Matisse or Kahlo - Hirst or Emin - whose artworks have been the most influential? The most shocking? The most expensive? These cards allow art lovers of all ages to play off popular artists and compare them to the trailblazing women we should all know...the battle to redefine the art world is on!

The latest addition to the 'Lives of the Artists' series: highly readable short biographies of the world's greatest artists David Hockney is the most famous living British artist. And he is arguably one of the more famous American artists as well. Emerging from the north of England in the 1960s, he made quite a splash in Swinging London as a portaitist, and went on to make a even bigger splash in Los Angeles when he moved there in the 1970s. His figurative paintings of the 1970s and 1980s captured the zeitgeist of West Coast living, while he also explored new avenues by constructing mosaics out of polaroids. By the beginning of the millennium, he returned to his Yorkshire roots, embarking on a new period of painting. This came to an end with the death by misadventure in his home of a young studio assistant in 2013. He went 'home' to LA and has in the intervening years begun a new period of contemplative portraiture.

Longlisted for the Authors' Club First Novel Award 'Divine . . . the smart, sexy read you need' Evening Standard 'Startlingly impressive' Daily Mail 'Exhilarating' Vogue.com 'An electric new novel' Guardian AN EXQUISITE DEBUT NOVEL. A MID-LIFE COMING-OF-AGE STORY CHARTING ONE MAN'S SEXUAL AWAKENING AND HIS SPECTACULAR FALL FROM GRACE IN 1990S LONDON. FOR FANS OF ALAN HOLLINGHURST AND EDWARD ST AUBYN. Exiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light. Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life. 'Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling' Financial Times 'Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told' Reverend Richard Coles, Daily Mail

'The best novel I have read for ages. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read . . . There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in' Stephen Fry 'Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge' Michael Donkor, Guardian Cambridge, 1994. Professor Don Lamb is a revered art historian at the height of his powers, consumed by the book he is writing about the skies of the Venetian master Tiepolo. However, his academic brilliance belies a deep inexperience of life and love. When an explosive piece of contemporary art is installed on the lawn of his college, it sets in motion Don's abrupt departure from Cambridge to take up a role at a south London museum. There he befriends Ben, a young artist who draws him into the anarchic 1990s British art scene and the nightlife of Soho. Over the course of one long, hot summer, Don glimpses a liberating new existence. But his epiphany is also a moment of self-reckoning, as his oldest friendship - and his own unexamined past - are revealed to him in a devastating new light. As Don's life unravels, he suffers a fall from grace that that shatters his world into pieces. 'A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable' Financial Times 'Tiepolo Blue really has blown me away . . . The last debut novel I read that had this much talent buzzing around inside it was Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library.' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Providing a thematic overview of the multifarious work produced by Derek Boshier (b.1937) from the post-war period to the digital age, this fascinating publication reveals how Boshier’s deceptively playful imagery offers analytical commentaries on societal issues and the fragility and fragmentation of human identity. Among contemporaries such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips, Boshier was a central figure in the British Pop Art movement. Embracing Pop sensibilities, his early work juxtaposed figurative painting and imagery to call attention to nuclear anxieties and the growing consumerism of 1960s Britain. Yet this is just one aspect of Boshier's remarkable artistic journey, which has drawn in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, graphic design and printmaking. The book's broad sweep includes recent paintings and drawings created in America at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and features commentaries by artists, academics, curators and writers who explore how Boshier's ground-breaking activity interrogates truth and logic, fantasy and reality in the modern age. With contributions by James Cahill, Philip Colbert, Eddie Chambers, Susan Compo, Rachele Dini, Inga Fraser, Jann Haworth, Leslie Jones, Emily Langridge, Gregory Salter, Penny Slinger and John Stezaker.

When it comes to lovemaking, for lots of men, a woman's mind and body are strange, alien territories. There is no reason why any man should know what a woman needs when he makes love to her, or how to go about giving it to her. A typical pattern often emerges in many intimate relationships: a woman is not properly warmed up, sex may become painful, and most often, she does not have an orgasm. When he wants to make love to her again, she resists. However, once a man understands how women tend to think about intimacy - vastly different than the way he thinks about it - and learns a new approach and a few simple but dazzling techniques for effective lovemaking, he will know exactly what to do when he makes love to her. He will not only give her a good warm up, but most importantly, he will give her an orgasm every time they make love. When this occurs, she will become a wildly enthusiastic lover, and will want to make love to him again and again. Her reluctance will be a thing of the past. Most importantly, this book is written for men. The voice and point of view here are male. Two good friends sit down over a beer to discuss women and sex. They are honest, graphic, irreverent, humble and funny as they share their exasperations and frustrations - but most importantly, they solve them. John Lennon said, 'Love To Turn You On'. Gentlemen, there is nothing equal to the otherworldly thrill of giving a woman an orgasm; to witness her shudder with pleasure and to know that you are the man responsible. She will reward you a thousand fold. Happy lovemaking. James Cahill

