain launched in September 2012. 'I think what I want to do is to follow a trail that leads, through many twists and turns, from the religious revival of the early 19th century to Blue Period Picasso, then to Surrealism. It may take in the Children of the Raj and the discovery of Japan along the way. It leads from rather rigid moralism, to conscious immoralism, and then at last to Freud/Dali.' Edward Lucie-Smith 05/2012

In this book Edward Lucie-Smith considers the achievement of John Singer Sargent in response to a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This exhibition features Sargent's more private works - images of friends, rather than portraits painted on commission. In many ways Sargent is an ambiguous figure. The child of wealthy expatriate American parents, he was brought up in Europe, at first made his career in France, then settled in Britain. Totally cosmopolitan, he kept his American nationality, painted many American sitters, but never lived for any extended period of time in the United States, either as a child or as an adult. During his time in France he consorted with a number of artists who, at a certain point in their careers, were thought of as cutting edge. Monet is a prime example. However, his more intimate artist friends, such as Helleu, whom he painted a number of times, were not radicals, and always second-or-third rankers. Sexually he is a mystery. Biographers have tended to classify him according to their own sexual preferences, rather like the biographers of Caravaggio. For some he was a closeted gay man, for others he was definitely a lover of women. He never married and there is no proof of any liaisons, either heterosexual or homosexual. Paintings of subjects from his own social circle, made for his own pleasure rather than on commission, suggest that while he liked handsome young men, he was also fascinated by women of dominant temperament. His own mother was apparently a woman of this type. Easily social with friends, he nevertheless fiercely guarded his essential privacy. There is a parallel here with his somewhat older contemporary Lord Leighton, another hugely successful bachelor artist. Both men were strikingly masculine in appearance. In terms of his later reputation, Sargent was long regarded as a paradigmatic example of an artist who was immensely skilful but in no way truly experimental - someone who fitted perfectly into the wealthy society of his time. The reconsideration of Sargent that is now taking place has parallels with the reconsideration of Gustav Klimt, which got its start a little earlier. Neither one of them can really be described as 'avant-garde' in any meaningful sense of that much-abused term, but we have now started to see them as being extremely significant as makers of images that somehow sum up their epoch without sacrifice of aesthetic quality. Their paintings still resonate with the contemporary audience today.

In this study 'Art, Poetry and WW1, by Edward Lucue-Smith of writing, poetry and painting In the Centenary Year of the outbreak of the First World War the author considers the historical impact on the general psyche of the calamitous events, reflected in the expression of poets and visual artists. The volume includes Eric Kennington, CRW Nevinson, John Singer Sargent, William Orpen, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash; and writers Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and T.S. Eliot. In Europe the painters: Otto Dix, Max Beckman, Franz Marc, Gino Severini, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ludwig Meidner. He establishes a continuity to the theme with reference to works by Velazquez, Watteau, Goya and others, in their treatment of the spectacle of battle and the horrors of human conflict.

An anthology of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover a broad span, from the Italian Renaissance of Giotto and Antonello da Messina, Leonardo and Michelangelo, progressing to Rubens, Velazquez and Ingres, with essays on William Hogarth, John Constable and John Everett Millais for British Art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, which remain in print; the author sweeps the reader on a fabulous journey of perception, disclosing the strands that bind the continuum of classic and contemporary art.

