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Ireland’s Art, Ireland’s History: Representing Ireland, 1845 to Present
Until recently little attention was paid to the role of art in constructing the “story” of the
Irish nation. This wide-ranging study of Irish pictures and sculpture opens up the subject by
providing a fresh interdisciplinary approach. Each work is analyzed beyond its strictly art
historical relevance. A deeper investigation into the context in which a work was produced
reveals much about the aspirations and ideological ambitions of artists, those commissioning
works, and the viewing public. The study of such diverse topics as the representation of the
Irish peasant, the behind-the-scenes tensions in setting up a national gallery for Ireland, the
erecting of political monuments, Church art, West of Ireland landscape painting, and the difference
in nationalistic fervor among artists as diverse as Albert G. Power and Jack B. Yeats unveil
fascinating testimony about Ireland’s collective national “needs” and its constructs of identity.Read more
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Frank Auerbach: Revised and Expanded Edition
This is the most comprehensive monograph to date on the Frank Auerbach (b. 1931), one of the preeminent artists of our age, widely admired for his vivid, impulsive depictions of the world around him. Often compared to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in terms of the revolutionary and powerful nature of his work, Auerbach s depictions of people and the urban landscapes near his London studio make him one of the greatest painters alive today. Spanning the length of his career from the 1950s to the present, this expanded edition includes 250 additional works bringing it up to date. In the back of the book there are small-scale chronological sequencing of full-colour reproductions, which depict nearly every painting made by the artist, from his student years up until this publication. At age 90, he looks back over his life and his work, rich with breakthroughs in painting and masterful individuality. The constant painter: a rare interview with Frank Auerbach A weighty monograph filled with photographs of his life s work, written by William Feaver, is published [and] underscore his position as a Grand Old Man of British Painting. –London Evening Standard This definitive account of Auerbach s work and life includes excellent large-scale reproductions of 200 paintings and an illustrated catalogue of some 1,000 more, lively, pertinent interpretations from Feaver, the artist s long-term friend, critical supporter and model, and engaging interviews and photographs. Financial Times As a painter s resource this book is invaluable. Notes from the UndergroundRead more
£41.70£52.30Frank Auerbach: Revised and Expanded Edition
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Brutalist London Map: Guide to Brutalist architecture in London – 2nd edition (Blue Crow Media Architecture Maps)
Brutalist London Map is the first of our new series of architecture guides produced in collaboration with Henrietta Billings and Simon Phipps. This two-sided folding map features over fifty leading examples of Brutalist architecture in London, from the Alexandra Road Estate to World’s End Housing. Celebrated Brutalist buildings such as the Trellick Tower, the Barbican and the National Theatre are included along with lesser known, yet equally influential buildings.
The reverse side of the map features an introduction to Brutalism by Henrietta Billings, photos by Simon Phipps and details about each building. Perfect for a walking tour or framing, this map measures slightly larger than A2 open, folds to slightly larger than A5 and is protected by a wide band. All of our printed publications are printed in East Sussex on quality recycled paper.
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Tom of Finland XXL
In 1998, TASCHEN introduced the world to the masterful art of Touko Laaksonen with The Art of Pleasure. Prior to that, Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, enjoyed an intense cult following in the international gay community but was largely unknown to a broader audience.
In 2009, TASCHEN followed up with the ultimate Tom overview: Tom of Finland XXL, a beautiful big collector’s edition with over 1,000 images, covering six decades of the artist’s career. The work was gathered from collections across the United States and Europe with the help of the Tom of Finland Foundation, featuring many drawings, paintings, and sketches never previously reproduced. Other images had only been seen out of context and were finally presented in the sequential order Tom intended for full artistic appreciation and erotic impact.
The elegant oversized volume showed the full range of Tom’s talent, from sensitive portraits to frank sexual pleasure to tender expressions of love and haunting tributes to young men struck down by AIDS, and was completed by eight commissioned essays on Tom’s social and personal impact by Camille Paglia, John Waters, Armistead Maupin, Todd Oldham, and others, plus a scholarly analysis of individual drawings by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith.
