The Times and Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 'Superb ... Spalding is a lucid and revealing guide who wears her scholarship lightly' Sunday Times 'Spalding’s prose is as clear as a Ravilious greenhouse, her thoughts as orderly as a Ben Nicholson white relief' The Times A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain's leading art historians and critics. The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names – Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer – have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art. The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange. Throughout these years, the pursuit of ‘the real’ was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the ‘romantic’, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.

Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'Offshore' and 'The Blue Flower', turns her attention to the remarkable life of the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. 'I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone - in a land no one can define or remember, only desire' Edward Burne-Jones Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) was the prototypical pre-Raphaelite but with a truly individual sensibility. Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful biography charts his life from humble beginnings in Birmingham as the son of an unsuccessful framer, through a transformative period at Oxford, where he met his close friend and collaborator William Morris, and on to the apprenticeship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti that would shape his artistic vision. His work harks back to an Arthurian England - an Arcadia that offered solace against the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and on a deeply personal level provided respite from his ever-present melancholia. This is an illuminating portrait of a fascinating figure - artistic genius, doting father, troubled husband - written with all Penelope Fitzgerald's characteristic sympathy and insight.

In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poetic licence of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasizing that the lack of an independent income, and the titular 'room of one's own', prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential. As relevant in its insight and indignation today as it was when first delivered in those hallowed lecture theatres, A Room of One's Own remains both a beautiful work of literature and an incisive analysis of women and their place in the world. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf features an afterword by the British art historian Frances Spalding. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

This novel for grown-up children and childish grown-ups was first published in 1872 and is evocative and surprisingly modern.

A feast of colour and texture, Chila Burman's first major monograph celebrates one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists and her extraordinary body of work from across four decades. Chila Burman is a British Asian artist known for her radical feminist practice, her joyful neon light installations and her use of kaleidoscopic colours. Since the mid 1980s her work has explored the experiences and aesthetics of Asian femininity and female empowerment, and the impact of imperialism, colonialism, race and class. Informed by popular culture, Indian mythology and Bollywood, fashion and found objects, her work has consistently strived to challenge stereotypes and to champion equality. This book, the first major monograph on the artist, will bring together Burman’s extraordinary body of work from across four decades. Featuring paintings and installations, photography and prints, video and film works, and a range of diverse voices, it explores the ideas central to Burman’s practice, as well as her unique style.

An essay collection which examines Britten's juvenilia, influences such as Shostakovich and Verdi, his opera Owen Wingrave and a libretto written by Australian novelist Patrick White with the hope of a future collaboration. Benjamin Britten: New Perspectives on his Life and Work reveals the extent to which Britten scholarship is reaching outside the confines of Anglo-American criticism. The volume engages with juvenilia and other orchestral works from the 1920s and examines a broad range of influences on Britten, including the works of Shostakovich and Verdi, the poetry of Ovid, and the cinema. Among his operatic works the dramatic qualities of Owen Wingrave arediscussed through a close study of Piper's libretto and we witness the genesis of a libretto written by Australian novelist Patrick White and submitted to Britten with the hope of a future collaboration. The volume uncovers the generally hostile reception Britten's operas received in Paris until around the 1990s. Britten's status as 'outsider' in both the USA and in his own country when he returned in 1942 is discussed: the possibility is that Britten wasbecoming nervous of the gathering US involvement in the war and the real chance he may be called up to serve in the US forces is also discussed here.

Vanessa Bell is central to the history of the Bloomsbury Group, yet until this authorised biography was written, she largely remained a silent and inscrutable figure. Tantalising glimpses of her life appeared mainly in her sister, Virginia Woolf's, letters, diaries and biography. Frances Spalding here draws upon a mass of unpublished documents to reveal Bell's extraordinary achievements in both her art and her life. She recounts in vivid detail how Bell's move into the Bloomsbury Group and her exposure to Paris and the radical art of the Post-Impressionists ran parrallel with an increasingly unorthodox personal life that spun in convoluted threads between her marriage to Clive Bell, her affair with Roger Fry, her friendship with Duncan Grant and relationship with her sister.