A history of the development of the art market spanning the 17th century to contemporary art today.In modern times the profession of the dealer had its start in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries and was essentially due to the revolution brought about by the invention of the printing press. Prints could be offered as readymade images to a widespread market. Durer said he made more money out of his prints, more easily than he did from his commissioned paintings. His mother was his dealer, offering them in the marketplace at Nuremberg.With the rise and expansion of mercantile capitalism the sale of readymade works, supplied by third parties, not directly commissioned from the artist himself nor directly specified by the ultimate client, became a more and more common form of trading in art. This was particularly the pattern in the Low Countries and it also helped to sustain the increasingly large community of foreign artists, Netherlandish and German, who made their way to Italy, where they had no immediate social connections and needed intermediaries in order to make a livelihood. These intermediaries undoubtedly encouraged artists to tackle subject matter they believed would sell.By the early 18th century the profession of art dealer was well-established, in opposition to the official academies. Watteau's painting L'Enseigne de Gersaint portrays an upmarket Parisian establishment of this type. It is perhaps no accident that it shows a portrait of the reigning French monarch, Louis XV, being unceremoniously packed away in a box. Emblems of power now counted for less that symbols of luxury. A large mirror propped up on the right suggests that little distinction needed to be made, in this context, between paintings and looking glasses. Both were furnishings, the essential trappings of a civilized life-style, and both served to display not only their possessors' taste, but also their wealth. The big mirror, in fact, may have been more valuable than any of the paintings crowding the walls.The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it saw a radical redistribution of art works. Naturally dealers played a large part in this - also in defining what was prestigious, therefore saleable, and what was not. In the Victorian period in London, as attention swung towards then contemporary creations, dealers such as the still surviving Fine Art Society (founded in 1877) played a major role in shaping taste. The history of this gallery in Bond Street and that of the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement are closely intertwined.In late 19th century, dealers such as Durand-Ruel (in this case through his support of the Impressionists) were increasingly important in changing the currents of taste. In Durand-Ruel's case, his influence became international. This went hand in hand with a different kind of international influence, exercised by the great British dealer Lord Duveen, In alliance with the art historian Bernard Berenson, Duveen devised a way of selling Old Master paintings, often of religious or esoteric mythological subjects, to a clientele who had little natural liking for that kind of subject-matter, by emphasizing the formal qualities of these works, rather than what they portrayed. This was a first step towards the acceptance of abstraction in art.As the Modern Movement progressed dealers such as Vollard and Paul Guilluame had a greater and greater say in defining what was important in contemporary art and what was not. This influence continued as the centre of avant-garde activity moved from Paris to New York. Galleries such as that of Pierre Matisse and Peggy Gugenheim's Art of This Century Gallery pioneered the way to the acceptance of new forms of artistic expression. Later, Leo Castelli, an immigrant from the cosmopolitan Italian city of Trieste, was instrumental in establishing the reputations of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Castelli's 1962 solo show for Lichtenstein was a major step in the worldwide success of Pop art.This pattern continues today, on an even more ambitious and global scale. Galleries such as Gagosian (with multiple international sites) and White Cube here in London play a major part in creating contemporary perceptions about what is and is not important in art.

In this classic survey, now updated and with full-colour images throughout, Edward Lucie-Smith introduces the art of Latin America from 1900 to the present day. He discusses in detail major figures such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, as well as dozens of less well-known artists. Those who spent their lives in exile, and artists from Europe and the US who lived in South America, such as Leonora Carrington, are all included in this broad, comprehensive view. The artists featured here have sought for indigenous roots and a local tradition; explored abstraction, expressionism and new media (video, installation, performance); entered dialogue with European and North American movements, while insisting on reaching a wide popular audience for their work; and created an energetic, innovative and very varied art scene across the continent today. A new chapter extends the discussion into the twenty-first century, summarizing key trends and most notable figures of the last two decades. A constant theme is the embrace of the experimental and the new by artists across Latin America.

This standard introduction to visual art since 1945 has been revised, updated and redesigned for the first time since 2001. Movements, trends and individual artists from abstract expressionism to the present day are summarized, with detailed coverage of major developments such as pop art, conceptual and performance work, minimal art, neo-expressionist and figurative painting, the YBAs and the globalized art scene of the twenty-first century. A new chapter on art since 2000 includes discussion of work by Banksy and Ai Weiwei, as well as recent trends in art from Russia and Eastern Europe. Writing with exceptional clarity and a strong sense of narrative, Edward Lucie-Smith demystifies the work of dozens of artists, revealing how the art world has interacted with social, political and environmental concerns. Nearly 300 images of key artworks range from the paintings of Jackson Pollock via graffiti from 1980s New York and land art of the 1970s to contemporary painting from China and video from Japan. The book is as global in its reach as art has become in the 21st century.