The only thing missing from Tom of Finland XXL was a widely affordable price tag―until now. The new Tom of Finland XXL is still big enough to work your biceps, and includes all of the original content, but costs a fraction of the original price. You’re welcome.
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£54.60£57.00Tom of Finland XXL
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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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Talk Art The Interviews: Conversations on Art, Life and Everything
‘Insights from the zeitgeist are preserved with conviction and clarity, offering an inclusive way to access contemporary art in all its forms. If Talk Art is the fun podcast, then this book is the educational supplement to be prescribed alongside it.’ – Aesthetica‘Where the collection really takes off is the interviews with younger artists, which are sensitive,
unpatronising, genuinely questioning and fundamentally challenging….Indeed, this collection’s strength ultimately lies in the fact that it reveals nothing more than a battlefield in its quest to establish what contemporary art is all about.’ – ArtReviewThe authors of the Sunday Times bestseller Talk Art: Everything you wanted to know about contemporary art but were afraid to ask, have brought together 24 of the most profound, moving, funny and informative interviews from the wildly popular Talk Art podcast.
These curated excerpts explore the inspirations, art experiences and favourite artists of a fascinating range of creative people from Grayson Perry to Elton John, from Tracey Emin to Paul Smith, and from Wolfgang Tillmans to Sonia Boyce, accompanied by images of the artworks that they have created or that have influenced them.
The interviews featured include:
– Jerry Saltz
– Laurie Anderson
– Stephen Fry
– Elton John
– Tracey Emin
– Paul Smith
– Sonia Boyce
– Chila Burman
– Rachel Whiteread
– Wolfgang Tillmans
– Pierce Brosnan
– Grayson PerryRead more
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Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper
A revelatory exploration of Mark Rothko’s paintings on paper that transforms our understanding of a preeminent twentieth-century artist
Mark Rothko (1903–1970) is renowned for his towering abstract paintings on canvas; joy, despair, ecstasy, and tragedy are among the themes that he sought to express in his luminous works. Despite Rothko’s prominence, few people know that he also created more than 1,000 paintings on paper over the course of his career. The artist viewed these not as preliminary studies but as finished paintings in their own right.
These remarkable paintings range from early figurative subjects and surrealist works to the soft-edged rectangular fields, often realized at monumental scale, for which Rothko is best known. These works challenge our expectations about how painting is defined, as well as popular ideas about Rothko and his career. In this beautifully illustrated volume, Adam Greenhalgh traces the role these works played in the artist’s reception, reputation, and success.
This book accompanies the first major exhibition dedicated to Rothko’s works on paper in forty years and brings together nearly one hundred radiant, rarely displayed examples. Building on the important research conducted by Greenhalgh and his team for the catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s works on paper, this important catalogue offers a new appreciation of an underrecognized facet of the artist’s practice.
Exhibition Schedule:
National Gallery of Art, Washington
(November 19, 2023–March 31, 2024)
The National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo
(May 16–September 22, 2024)Read more
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Sleeping by the Mississippi
Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth is one of the defining publications in the photobook era. First published by Steidl in 2004, it was Soth’s first book, sold through three print runs, and established him as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice. This is the second printing of the MACK edition and includes two new photographs that were not included in the Steidl versions of the book. Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America’s iconic yet oft-neglected ‘third coast’. Soth’s richly descriptive, large-format colour photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. ‘In the book’s 46 ruthlessly edited pictures’, writes Anne Wilkes Tucker in the original essay published in the book, ‘Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex.’ Like Robert Frank’s classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. Sixteen years since the book was first published, the artist’s lyrical view has undoubtedly acquired a nuanced significance – one in which hope, fear, desire and regret coalesce in the evocative journey along this mythic river.Read more
£42.80Sleeping by the Mississippi
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Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Legacy: W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials
