History
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100 Books from the Libraries of the National Trust (The National Trust Collection)
The National Trust looks after almost half a million books and manuscripts held in libraries across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This beautifully illustrated volume brings together a selection of 100 rare and fascinating examples spanning the 8th to the 21st centuries.100 Books from the Libraries of the National Trust includes illuminated medieval manuscripts; the Trust’s oldest atlas, with maps of the ancient world; a volume from Henry VIII’s library; a book inscribed in blood; an Arabic manuscript on horsemanship; a very early book on swimming; the largest volume of botanical drawings ever produced; marches by Joseph Haydn; a library of miniature children’s books; Dame Ellen Terry’s annotated working copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; the first book ever printed in Antarctica; Virginia Woolf’s handwritten manuscript for her novel Orlando; and John Lennon’s treasured childhood copy of Richmal Crompton’s William the Gangster.
Chosen by National Trust curators from collections at more than 160 properties, the featured books are arranged chronologically, each accompanied by beautiful photography and an illuminating, easytoread caption. The book concludes with a handy glossary of terms and a gazetteer of important National Trust libraries.
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£8.70£9.50 -
100 European Graffiti Artists
One hundred extraordinary artists representing many European cities, each with its own and often uniquely inspiring graffiti scene, including London, Amsterdam, Paris, and more. This dense, sprawling portfolio is the product of modern day documenter Steam 156’s undisputed knowledge of European graffiti, and includes artist profiles, most written by the artists themselves, crew affiliations, locations, the year they started, details about style, influences, and characteristic strokes, contours, and angles, with hundreds of photos in all. A medium of powerful, youthful, artistic expression, graffiti spread rampantly across Europe in the early 1980s and has never ceased. Cities across the continent are now hosts to halls of fame, abandoned spaces, and streets full of incredible work by artists, featured in this book, who are carrying the art form boldly into the future and expanding its influence even further.Read more
£34.40£43.70100 European Graffiti Artists
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24 Sheets of Chiyogami Patterns Gift Wrapping Paper: High-Quality 18 X 24″ (45 X 61 CM) Wrapping Paper: High-Quality 18 x 24″ (45 x 61 cm) … … Paper: 18 x 24″ (45 x 61 cm)…
These fine-quality sheets feature 6 prints inspired by classic and colorful Japanese chiyogami! These papers are suitable for craft projects as well as for gift wrapping. The variety of designs means they are useful for any occasion–whether a holiday, birthday, anniversary or “just because.” 24 sheets of 18 x 24 inch (45 x 61 cm) paper 6 unique patterns The tradition of gift wrapping originated in Asia, with the first documented use in China in the 2nd century BC. Japanese furoshiki, reusable wrapping cloth, is still in use four centuries after it was first created. Gift wrapping is one custom that has prevailed through the ages and across the world–it should be special for both the gift giver and recipient.Read more
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A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Brush Painting: 35 Painting Activities from Calligraphy to Animals to Landscapes
A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Brush Painting teaches this ancient art form in an easy-to-understand way―no prior experience necessary!As one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world, Chinese brush painting has been used for thousands of years to create images that harness the imagination, and capture the inner spirit of a subject―be it an animal, landscape or tree. All you need for this simple, but beautiful, art form is black watercolor paint, white paper, a brush and some creativity!
An introduction tells you about the history of brush painting, and also gives tips for holding your brush, achieving different shades and collecting your materials. After that, the book takes you step-by-step through more than 35 hands-on activities―including basic strokes, putting them together to create an object or scene, the importance of leaving open space and even writing some Chinese calligraphy.
With the help of this book, artists of all ages can learn to paint:
- Bamboo stalks, branches and leaf clusters
- A knotted pine tree and its delicate needles
- A snail with a spiral shell and little body peeking out from underneath
- A waterfall gliding down the side of a mountain
- And much more!
You’ll find that this activity will help you learn to center your mind and thoughts, and your masterpieces will be inspiring decorations or great gifts for friends and family. Get started learning this ‘soft martial art!’
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A Big Important Art Book (Now with Women): Profiles of Unstoppable Female Artists–And Projects to Help You Become One
Celebrate 45 women artists, and gain inspiration for your own practice, with this beautiful exploration of contemporary creators from the founder of The Jealous Curator.
Walk into any museum, or open any art book, and you’ll probably be left wondering: where are all the women artists? A Big Important Art Book (Now with Women) offers an exciting alternative to this male-dominated art world, showcasing the work of dozens of contemporary women artists alongside creative prompts that will bring out the artist in anyone!
This beautiful book energizes and empowers women, both artists and amateurs alike, by providing them with projects and galvanizing stories to ignite their creative fires. Each chapter leads with an assignment that taps into the inner artist, pushing the reader to make exciting new work and blaze her own artistic trail. Interviews, images, and stories from contemporary women artists at the top of their game provide added inspiration, and historical spotlights on art “herstory” tie in the work of pioneering women from the past. With a stunning, gift-forward package and just the right amount of pop culture-infused feminism, this book is sure to capture the imaginations of aspiring women artists.