In 1998, TASCHEN introduced the world to the masterful art of Touko Laaksonen with The Art of Pleasure. Prior to that, Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, enjoyed an intense cult following in the international gay community but was largely unknown to a broader audience. In 2009, TASCHEN followed up with the ultimate Tom overview: Tom of Finland XXL, a beautiful big collector's edition with over 1,000 images, covering six decades of the artist's career. The work was gathered from collections across the United States and Europe with the help of the Tom of Finland Foundation, featuring many drawings, paintings, and sketches never previously reproduced. Other images had only been seen out of context and were finally presented in the sequential order Tom intended for full artistic appreciation and erotic impact. The elegant oversized volume showed the full range of Tom's talent, from sensitive portraits to frank sexual pleasure to tender expressions of love and haunting tributes to young men struck down by AIDS, and was completed by eight commissioned essays on Tom's social and personal impact by Camille Paglia, John Waters, Armistead Maupin, Todd Oldham, and others, plus a scholarly analysis of individual drawings by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith. The only thing missing from Tom of Finland XXL was a widely affordable price tag-until now. The new Tom of Finland XXL is still big enough to work your biceps, and includes all of the original content, but costs a fraction of the original price. You're welcome.

As London evolves into a Babylonian-style city of lofty towers, the artist Anna Keen has been inspired to paint this London Metamorphosis. While each new edifice heads to the heavens, the exposed entrails of these vast construction sites strangely resemble ruins. Her large canvases are enriched with details stemming from patient observation and on-the-spot sketches, and from voyages around the city made by helicopter, boat, road and on foot. Like the eighteenth-century artist J.M Gandy, who simultaneously painted London in ruins and in construction, Anna Keen takes us just beneath the surface of the metropolis, to where the emotional landscape lurks and to where the soul of London is heading. London-based art historian Edward Lucie-Smith has followed Anna Keen's painting since 1995 in Rome.

Goya - the Witches and Old Women Album', now on view at the Courtauld Gallery in London, is fascinating for many reasons. It is a brilliant example of painstaking detective work. The long separated drawings of this album, which dates from 1819-23, have been brought together in their original sequence. Only one sheet, out of 23, now appears to be missing. It also represents a bridge between once traditional ideas about art and those we have now. Some of its roots are in the long-established tradition of personal caricature, and the related tradition of grotesque genre portraits of the poor and disadvantaged. Remote, but still present, are echoes of the little grotesque figures made in Hellenistic Alexandria. One can also see traces of influence from 17th century and later caricature drawings - those made, for example, by Guercino and Pier Francesco Mola. Even more strongly visible are what Goya owed to the drawings made by Giandomenico Tiepolo - the Punchinello series in particular.Giandomenico lived and worked in Spain from 1762-70, as assistant to his father, G.B. Tiepolo.What is highly original is the fact that these drawings, often extremely ambiguous in meaning, form a meditative sequence, not apparently intended for public consumption, but entirely self-reflexive. They record the artist's dreams and fantasies, but strictly for his own contemplation. As such they represent a major psychological breakthrough, a next step forward from the late self-portraits of Rembrandt. Their successors are the images created by major Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The exhibition enables us to see our contemporary ideas about the nature of the self at the very moment of their first formation. These are the issues Edward Lucie-Smith will discuss in his text about this pioneering show, which not only reconstructs Goya's long-dispersed album, but places it in the context of other drawings and prints by the same great artist.