For the first time ever, this volume presents a thrillingly comprehensive, fully-illustrated catalogue of all photographic materials (negatives, prints, slides) left in the University of East Anglia’s photographic archives by W. G. Sebald at the time of his death in 2001; these have never been made public before in their entirety. Every care has been given to the quality of reproduction, layout, annotation and overall design to ensure maximum clarity for researchers and to make vivid Sebald’s working methods to the delight of enthusiasts across the globe. As a result of privileged access to those who collaborated and shared with Sebald close working connections, the volume is a trove of unique insights. Among much else besides, it contains an illuminating interview with Michael Brandon-Jones, the photographic expert who prepared all of Sebald’s photographs in the darkrooms of University of East Anglia. It also contains a collection of extracts, principally on the subject of photography, from interviews with Sebald held in the library of recordings in the possession of his close friend, Gordon Turner, who also provides a memoir. Accompanying them are inspired essays by Clive Scott and Angela Breidbach on Sebald’s writing with photographs and the complex and mercurial interactions of those photographs with narrative design. While many of the photographs discussed relate directly to a remarkable literary achievement, the book presents a lively sense too of those photographs that never made it to the printed page. How they acted, taken from a very wide, very mixed variety of sources, as constant aide-mémoires and triggers in Sebalds creative consciousness, constituting a kind of biography of his spiritual life. It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this collection for anyone interested in Sebald’s creative processes or the ways in which photography might serve fiction. It promises an inexhaustible treasure-trove of new discoveries and is a book unique in what it can newly reveal about this cherished, international author.Photography by Michael Brandon-Jones, contributions by Angela Breidbach, Gordon Turner, Francisco Cantu, Glen Jamieson and indexing by Jo Catling.
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International Realism: 13th International ARC Salon
- Over a thousand stunning traditional artworks, from the forefront of the 21st Century Realist Art Movement
- Presents the winners and finalists of the 13th International ARC Salon Competition
- Artist contributors from across the globe compete in a range of genres, from ‘Imaginative Realism’ to ‘Plein air’ and ‘Portraiture’
With determination to restore the universal language of realism in the visual arts, a group of fine artists and experts banded together to celebrate and propagate Contemporary Realism. They founded the Art Renewal Center in 1999. Since their genesis, this non-profit educational foundation has dedicated itself to encouraging rigorous skill-based training in the methods of the Old Masters, bestowing the title of ‘ARC Approved ‘ on ateliers who share their core values and demonstrate technical mastery.
The International ARC Salon Competition is the largest and most prestigious for realist based art in the USA, arguably the world, receiving this year over 3,750 entries from 69 countries. This year’s winners demonstrate the great breadth and originality that can be found in all facets of fine art. Categories include: Figurative, Portraiture, Imaginative Realism, Landscape, Animals, Sculpture, Drawing, Still Life, Plein Air and the Da Vinci Initiative Award for the Young Aspiring Artist.
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£36.40£47.50International Realism: 13th International ARC Salon
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Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation
A fresh perspective on collaboration, collectivity, and conflict in the women’s art movement of the 1970s
Women Artists Together is a thought-provoking study of how the women’s liberation movement galvanized a generation of women artists. It offers a fresh perspective on the history of the women’s art movement and considers how it was shaped by collaboration and togetherness. Retracing 1970s liberation politics, Amy Tobin emphasizes how artworks emerged from―and contested―feminist paradigms and contexts.
Taking class, gender, race, and sexuality as central concerns, the book includes examples of inspirational feminist activism as well as fallings out, disagreements, and antagonism. Across four chapters, Tobin looks at the work of UK- and US-based artists including Judy Chicago, Mary Beth Edelson, Rose English, Harmony Hammond, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Claudette Johnson, Suzanne Lacy, Howardena Pindell, Ingrid Pollard, Carolee Schneemann, Cecilia Vicuña, and Kate Walker. Groups include the Feminist Art Programme at Cal Arts, Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, Where We At, Black Women Artists Inc., and the South London Art Group, publications such as Heresies and Chrysalis, along with writers and curators including Lucy R. Lippard and Arlene Raven.Read more
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John Craxton: A Life of Gifts
Uplifting and engaging, this story recounts the life and career of a rebellious 20th-century British artistBorn into a large, musical, and bohemian family in London, the British artist John Craxton (1922–2009) has been described as a Neo-Romantic, but he called himself a ‘kind of Arcadian’. His early art was influenced by Blake, Palmer, Miró, and Picasso. After achieving a dream of moving to Greece, his work evolved as a personal response to Byzantine mosaics, El Greco, and the art of Greek life.