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A Little Feminist History of Art
Emerging in the late 1960s as women artists struggled to de-gender their work to compete in a male-dominated arena, the feminist art movement has played a leading role in the art world over the last five decades. Using the female gaze to articulate socially relevant issues after an era of aesthetic formalism, women artists, working in a variety of media, have called to attention ideas around gender, identity and form, criticising the cultural expectations and stereotyping of women, women s struggle for equality, and the treatment of the female body as a commodity. This little book is a short and pithy introduction to some of the most important artworks borne out of this movement. Fifty outstanding works from the late 1960s to the present reflect women s lives and experience, as well as the changing position of women artists, and reveal the impact of feminist ideals and politics on visual culture. Exploring themes such as gender inequality, sexuality, domestic life, personal experiences and the female body, A Little Feminist History of Art is a celebration of one of the most ambitious, influential and enduring artistic movements to emerge from the twentieth century.Read more
£8.60£9.50A Little Feminist History of Art
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A-Z Great Modern Artists (A-Z Great Modern series)
A most striking, design-led reference book, A to Z Great Modern Artists features artist and graphic designer Andy Tuohy’s portraits of 52 key modern artists, rendered in each artist’s own characteristic style – including Aleksandr Rodchenko in his constructivist poster style, Andy Warhol as a classic repeat print, and Barbara Hepworth illustrated to resemble one of her distinctive bronze and rod sculptures.With expert text by art historian Christopher Masters, each artist’s entry includes a summary of the essential things you need to know about the artist; their biographical details, why they’re so significant, where you can find their works today, and a surprising fact about them plus reproductions of key works.
Whether you’re already an art expert, or looking for a helpful cheat to navigating around a gallery, you’ll love this stunning and intelligent guide to global artists of the modern age.
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£16.60£18.00A-Z Great Modern Artists (A-Z Great Modern series)
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About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art
A unique survey of 350 artworks by a global and diverse array of LGBTQ+ artists – many underrecognized and overlooked – from the last 50 years
Though the Stonewall Riots might now be shorthand for the start of the gay rights movement, so much of art and culture has been ‘queer’ since the beginning of time. In About Face, art historian and curator Jonathan D. Katz explores this concept head-on, curating a tapestry of works that connect historical threads and reveal how gender and sexual identity have been interwoven by artists contemporaneous to and since Stonewall. With more than 350 artworks by over 40 LGBTQ+ artists across nationalities and generations, and original texts by artists and scholars, About Face is as stunning as it is important.
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£34.10£42.80About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art
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Abstract Art: A Global History
Taking a radically new approach to the history of abstract painting, Pepe Karmel applies a scholarly yet fresh vision to reconsider the history of abstraction from a global perspective and to demonstrate that abstraction is embedded in the real world. Moving beyond the orthodox canonical terrain of abstract art, he surveys artists from across the globe, examining their work from the point of view of content rather than form. Previous writers have approached the history of abstraction as a series of movements solving a series of formal problems. In contrast, Karmel focuses on the subject matter of abstract art, showing how artists have used abstract imagery to express social, cultural and spiritual experience.An introductory discussion of the work of the early modern pioneers of abstraction opens up into a completely new approach to abstract art based around five inclusive themes – the body, the landscape, the cosmos, architecture, and the repertory of man-made signs and patterns – each of which has its own chapter. Starting from a figurative example, Karmel works outwards to develop a series of narratives that go far beyond the established figures and movements traditionally associated with abstract art. Each narrative is complemented by a number of ‘featured’ abstract works, which provide an in-depth illustration of the breadth of Karmel’s distinctive vision.
A wide-ranging examination of topics – from embryos to the surface of skin, from vortexes to waves, planets to star charts, towers to windows – is interwoven with detailed analysis of works by established figures like Joan Miró and Jackson Pollock alongside pieces by lesser-known artists such as Wu Guanzhong, Hilma af Klint and Odili Donald Odita.
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£48.10£61.80Abstract Art: A Global History
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Action / Gesture / Paint: a global story of women and abstraction 1940–70
Drawing on the avant-garde movements of both Expressionism and Surrealism, the women of Abstract Expressionism redefined artistic practice as an immersive arena for action, process and consciousness. Their paintings were regarded not as images but as events. Although the movement officially began in mid-century USA, it quickly – through myriad means – spread around the world and became a catalyst for redefining ideas around aesthetics, poetry, philosophy and politics.This new publication, accompanying a major European touring exhibition, will include works by 40 artists from across the globe, from well-known practitioners such as Carmen Herrera, Etel Adnan, Sandra Blow and Helen Frankenthaler, to lesser-known names from countries such as Australia, China, Iceland, Japan, Mexico, Mozambique, Romania and Venezuela: women who took up the ideas and methodologies of the movement but endowed them with specific cultural and subjective dimensions.
