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and art critic Edward Lucie-Smith contributes a study of the individual artists, their interconnection and previously unpublished material of their intricate links with the social establishment of the time.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

Renowned artist Damien Hirst (b.1965) is reviewed in an exhibition of works spanning twenty years, held at Tate Modern from April to September 2012.The review explores the development of his art from the potent animal vitrines and butterfly composites to the series of extensive spot paintings, where the artist engaged in a complex invigilation of the coded systems that govern daily existence. The exhibition at Tate Modern features 'For The Love of God', the celebrated diamond studded skull, to be centred in the vast Turbine Hall of the converted power station at Bankside.

Reviews 'David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture', exhibited at The Royal Academy. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Works developed with time-framed films, photographs, i-pad studies, 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 includes exhibition reviews by James Cahill and Michael Lovell Pank + reviews of recent catalogues and books on the artist by Marco Livingstone, Martin Gayford and Christopher Simon Sykes, by Marina Vaizey.

James Cahill presents a review of a new exhibition by the renowned artist Francesco Clemente,(b.1952) exploring his first show in London for seven years. The monograph includes a conversation recorded with the artist in which he discusses the new paintings, and the ideas which grounded their development. Clemente embodies a binding of different cultures: the Western Italian Renaissance, Eastern philosophy of Buddhism and the Mandala; formed in a life divided between New York and India. The exhibition of fourteen works at Blain|Southern, Hanover Square, is entitled 'Mandala for Crusoe' and runs until 26th January 2013. Francesco Clemente (b. 1952, Naples, Italy) is a renowned artist from the Neo-Expressionist movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. From 1970 he studied architecture at the University of Rome, and began to exhibit his drawings, photographs and conceptual works in Europe. From 1973, he travelled regularly to India, and in 1981 he moved to New York. He collaborated with close friends, notably the poets Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, and reacting against a wave of anti-painting sentiment among critical circles, Clemente initiated a series of collaborative paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Since the mid-1980s, Clemente's work has been the subject of many international solo exhibitions, including; Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1984 - 5); Kunstmuseum Basel (1987); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990); Royal Academy of Arts, London (1990); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994 - 5); Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999 - 2000); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); Museo MAXXI, Rome (2006); Museum MADRE, Naples (2009); and more recently at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011) and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2011). His works have also been included in notable group exhibitions including Documenta 7 in 1982 and the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 1995. Clemente is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (Blain|Southern)

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.

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.

What if you could sit down with your favourite artist and ask them anything you liked – Life? Work? Inspiration? Based on new interviews and archival material from a huge roster of artists, this book does exactly that. Is art a ‘career’, a vocation or something else entirely? Do you need a studio or a dealer, and how do you find one? Does financial success – or the lack of it – change you? Should you read the reviews? Encompassing every stage of an artist’s life – from early works to debut shows and mid- and late-career stages – this book allows artists to answer these key questions.

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

'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

Cv/VAR 146 reviews the work of Damien Hirst (b. Bristol 1965) presented in a retrospective exhibition spanning twenty years at Tate Modern, April to September 2012. It explores the development of his art from the controversial animal vitrines and beautiful butterfly composites to an extensive series of spot paintings, where the artist engaged in a complex invigilation of coded systems that govern daily existence. It encounters a rarely exhibited work One Thousand Years 1991, Pharmacy and For The Love of God, the celebrated diamond studded skull.

'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

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 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.

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.

In this groundbreaking book, James Cahill expands the field of Chinese pictorial art history, opening both scholarly studies and popular appreciation to vernacular paintings, 'pictures for use and pleasure'. These were works commissioned and appreciated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the non-elites of Chinese society, including women. Traditional Chinese collectors, like present-day scholars of Chinese painting, have favored the 'literati' paintings of the Chinese male elite, disparaging vernacular works, often intended as decorations or produced to mark a special occasion. Cahill challenges the dominant dogma and doctrine of the literati, showing how the vernacular images, both beautiful and appealing, strengthen our understanding of High Qing culture. They bring to light the Qing or Manchu emperors' fascination with erotic culture in the thriving cities of the Yangtze Delta and demonstrate the growth of figure painting in and around Beijing's imperial court. They also revise our understanding of gender roles and show how Chinese artists made use of European styles. By introducing a large, rich body of works, "Pictures for Use and Pleasure" opens new windows on later Chinese life and society.

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.

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