History

• 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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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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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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• The complete ‘codex’ of one of the greatest street art artists in the world
• Includes text by art critic Lucy Lippard and philosopher Johan Braeckman
• Works are found on walls around the world, and in travelling exhibitions

“Although the street art is generally conveyed in a very natural matter, even his dead animal paintings seem at peace.” – Streetartbio.com “Detached from the artist’s identity, his detailed, illustrative animal paintings have brought him back to the world. With local species of animals as his main focus, ROA inevitably starts a dialogue about human interaction with nature and the environment, whether it is painting on the walls of a museum or in an abandoned rural factory.” – Hi Fructose – The New Contemporary Magazine

“One of the most influential acts of street art around the world.” – The Huffington Post

Fascinated by nature, the anonymous muralist and street artist ROA is inspired by the beauty of its non-human inhabitants. With great attention to detail, ROA draws over-sized black and white creatures of endemic or endangered species on buildings around the world, from Moscow to Mexico City, and from Los Angeles to London. His subjects are frequently survivors; scavengers, rodents, and unusual animals that thrive in their particular milieu.

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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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This comprehensive collection of the best of Ashley Wood’s work covers nearly 400 “treasured” art works in a range of media, from his oil paintings, sketches and drawings, to his package and figurine designs. These works have either been unpublished or have only been available in previous exhibition catalogues. Inspired by Osamu Tezuka (the legendary Japanese manga artist) and Nobuyoshi Araki (the Japanese photographer), Wood is in constant motion developing new epic stories and expanding universes populated with his designs and creations for toy lines, comics, videogames, film, and music. He continues to evolve and inspire many new artists. This is a must-have book for hardcore Ashley Wood fans around the world.

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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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• Including new pieces and illuminating texts by Perry himself
• 76 works from the exhibition form the centrepiece of this vibrant and insightful retrospective of his life and work
• Published to accompany the Grayson Perry: Smash Hits exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, July to November 2023

Grayson Perry is one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists and cultural figures. This book, which includes first sight of new and previously unpublished works, is published to accompany the largest-ever retrospective of Perry’s art. It offers a vibrant insight into his life and work, from his youth in rural Essex to sell-out stage shows at the Royal Albert Hall.

Grayson Perry vividly reflects on his art, life and career, remembering the sources of inspiration and influences along the way. Victoria Coren Mitchell’s thought-provoking contribution considers the role of humour in Perry’s art, highlighting the often-underestimated effort involved in being at once a serious artist and a lovable character. Patrick Elliott provides an illuminating biographical essay of the artist. The reader is also given a fascinating glimpse into the technique and process behind Perry’s prints, pots and tapestries.

Showcasing 75 exhibited works, the book covers the full range and breadth of his astonishing career.

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• A catalogue of the major exhibition of remarkable paintings by Mark Rothko at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, from October 18, 2023 to April 2, 2024
• This publication has been produced in close collaboration with the artist’s family
• Two page fold-outs plunge the reader deep into Rothko’s oeuvre
• Contains previously unpublished works and archive material
• Represents a major cultural event for Paris and the world

This illustrated catalogue is published to accompany the retrospective exhibition devoted to American artist Mark Rothko, curated by Suzanne Pagé and the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko. The show will feature over one hundred works. Born Markus Rothkowitz in Latvia in the early 20th century, the man who would soon become known as Mark Rothko began painting in the 1930s. While his early works were influenced by mythology and Surrealism, his first abstract paintings emerged in the 1940s with the Multiform series, followed by his Classic Years and the Black and Gray paintings. A key figure on the New York art scene, Rothko was an uncategorisable artist who deployed an extensive palette of colour and light with a talent that consistently triggers emotion. His great sensitivity shaped a poetic, enigmatic universe that leaves no one untouched.

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How does artistic life flourish during revolution and conflict? Ukraine in the early 1900s endured unimaginable political upheaval, yet this became a period of true renaissance in Ukrainian art, literature, theatre and cinema.

In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s presents the ground-breaking art produced in Ukraine in the early 20th century, focusing on the three key cultural centres of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. Against a complicated socio-political backdrop of collapsing empires, World War I, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence, and the eventual creation of Soviet Ukraine, several strands of distinctly Ukrainian art emerged.

While émigrés such as Sonia Delaunay and Alexander Archipenko found fame outside their homeland, the followers of Mykhailo Boichuk focused on Byzantine revivalism, and the artists of the Kultur Lige sought to promote the development of contemporary Yiddish culture. The first avant-garde exhibitions in Ukraine featured the radical art of Davyd Burliuk and Alexandra Exter, and the dynamic canvases of the Kyiv-based Cubo-Futurist Oleksandr Bohomazov. In Kharkiv, Vasyl Yermilov championed the industrial art of Constructivism, while Vadym Meller, Anatol Petrytskyi, Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov and Borys Kosarev revolutionized theatre design. The attempt to build a national identity in Ukraine resulted in a polyphony of styles and artistic developments across a full range of media – from oil paintings, sketches and sculpture to collages, cinema posters and theatre designs.

Twelve internationally renowned scholars, including curators from the National Art Museum of Ukraine, bring to life this astonishing period of creativity in Ukraine and all the movements it encompassed.

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• 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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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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Longlisted for the National Book Award

The never-before-told story of an obscure little street at the lower tip of Manhattan and the remarkable artists who got their start there.

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art.

Now, for the first time, Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones–one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art–eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives.

An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work.

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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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Developments in contemporary art have followed no straightforward line of progress or sequence of movements. Recognizing this, Tony Godfrey creates a narrative from a series of often dramatic creative conflicts and arguments around what art is or should be. From object versus sculpture and painting versus conceptual to local versus global, gallery versus wider world, The Story of Contemporary Art traces a history in terms of drastic changes in social and political life over the last sixty years.

How do we experience being human in a world that seems to change so quickly? In exploring art’s relationship to this question, Godfrey asserts that multiple voices must be heard: critics, theorists, curators and collectors, but also audiences and artists themselves. Key to the book is the story of how a perception that art was made almost exclusively by white men from North America and Western Europe has been radically overturned. Compelling and intelligent, but never academic, this book tells us how.

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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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This engaging book delves into the iconic relationship between Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and New York City. This comprehensive look at an essential aspect of the revered American artist’s life reveals how Hopper’s experience of New York’s spaces, sensations, and architecture shaped his vision and served as a backdrop for his distillations of the urban experience. During sidewalk strolls and elevated train rides, Hopper sketched the city’s many windowed facades. Exterior views gave way to interior lives, forging one of Hopper’s defining preoccupations: the convergence of public and private. These permeable walls allowed Hopper to evoke the perplexing awareness of being alone in a crowd that is synonymous with modern urban life.
 
Drawing on the vast resources of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the largest repository of Hopper’s work, and the recently acquired gift of the Sanborn Hopper Archive, this book features more than 300 illustrations and fresh insight from authoritative and emerging scholars.

Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art

Exhibition Schedule:

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023)

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