The catalaogue will include essays by Christian Levett, Joan Marter, Agustin Perez Rubio and Elizabeth Smith, as well as full colour illustrations of all the works.
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Affinities: A Journey Through Images from The Public Domain Review
An exploration of echoes and resonances across two millennia of visual culture, celebrating ten years of The Public Domain Review.Gathering a remarkable collection of over 500 public domain images, Affinities is a carefully curated visual journey illuminating connections across more than two thousand years of image-making. Drawing on a decade of archival immersion at The Public Domain Review, the book has been assembled from a vast array of sources: from manuscripts to museum catalogues, ship logs to primers on Victorian magic. The images are arranged in a single captivating sequence which unfurls according to a dreamlike logic, through a play of visual echoes and evolving thematic threads – hatching eggs twin with early Burmese world maps, marbled endpapers meet tattooed stowaways, and fireworks explode beside deep-sea coral.
At once an art book, a sourcebook, and a kaleidoscopic visual poem, Affinities is a unique and enthralling publication that will offer something different on each visit. Its playful and imaginative space invites the reader to transcend familiar categories of epoch, style, or historical theme, and to instead revel in a new world of creative possibilities played out between the images – opening up new connections, ways of seeing, and forms of knowledge.
Praise for The Public Domain Review
‘An Aladdin’s cave of curiosity … the best thing on the web’ Guardian
‘A gold mine of fantastic images and stories’ The New York TimesRead more
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After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art
Through the 1880s the very essence of representation, meaning and process in Western art were profoundly interrogated. Plausible representations of the external world were cast aside in favour of non-naturalism expressed in varying degrees, from modest distortions of reality to pure abstraction.The decades that followed, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation. Concentrating on this period of great upheaval, this book will explore the constructive dialogue between painting and sculpture, and the influential roles played by three giants of the era, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, across European art as a whole. While acknowledging the centrality of Paris as a cultural capital, it will also uniquely highlight other centres of artistic ferment in Europe, from Brussels and Barcelona to Berlin and Vienna, and track the variety of routes into modernism in the early twentieth century.
This fully illustrated catalogue will contain four essays, introductions to each city of ferment and biographies of the artists.
Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press
Exhibition Schedule:
The National Gallery, London 25 March–13 August 2023Read more
£29.30£38.00After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art
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Alex Katz
Alex Katz has found his audience. It s not the first time. Over seven decades, the artist has developed his vision with determination as the tides of avant-garde and academic fashion ebbed and flowed. His first audience was other painters (including de Kooning and Philip Guston), and today, still, he is perhaps best understood by other artists: those who appreciate how difficult it is to make something so simple, so well. Working in a representational style while his classmates celebrated Abstract Expressionism, eschewing slick surfaces for a pared-down view while his peers went glossy with Pop, Katz cleaved to one vision, a few locations, and subjects. Katz s endurance and commitment to developing an original American style is explored in depth, from his boyhood influences to an artistic circle that included John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Lois Dodd, Kenneth Koch, Frank O Hara, Fairfield Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Larry Rivers, and Paul Taylor. Sketches, works on paper, and archival material selected by the artist s son, the poet Vincent Katz, give a fuller picture of the painter and his world. The more than 250 paintings reproduced at an unprecedented scale will be the most comprehensive collection available in a single publication.Read more
£76.20£109.30Alex Katz
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Andrew Cranston – Never a Joiner
Andrew Cranston (b.1969, Hawick, Scotland; lives and works in Glasgow) is a painter-storyteller, a way of working that is enhanced by his often painting on the linen-bound covers of old books. His stories coalesce in the process of making – the paintings emerging gradually through the manipulation of his materials: layering, lacquering, bleaching, collaging and constantly re-working his way into images that seem to shift backwards and forwards in time. He once described a work as ‘a painting that came out of my brush one day’, a statement that sums up his approach. They are resolutely contemporary in spirit and yet connected by a strong thread to painters of the past, especially perhaps to the intimism of Vuillard and Bonnard, or to Matisse or Munch. These are narrative paintings, drawn from the artist’s memory and observations of life and liberally sprinkled with references to cinema, literature and art history.This publication presents a selection of the book cover paintings for which Cranston has become so well known in recent years. The cover image is a detail of Cat and cheeseboard (2018) in which a cat sits on the upholstered arm of a sofa surveying what the artist describes as ‘a selection of bries and camemberts, as mousetraps’. Other animals pop up from time to time – a horse, some fish, a leopard; the skeleton of an elk. There are still lifes with fruit, flowers and/or pottery, and lots of landscapes, from the bleak to the fantastical. There are peopled and unpeopled interiors, portraits of family members and celebrities (occasionally curious hybrids thereof), and childhood memories from school classrooms and classical music-filled assemblies to holidays in Switzerland and visits to granny’s flat. And there are quite a few watering cans too.