In this book, which compares and contrasts the work of these two exceptional artists, Edward Lucie-Smith examines the changed but still vital role of portraiture in the art of our time.It is particularly interesting that the upcoming exhibition of Giacometti's work at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on Giacometti's activity as a portraitist, in both painting and sculpture. It coincides with a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain of paintings by Frank Auerbach. Though Auerbach has tackled a range of other subjects, urban landscapes, interiors and nudes, he is perhaps best known for his intensely studied images of people who are in one way or another close to him.Portraiture has not been, in general, one of the main subjects of Modernist art - if any genre of art seemed truly passe-iste when the Modern Movement was at its height, it was this one. Both Giacometti and Auerbach offer striking exceptions to the general rule. The human image - the very specific human image, reflection of a unique personality - is a central artistic theme for them both.The rules of traditional portrait painting are, however, overturned. The artist chooses his subjects.They don't choose him. Usually his subjects are intimately known, members of his immediate circle. Both Giacometti and Auerbach portray the same sitters over and over again, trying - so it seems - to catch some elusive essence. The paintings are about as far as you can get from a portrait snapshot. Further still, perhaps, from the kind of flattering, polished likenesses created by professional photographers in their studios.

Cv/VAR series no.176 reviews 'Jammers' by the celebrated American artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), in an exhibition held at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street London, from 16th February to 28th March 2013. The series comes from a month in 1975 when the artist worked in an Ashram (textile factory) in Ahmedabad, India. He continued to develop the loose fabric structures in New York, bringing reference to sails of crafts (windjammers) and the sense of free natural movement. Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925 Rauschenberg attended Academie Julien and Black Mountain College, where he studied under Josef Albers. He worked with Jasper Johns and John Cage in the early 1950s, developing the famous 'combines', assemblages of found objects, and created the White and the Black paintings - presaging movements of Pop, Minimalist and Conceptual art of the following decades. Includes an essay on the artist's development 1952-62, his links with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Jasper Johns. Studies 'The White Paintings','Black Paintings' and an interview with David White, long time colleague and friend, and Chief Curator of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

In his fascinating study of the pervasive theme of 'The Dance of Death' 'Edward Lucie-Smith traces its lineage in art from mosaiics of Pompeii and early Medieval frescos. He cites the celebrated engraving by Albrecht Durer: The Knight, Death and the Devil' and an extensive series of woodcuts,'The Dance of Death' by Hans Holbein the Younger. He explores 'Les Grand Miseres de Guerre', by Jaques Callot, the nightmares of Henri Fuseli and bitter social studies of Goya. The story takes in harsh anti-war prints by Louis Raemaeker and iconic works by Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele.The monograph is fully illustrated in colour with bio-data, notes and references.

A study of the masters Rembrandt van Rijn and JMW Turner exhibited at Tate Britain and the National Gallery London. The point is that Rembrandt and Turner (plus, with perhaps more reason,Titian and Michelangelo, who both lived to be much older than Rembrandt ) are regularly cited as artists who developed 'late styles', which have since been regarded as proof of superior genius. The idea evolved in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. It was at that time that the term 'Alterstil' - 'old age style' was coined in German. There is an excellent discussion of this in the first chapter of the catalogue of the current Rembrandt show at the N.G. Here's a quote: "The nineteenth century cult of genius, in addition to the ideological encumbrance of Rembrandt being claimed as a member of the Germanic people, resulted in his late work in particular being considered as an example of Alterstil par excellence. The art historians Carl Neumann and Georg Simmel notably saw in him a confirmation of their theory that exceptional artists ascend at the end of their lives to a spiritual state that defies rational understanding; isolated from the world, they create artistic soliloquies, thevfull meanings of which others can only guess at." Edward Lucie-Smith to the editor, October 2014

Cv/VAR Series 177 publishes a study by the celebrated art historian and writer Edward Lucie-Smith of the leading American artist Chuck Close. Finding his early impetus in the photorealistic works by Richard Estes, as well as the surface shocks of Jackson Pollock's 'Tachiste' paintings, Chuck Close developed his own, highly resolved 'heads' (his preferred term to portraits), which are worked on a massive scale. Close is as much preoccupied with process as description, charting an intricate exchange between painting and the pixellated images of his subjects. Despite suffering a disabling spinal aneurism in 1988, the artist has continued to forge a monumental body of work in a variety of media: paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, of potent and original effect. Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940) is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Close currently lives and works in New York's West Village and in Bridgehampton, New York. wikipedia.org