This book is about a shared journey made by John and Myfanwy Piper who early on settled down in a small hamlet on the edge of the Chilterns, whence they proceeded to produce work which placed them centre stage in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Here, too, they fed and entertained many visitors, among them Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Benjamin Britten, and the Queen Mother. Their creative partnership encompasses not only a long marriage and numerous private and professional vicissitudes, but also a genuine legacy of lasting achievements in the visual arts, literature and music. Frances Spalding also sheds new light on the story of British art in the 1930s. In the middle of this decade John Piper and Myfanwy Evans (they did not marry until 1937) were at the forefront of avant-garde activities in England, Myfanwy editing the most advanced art magazine of the day and John working alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and others. But as the decade progressed and the political situation in Europe worsened, they changed their allegiances, John Piper investigating in his art a sense of place, belonging, history, memory, and the nature of national identity, all issues that are very much to the fore in today's world. Myfanwy Piper is best known as 'Golden Myfanwy', Betjeman's muse and for her work as librettist with Benjamin Britten. John Piper was an extraordinarily prolific artist in many media, his fertile career stretching over six decades and involving him in many changes of style. Having been an abstract painter in the 1930s, he became best known for his landscapes and architectural scenes in a romantic style. This core interest, in the English and Welsh landscape and the built environment, developed in him a sensibility that took in almost everything, from gin palaces to painted quoins, from ruined cottages to country houses, from Victorian shop fronts to what is nowadays called industrial archeology. His capacious and divided sensibility made him defender of many aspects of the English landscape and the built environment, while in his art he became an heir of that great tradition encompassing Wordsworth and Blake, Turner, Ruskin, and Samuel Palmer. He was torn between the pleasures of an abstract language liberated from time and place and those embedded in the locale, in buildings, geography, and history. Today, this expansive contradictoriness seems quintessentially modern, his divided response finding an echo in our own ambivalence towards modernity. Both Pipers created what seemed to many observers an ideal way of life, involving children, friendships, good food, humour, the pleasures of a garden, work, and creativity. Running through their lives is a fertile tension between a commitment to the new and a desire to reinvigorate certain native traditions. This tension produced work that is passionate and experimental. 'Only those who live most vividly in the present', John Russell observed of John and Myfanwy Piper, 'deserve to inherit the past'.

This book is a glorious celebration of Rhoda Pritzker's collection of 20th-century British art, much of which has been donated to the Yale Center for British Art. Pritzker, who was born in Manchester in1914 and emigrated to the United States during the Blitz, was an avid and daring collector of paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Keen to support artists whose reputations were still emerging, and loyal to no single school or style, she developed a unique and impressively diverse collection. While Pritzker most actively purchased pieces in the 1950s and 1960s, her collection offers a fascinating window onto postwar artistic production. Beautifully illustrated, this catalogue features a number of unpublished works and archival materials. Among the artists discussed are key figures, including L. S. Lowry, Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro, and Henry Moore, as well as lesser-known artists. The texts elucidate the factors that made Pritzker's method of collecting so singular-namely her relationship to an evolving transatlantic artistic community and the deeply personal nature of the works she procured. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (05/11/2016-08/21/2016)

This is a new release of the original 1937 edition.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

In this book Frances Spalding reassesses the astonishing achievements of British artists from the Edwardians Ben Nicholson and Walter Sickert to the Bloomsbury painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; from the work of Paul Nash and David Jones between the wars to that of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, David Hockney and the host of younger artists who have emerged since the 1960s. While modernist ideas from Europe and, more recently, American trends have had their influence, the author argues that British artists have drawn much of their inspiration from native traditions and are distinguished by their passionate adherence to individualism.

Published in 1915, THE VOYAGE OUT is Virginia Woolf's first novel, and came out after she had suffered a succession of severe mental crises. This definitive edition contains the original Hogarth Press text as overseen by the author, and a list of textual variants that appeared during her lifetime. THE VOYAGE OUT tells the story of a young Englishwoman, Rachel Vinrace, and her long sea voyage to South America, her engagement to Terence Hewet and her sudden illness and death. An extraordinary debut by one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century.

Spalding reveals and explores the intimate relationship between the course of Stevie Smith's life and the evolution of her art, into which she assimilated not simply the events and emotions of her private life, but the influences on her imagination of her wide and varied reading. Photos.