Each featured painting is accompanied by a text based on notes made by the artist before, during or after making a work. Mostly private thoughts, memories and anecdotes, these fragments jotted down on scraps of paper or tapped into his mobile phone were never intended to be published, but the resulting texts offer personal observations and reflections that Cranston considers ‘something like album sleeve notes where a musical artist might give some background to each song’. The texts are at times amusing, at others melancholic and moving, offering illuminating insights into the mind and life of the artist and the subjects, references and influences that feed into his painting practice. There are notes about technique and colour, about family and friends, about particular places at certain moments in time. For Cranston, writing has become ‘another way of engaging with painting and of activating the interesting afterlife that a work can have when it leaves the studio and goes out into the world.’
Andrew Cranston – Never a Joiner has been produced by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and co-published with Anomie Publishing, London. It has been published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at Ingleby, Edinburgh, and launched as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969 and currently lives and works in Glasgow. He studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen and at the Royal College of Art in London. Cranston has exhibited widely in the UK and USA and his work is housed in many museums and institutions across the world.
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£27.50£33.30Andrew Cranston – Never a Joiner
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Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s
Reveals how American art in the 1930s―intertwined with the political, social, and economic tumult of an era not so unlike our own―engaged with the public amid global upheaval
This publication examines the search for artistic identity in the United States from the stock market crash of 1929 that began the Great Depression to the closure of the Works Progress Administration in 1943 with a focus on the unprecedented dissemination of art and ideas brought about by new technology and government programs. During this time of civil, economic, and social unrest, artists transmitted political ideas and propaganda through a wide range of media, including paintings and sculptures, but also journals, prints, textiles, postcards, and other objects that would have been widely collected, experienced, or encountered. Insightful essays discuss but go beyond the era’s best-known creators, such as Thomas Hart Benton, Walker Evans, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, to highlight artists who have received little scholarly attention, including women and artists of color as well as designers and illustrators. Emphasizing the contributions of the Black Popular Front and Leftist movements while acknowledging competing visions of the country through the lenses of race, gender, and class, Art for the Millions is a timely look at art in the United States made by and for its people.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
Exhibition Schedule:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(September 6–December 10, 2023)Read more
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Art Hiding in Paris: An Illustrated Guide to the Secret Masterpieces of the City of Light
Paris is the city of light, the city of love, and the city of more art than you could possibly explore in a lifetime-and not just in museums. Tucked away in tree-lined parks, preserved in world class restaurants, emblazoned on Metro station walls, and hidden in the most unexpected places are masterpieces worthy of the Louvre, if you know where to look!
In this whimsically illustrated celebration of Parisian art and artists, author and curator Lori Zimmer highlights more than 100 treasures. From the gorgeous remnants of the Art Nouveau era to the homes of some of the world’s most influential artists-including Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and more-to an introduction to the modern masters of urban art, there are endless riches to be explored. Discover art that was hidden for decades inside cafes, shops and even a Belle Époque brothel! Paris will surprise you.
Illustrated by artist Maria Krasinski, this book provides curated itineraries for dreaming up your next urban exploration, and is perfect for displaying on any art lover’s shelf.
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Art History For Dummies
Ready to discover the fascinating world of art history? Let’s (Van) Gogh!
Fine art might seem intimidating at first. But with the right guide, anyone can learn to appreciate and understand the stimulating and beautiful work of history’s greatest painters, sculptors, and architects. In Art History For Dummies, we’ll take you on a journey through fine art from all eras, from Cave Art to the Colosseum, and from Michelangelo to Picasso and the modern masters. Along the way, you’ll learn about how history has influenced art, and vice versa.
This updated edition includes:
- Brand new material on a wider array of renowned female artists
- Explorations of the Harlem Renaissance, American Impressionism, and the Precisionists
- Discussions of art in the 20th and 21st centuries, including Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and today’s eclectic art scene
Is there an exhibition in your town you want to see? Prep before going with Art History For Dummies and show your friends what an Art Smartie you are.
An unbeatable reference for anyone looking to build a foundational understanding of art in a historical context, Art History For Dummies is your personal companion that makes fine art even finer!
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£19.30£23.70Art History For Dummies
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Art Works: How Organizers and Artists Are Creating a Better World Together
An inside look at the organizers and artists on the front lines of political mobilization and social change
“Ken [Grossinger] is one of the smartest strategists I know.” —John Sweeney, AFL-CIO president, 1995–2009
An artist’s mural of George Floyd becomes an emblem of a renewed movement for racial equality. A documentary film injects fuel into a popular mobilization to oust a Central American dictator. Freedom songs course through the American civil rights movement.
When artists and organizers combine forces, new forms of political mobilization follow—which shape lasting social change. And yet few people appreciate how much deliberate strategy often propels this vital social change work. Behind the scenes, artists, organizers, political activists, and philanthropists have worked together to hone powerful strategies for achieving the world we want and the world we need.