How does a writer learn to write? For Tim Lewis, 27, the answer arrives in the form of Joy, an impossibly desirable, dreadlocked, passion-loving beauty. Fired from an L.A. inner-city teaching nightmare, Tim is catapulted to San Francisco to pursue a last ditch, secret dream to be a writer. But before he leaves, his father, dying of cancer and unhappy with Tim's decision, makes him promise: he must write something beautiful for his dad. But the man has roughly six months to live and nothing like a little pressure. In San Francisco, Tim meets Joy and discovers her odd quirk: if he conjures steamy tales with Joy as the erotic heroine, she gets hot and he gets to make love to her. The better the story the hotter she gets, and what more enticing motivation could a writer hope for? But he battles with Joy's impossible demands, her hipster friends, and struggles to stay afloat by coaching a near-hopeless collegiate cross-country team. Yet intimacy with Joy is mythic, and as Tim's deadline fast approaches, the story races to a surprising conclusion before the magical backdrop of San Francisco, and through the voice of a goofy, lovesick, and thoroughly overheated narrator who leaps effortlessly into lively, spontaneous storytelling.

Cv/VAR 104 reviews 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture', exhibited at The Royal Academy January to April 2012. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. The project developed with time-framed films, i-pad works, drawings, sketchbooks, oils and watercolours. recording particular motifs and places in the changing seasons. Studies were enlarged on joined canvases in compositions up to 32' wide, designed to immerse the viewer in an intense experience of the landscape. The monograph reviews the exhibition and recent books and catalogues on the artist.

From Neolithic painted petroglyphs, early paintings on silk, and landscapes by twelfth-century literati to the traditional handscrolls being produced today, Chinese painting has always had the power to enthrall. This magnificent book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some three thousand years. Drawing on museum collections, archives, and archaeological sites in China-including many resources never before available to Western scholars-as well as on collections in other countries, the authors present and analyze the very best examples of Chinese painting: more than 300 of them are reproduced here in color. Both accessible to the general reader and revelatory for the scholar, the book provides the most up-to-date and detailed history of China's pictorial art available today. In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found-in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture & Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes. Published in association with Foreign Languages Press, Beijing

Exploring the little-known drawing practice of a late giant of Spanish sculpture Juan Munoz (1953-2001) was a Spanish artist and self-described "storyteller" who worked primarily as a sculptor. Best known for his unsettling papier-mache characters that seem to be caught in the middle of an action suspended in time, Munoz made remarkable and pioneering breaks from the traditional and formal language of sculpture by introducing narrative elements into his work. This is the first overview of Munoz's little-known work in illustration, featuring his drawings and works on paper held by museum and gallery collections across Europe and the United States. With critical texts and essays to accompany the works, this volume contextualizes the artist's drawing practice both within his larger oeuvre and the influence of 18th- and 19th-century European and Spanish drawing traditions.

In "The Painter's Practice," James Cahill reveals the intricacies of the painter's life with respect to payment and patronage--an approach that is still largely absent from the study of East Asian art. Drawing upon such unofficial archival sources as diaries and letters, Cahill challenges the traditional image of the disinterested amateur scholar-artist, unconcerned with material rewards, that has been developed by China's literati, perpetuated in conventional biographies, and abetted by the artists themselves. His work fills in the hitherto unexplored social and economic contexts in which painters worked, revealing the details of how painters in China actually made their living from the sixteenth century onward. Considering the marketplace as well as the studio, Cahill reviews the practices and working conditions of artists outside the Imperial Court such as the employment of assistants and the use of sketchbooks and prints by earlier artists for sources of motifs. As loose, flamboyant brushwork came into vogue, Cahill argues, these highly imitable styles ironically facilitated the forger's task, flooding the market with copies, sometimes commissioned and signed by the artists themselves. In tracing the great shift from seeing the painting as a picture to a concentration on the painter's hand, Cahill challenges the archetype of the scholar-artist and provides an enlightened perspective that profoundly changes the way we interpret familiar paintings.