In Art Works, noted movement leader Ken Grossinger chronicles these efforts for the first time, distilling lessons and insights from grassroots leaders and luminaries such as Ai Weiwei, Courtland Cox, Jackson Browne, Shepard Fairey, Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Alexander, Bill McKibben, JR, Jose Antonio Vargas, and more. Drawing from historical and present-day examples—including Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Legacy Museum, and the Art for Justice Fund—Grossinger offers a rich tapestry of tactics and successes that speak directly to the challenges and needs of today’s activists and of these political times.
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Artists making books: poetry to politics
A collection of outstanding and fascinating artists’ books revealing the inspirations and concerns of a group of remarkable contemporary artists.‘More than a simple reflection of the British Museum’s artist-book holdings, this is an important index of artists’ responses to the issues and circumstances that have shaped the Arab world in recent times.’ – ArtReview
In the hands of artists and poets, books have been taking a radically different form since the advent of the artist’s book in Paris in the early 20th century. Appearing in a variety of shapes and sizes, as one-offs or small print editions, books offer artists and poets a novel form of expression. In the words of Indian artist Nalini Malani (b. 1946), the book is ‘a carrier of experience’, in which whole worlds are encapsulated.
In this beautifully produced book, works made by artists from Beirut to Tunis and beyond highlight the relationship between artists and writers and the influences that inform their work, from family to politics and everything in between. Lebanese artist Abed Al Kadiri (b. 1984) conceived his book during the first month of the pandemic to explore his family history, while through the eyes of Iraqi artist Kareem Risan (b. 1960) we see the shocking aftermath of a deadly explosion on the streets of Baghdad in 2005.
These artists also find inspiration in classical poetry and literature. Some of their works respond to and are informed by the medieval Persian poetry of Rumi and Hafez, as well as the tales of The Thousand and One Nights.
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£19.30£23.80Artists making books: poetry to politics
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Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism
Autotheory–the commingling of theory and philosophy with autobiography–as a mode of critical artistic practice indebted to feminist writing and activism.In the 2010s, the term autotheory began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory.
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Banksy
The largest presentation of works by Banksy, the world’s most enigmatic yet highly sought-after artist, including iconic works, installation objects, ephemera, and memorabilia all in one volume.Banksy is the world’s most discussed artist of recent decades, and this seminal collection features hundreds of works including Girl with Balloon, Pulp Fiction, Love Is in the Air, Barcode, and Monkey Queen. It also includes scores of paintings, serigraphs, stencils, and installation objects as well as a selection of memorabilia―many of which have never been published previously. Created with the cooperation of Pest Control, the group that manages all things Banksy, this is as official and authorized as any Banksy publication could be.
Banksy is the world’s greatest practitioner of street art. His work has always been political, involving pointed critiques of inequality, injustice, consumerism, and the establishment, yet no one knows his identity. He is an exemplary case of fame and notoriety built upon absence and anonymity. His relationship with the art market is also complex: marked by mocking hostility while being one of the most marketable and most collected contemporary artists.Read more
£21.80£28.50Banksy
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Barbara Rae: The Lammermuirs
- Studies of the Lammermuirs in south-eastern Scotland by the painter and printmaker Barbara Rae CBE RA, many made when the coronavirus pandemic prevented travel further afield
The Lammermuir Hills have been an important trade route between Scotland and England for generations, as well as an effective barrier when necessary.
Drawn by the long history of south-eastern Scotland and the many conflicting elements in play in its natural environment – among them wind farms, pylons, forestry plantations, grouse moors and sheep – the distinguished Scottish painter and printmaker Barbara Rae cbe ra has made numerous studies of these wild expanses.
This handsome volume reproduces a wide selection of her intensely colourful images with accompanying photographs and maps, and texts by the art critic Duncan Macmillan, Emeritus Professor of the History of Scottish Art at the University of Edinburgh, and Maureen Barrie, who worked for many years at National Museums Scotland.
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£25.50£28.50Barbara Rae: The Lammermuirs
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Basquiat
An icon of 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) first made his name under the graffiti tag “SAMO,” before establishing his studio practice and catapulting to fast fame at the age of 20. Although his career lasted barely a decade, he remains a cult figure of artistic social commentary, and a trailblazer in the mediation of graffiti and gallery art.
Basquiat’s work drew upon diverse sources and media to create an original and urgent artistic vocabulary, biting with critique against structures of power and racism. His practice merged abstraction and figuration, poetry and painting, while his influences spanned Greek, Roman, and African art, French poetry, jazz,and the work of artistic contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. The results are vivid, visceral mixtures of words, African emblems, cartoonish figures, daubs of bold color, and beyond.
This book presents Basquiat’s short but prolific career, his unique style, and his profound engagement with ever-relevant issues of integration and segregation, poverty and wealth.
About the series
Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:
a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
a concise biography
approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions
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£7.60£11.40Basquiat
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Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was only twenty-seven when he died in 1988, his meteoric and often controversial career having lasted for just eight years. Despite his early death, Basquiat’s powerful oeuvre has ensured his continuing reputation as one of modern art’s most distinctive voices. Borrowing from graffiti and street imagery, cartoons, mythology and religious symbolism, Basquiat’s drawings and paintings explore issues of race and identity, providing social commentary that is shrewdly observed and biting. This bestselling book, now available in a compact edition, celebrates Basquiat’s achievements in the contexts of the key influences on his art. It not only re-evaluates the ar tist s principal works and their meaning, but also explains what keeps his painting relevant today.Read more
£16.70£18.00Basquiat
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Basquiat x Warhol: Paintings 4 Hands
- Published to accompany an exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton from 5 April to 28 August 2023
- The collaboration between the two artists, legends of the New York avant-garde, through more than a hundred of their joint works
In the spring of 2023, Fondation Louis Vuitton will be holding Basquiat x Warhol… Painting 4 hands, the most important exhibition ever devoted to the collaborative work of these two artists. The exhibition will feature more than 100 jointly signed paintings, in addition to individual works by Basquiat and Warhol, and works by other major artists (Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, etc.) in order to recreate the New York downtown art scene of the 1980s.
From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) jointly produced about 160 paintings, some of the largest in their respective careers. A genuine artistic dialogue of style and form had developed between them that dealt equally well with crucial issues such as the integration of the African-American community into the narrative of North America, a continent where Warhol was a major manufacturer of icons.
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£36.90£47.50Basquiat x Warhol: Paintings 4 Hands
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Basquiat. 40th Anniversary Edition: And the Art of Storytelling (40th Edition)
The legend of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as strong as ever. Synonymous with 1980s New York, the artist first appeared in the late 1970s under the tag SAMO, spraying caustic comments and fragmented poems on the walls of the city. He appeared as part of a thriving underground scene of visual arts and graffiti, hip hop, post-punk, and DIY filmmaking, which met in a booming art world. As a painter with a strong personal voice, Basquiat soon broke into the established milieu, exhibiting in galleries around the world. Basquiat’s expressive style was based on raw figures and integrated words and phrases. His work is inspired by a pantheon of luminaries from jazz, boxing, and basketball, with references to arcane history and the politics of street life-so when asked about his subject matter, Basquiat answered “royalty, heroism and the streets.” In 1983 he started collaborating with the most famous of art stars, Andy Warhol, and in 1985 was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. When Basquiat died at the age of 27, he had become one of the most successful artists of his time. First published in an XXL edition, this unprecedented insight into Basquiat’s art is now available in a compact, accessible volume in celebration of TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary. With pristine reproductions of his most seminal paintings, drawings, and notebook sketches, it offers vivid proximity to Basquiat’s intricate marks and scribbled words, further illuminated by an introduction to the artist from editor Hans Werner Holzwarth, as well as an essay on his themes and artistic development from curator and art historian Eleanor Nairne. Richly illustrated year-by-year chapter breaks follow the artist’s life and quote from his own statements and contemporary reviews to provide both personal background and historical context. About the series TASCHEN turns 40 this year! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. In 2020, we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.Read more
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Bauhaus: Art Portfolio (Multilingual Edition)
Pepin Press Art Portfolios contain 8 high-quality art reproductions printed on 200 gsm watercolour paper or satin coated art paper. These papers are non-ageing, manufactured from chlorine-free pulp by FSC and PEFC certified mills. The prints are enclosed in hardback portfolio covers made of premium paperboard with inner end papers along with flaps for further protection. The portfolios have a high-quality cloth spine (made of rayon, a plant-based fiber) and a cotton ribbon closure. All images reproduced come from our own archives, except for the van Gogh and Monet volumes. In our selections we have sought to combine complimentary images, striking a balance between the familiar and those lesser known. Alongside traditionally famous images many uncommon but delightful drawings and prints can also be found.Read more
£25.30£28.00Bauhaus: Art Portfolio (Multilingual Edition)
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Blade: King of Graffiti
BLADE has already told his life story through graffiti. Now, over forty years into his career and armed with an incredible memory, BLADE sits down with Chris Pape to reflect on growing up in the Bronx in the turbulent 1970s, and recounts the highs and lows of his storied career, holding nothing back. BLADE is considered The King of Graffiti because, by 1980, after painting 5,000 wildly creative trains, he stopped counting. This book parallels the New York graffiti movement almost from its inception, moving through its glory years in the mid-1970s, when BLADE earned his title, and ending in the global art scene, where he remains a major presence. BLADE helped New York graffiti become internationally famous by making it look fun, and, for reasons of quantity, quality, and, perhaps above all, for sheer spirit, BLADE may very well be the most popular graffiti artist with his peers. Chris Pape was born in 1960. He grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan where he watched the birth of the graffiti movement. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Elsa, and their kids, Cora and Dash.Read more
£28.20£37.00Blade: King of Graffiti
£28.20£37.00 -
BLM-Black Lives Matter-BLM
Black Lives Matters Diary + Journal, 8-1/2″ x 11″ Green Cover, 101 Sheets with lines to record your day to day activities and journal your thoughts.Read more
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Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints: 1962-2020
Bridget Riley has made screenprints throughout her career, extending the principles of her paintings into a new, reproducible medium. Bringing together the complete, updated inventory of this substantial body of work, this volume explores Riley’s development as a printmaker and her relationship to the screenprint medium.Newly revised, updated and designed, this catalogue raisonné richly illustrates Bridget Riley’s graphic work in a larger, enhanced format. Alongside a full-colour inventory of the prints are updated essays by Lynn MacRitchie and Craig Hartley and an additional essay by Robert Kudielka, which provide a greater context for Riley’s work. This revised volume, a co-publication with The Bridget Riley Art Foundation, also benefits from supplemental material including an artist biography and selected solo and group exhibition history.
Published by Thames & Hudson and the Bridget Riley Art Foundation
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£31.50£42.80Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints: 1962-2020
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British Murals & Decorative Painting 1910-1970
The murals that were produced in this country in the twentieth century remain as one of the great inventive achievements in modern British art. Highly original in their approach to design, balancing varying degrees of modernity or tradition, they demonstrate the creative drive of their makers and contain singular expressions of the aesthetic, personal and social concerns that typify the ages from which they come. Some are celebrations of simple human pleasures, perhaps to decorate a refreshment room, an ocean liner or a dining room.Others are intended to be the highest expressions of their art, ambitious allegorical or decorative compositions that like the frescoes of the
Renaissance would speak through the ages to later generations. The individuals and committees who commissioned them similarly believed they would both represent the best that Britain had to offer and mark the high accomplishment of contemporary society, elevating the public and private spaces they occupied and inspiring moral purpose.This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘British Murals & Decorative Painting 1910-1970’ which took place at the Fine Art Society – London (13 February – 9 March 2013) in association with Liss Llewellyn Fine Art. It coincided with the Sansom & Co publication British Murals & Decorative Painting 1920-1960.
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£20.10£23.80British Murals & Decorative Painting 1910-1970
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Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run.
Though famed for his dramatic use of color, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio’s boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualized languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge.
This book brings together more than 50 of Caravaggio’s most famous and revolutionary works to explore how and why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did.
About the series
Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series features:
a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
a concise biography
approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions
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£11.40Caravaggio
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Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the New Republics
In the midst of the space race and nuclear age, Soviet Realist artists were producing figurative oil paintings. Why? How was art produced to control and co-opt the peripheries of the Soviet Union, particularly Central Asia? Presenting the ‘untold story’ of Soviet Orientalism, Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen re-evaluates the imperial project of the Soviet state, placing the Orientalist undercurrent found within art and propaganda production in the USSR alongside the creation of new art forms in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. From the turmoil of the 1930s through to the post-Stalinist era, the author draws on meticulous new research and rich illustrations to examine the political and social structures in the Soviet Union – and particularly Soviet Central Asia – to establish vital connections between Socialist Realist visual art, the creation of Soviet identity and later nationalist sentiments.Read more
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Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme: Drawing Course
- Two hundred lithographs that comprised a famous late nineteenth-century drawing course
- Introduces the work of a hitherto neglected master: Charles Bargue
- Of interest to artists, art students, art historians, and lovers and collectors of art
The Bargue-Gérôme Drawing Course is a complete reprint of a famous, late nineteenth-century drawing course. It contains a set of almost two hundred masterful lithographs of subjects for copying by drawing students before they attempt drawing from life or nature. Consequently it is a book that will interest artists, art students, art historians, and lovers and collectors of drawings. It also introduces us to the work and life of a hitherto neglected master: Charles Bargue.
The Drawing Course consists of three sections. The first consists of plates drawn after casts, usually of antique examples. Different parts of the body are studied in order of difficulty, until full figures are presented. The second section pays homage to the western school of painting, with lithographs after exemplary drawings by Renaissance and modern masters. The third part contains almost 60 académies, or drawings after nude male models, all original inventions by Bargue, the lithographer. With great care, the student is introduced to continually more difficult problems in the close observing and recording of nature.
Charles Bargue started his career as a lithographer of drawings by hack artists for a popular market in comic, sentimental and soft-porn subjects. By working with Gérôme, and in preparing the plates for the course, Bargue was transformed into a spectacular painter of single figures and intimate scenes; a master of precious details that always remain observation and never became self-conscious virtuosity, and colour schemes that unified his composition in exquisite tonal harmonies. The last part of the book is a biography of Bargue, along with a preliminary catalogue of his paintings, accompanied by reproductions of all that have been found and of many of those lost.
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£46.30£61.80Charles Bargue and Jean-Léon Gérôme: Drawing Course
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Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Barrels and The Mastaba 1958–2018
In 2018, London’s Hyde Park was home to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s latest installation: The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake). The temporary sculpture took cues from mastabas of the first urban civilizations of Mesopotamia, which were mud benches with two vertical sides, two slanted sides, and a flat top. Towering at 20 meters high, its 600 metric tons anchored to the Serpentine Lake, this waterborne project gathered 7,506 painted oil barrels to create a floating mosaic of red, white, blue, and mauve.
The most ambitious of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s barrel works to date, The London Mastaba is a precursor to the duo’s work in progress The Mastaba (Project for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates). First conceived in 1977, The Mastaba for Abu Dhabi, if realized, would be Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s greatest achievement and only permanent large-scale work. Situated in the desert and made of 410,000 multicolored barrels, the 150-meter-high sculpture would be the largest in the world, rising higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Designed by Lorenza Giovanelli and Christo, this book gathers drawings, collages, technical data, scale models―many published for the first time―and photographs by Wolfgang Volz to trace Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 60-year history of barrel artworks.
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Ciprian Muresan: Drawings, 2015-2004
Never employed as an instrument for direct notation, for Ciprian Muresan (*1977 in Dej) drawing functions in equations that envelop this mode of production in a reflection on visibility and loss, on historical suspension, and ways in which the past is retrieved. Based on the artist’s diverse artistic output, the volume surveys the forms in which drawing recurs in Muresan’s practice. It foregrounds lines of continuity between earlier works, such as cheat sheets onto which The Gospel of John has been transcribed, and recent projects in which, for instance, all of the reproductions in books on Antonello da Messina or Kasimir Malevich are copied onto a single sheet of paper. Essays contextualize Muresan’s drawings in their fraught relation to art history, remembrance, and conservation as well as against shifting notions of labor.Read more
£10.60£17.10Ciprian Muresan: Drawings, 2015-2004
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Cooking & Dining in the Victorian Country House
For centuries the food cooked in our country houses was the finest available, its variety greatly expanded by Victorian investment in new technology and professional cooks who were employed in the country houses. Adventurous, international trade in the Victorian period also meant that new ingredients became available. This great culinary tradition began its decline around the time of the First World War, and collapsed with the outbreak of war in 1939. Now, over eighty years later, it remains forgotten, as even those who experienced its final stages have passed away. Hopefully Peter Brears’ book will go a long way in reviving interest in it, and encouraging further appreciation and enjoyment of all its diverse aspects.Read more
£28.90£34.20Cooking & Dining in the Victorian Country House
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Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines
The first publication dedicated to artists’ zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice
Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists’ zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium’s essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
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£28.30£33.20Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines
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Creative Inspiration: Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh’s paintings are amongst the most iconic and admired in the world. The trials of his life and health are endlessly discussed but the extraordinary richness of his writings and depth of his thinking on creativity, art and beauty is less explored.In Creative Inspiration, Van Gogh’s writings have been edited and selected to create an enlightening, uplifting and helpful book for art lovers and creatives – amateurs and professionals alike.
150 carefully selected images illustrate these quotes, focusing on the sketches and drawings that reveal the rigour and ambition with which he approached his work.
The book is thematically divided – from Beginnings to Routine to Beauty – and his determination and charisma are shared through words and pictures.
A beautiful, and delightfully handy, art book that is designed to inspire.
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£10.50£12.30Creative Inspiration: Vincent Van Gogh
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Dalí. The Wines of Gala
Hot on the heels (or lobster claws) of the best-selling Salvador Dalí phenomenon, Les dîners de Gala, TASCHEN presents the artist’s equally surreal and sensual viticulture follow-up: The Wines of Gala. A Dalínian take on pleasures of the grape and a coveted collectible, the book sets out to organize wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths.” Through eclectic metrics like production method, weight, and color, the book presents wines of the world in such innovative, Dalíesque groupings as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.”
Bursting with imagery, the book features more than 140 illustrations by Dalí. Many of these are appropriated artworks, including various classical nudes, all of them reconstructed with suitably Surrealist, provocative touches, like Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus, one of Dalí’s favorite points of reference over the decades. Dalí also included what is now considered one of the greatest works from his late “Nuclear Mystic” phase, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which sets the iconic biblical scene in a translucent dodecahedron-shaped space before a Catalonian coastal landscape. Dalí was by this stage a devout Catholic, simultaneously captivated by science, optical illusion, and the atomic age.
The first section is dedicated to “Ten Divine Dalí Wines,” an overview of 10 important wine-growing regions, while the second develops Dalí’s revolutionary ordering of wine by emotional experience, instead of by geography or variety. Rather than any prescriptive classification, it’s a flamboyant, free-flowing manifesto in favor of taste and feeling, as much a multisensory treat as a full-bodied document of Dalí’s late-stage oeuvre, in which the artist both reflected on formative influences and refined his own cultural legacy.
Winner of the 2018 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards
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£35.20£47.50Dalí. The Wines of Gala
£35.20£47.50