This book tells his adventurous story for the first time. At turns exciting, funny, and poignant, the saga is enlivened by Craxton’s ebullient pictures. Ian Collins expands our understanding of the artist greatly―including an in-depth exploration of the storied, complicated friendship between Craxton and Lucian Freud, drawing on letters and memories that Craxton wanted to remain private until after his death.
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£12.90£23.80John Craxton: A Life of Gifts
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Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing
Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin’ series has long proved an extraordinarily accurate predictor of tomorrow’s stars. This paperback edition of the latest volume is a cutting-edge and indispensable survey of the very best of contemporary drawing, as chosen by a panel of the world’s leading art experts
Over the past 50 years, drawing has been elevated from a supporting role to a primary medium, ranking alongside painting as a central art form. Since Phaidon’s publication of the first such surveys (Vitamin D in 2005 and D2 in 2013), contemporary artists have continued to explore drawing’s possibilities – from intimate to large-scale works, in a diversity of mark-making processes and materials. Vitamin D3 showcases more than 100 such artists, as nominated by a global panel of more than 70 international art experts.
The more than 70 nominators include such iconic figures as: Iwona Blazwick, Louisa Buck, Mark Coetzee, Thelma Golden, Laura Hoptman, Geeta Kapur, Pablo León de la Barra, Christine Macel, Kate Macfarlane, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Zoe Whitley.
The more than 100 selected artists include: Miriam Cahn, Robert Crumb, Tom Friedman, Tania Kovats, Claudette Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Otobong Nkanga, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Deanna Petherbridge, Christina Quarles, Qiu Zhijie, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Wael Shawky, Emma Talbot, and Johanna Unzueta.
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£28.30£33.30Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing
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Keith Haring: (Reduced size) (Rizzoli Classics)
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the artist’s birth, this book is the intended to be a faithful posthumous execution of the project. Containing a wealth of unpublished materials, and representing a decade of work and research, it promises to be the definitive book on the artist’s life and work. Beginning with his very first collages and early subway tags – including many heretofore unseen photographs of the first ephemeral chalk drawings – through the development of the iconic graphic work now synonymous with his name, the book follows his meteoric rise to international stardom and worldwide recognition. Completely unprecedented in its scope, this volume documents everything from sketches to unedited interviews; personal snapshots to party invitations, bringing to life an extraordinary decade in art and history.Read more
£28.50 -
Mark Rothko
A landmark monograph on an unprecedented scale that allows all aspects of Mark Rothko’s career to be heard in full voice, published in close collaboration with the artist’s family and featuring beloved works from major collections as well as never-before-seen canvases and paintings on paper.Deluxe and comprehensive, this revelatory volume examines the brilliance of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), a pioneer of the New York School and major figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Illustrated with more than 275 images that explore his paintings, prints, and works on paper, this book highlights the best-known and also lesser-known works by Rothko―from his early figurative and Surrealist works to his mesmerizing color-field paintings of immense scale to the more restricted palette of his luminous later works and his final series of black-and-gray paintings. Among Rothko’s artistic philosophies, he held that painting was a deeply psychological and spiritual experience through which basic human emotions could be communicated. This is the first book to include foldouts that highlight works from the Rothko Chapel in Houston and the Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko draw on intimate knowledge of the artworks and the artist’s life to give a fuller picture of their father and place him within the context of art history; they endeavor to give an impartial portrait―the man and his work―while introducing personal details where they can enlighten. Alexander Nemerov and Hiroshi Sugimoto provide reflections about the artist’s work.Read more
£93.30£109.30Mark Rothko
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Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘A burst of springtime joy’ Daily Telegraph
‘A springboard for ideas about art, space, time and light’ The Times
‘Lavishly illustrated’ Guardian
David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural Normandy
On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquility for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year before, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art.
Spring Cannot be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art’s capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney’s new, unpublished Normandy iPad drawings and paintings alongside works by van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others.
We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, colour, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see… but about how to live.
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£12.20£16.10 -
Pop Art
Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork.
Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from Hollywood’s most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop Art also deployed methods of mass-production, reducing the role of the individual artist with mechanized techniques such as screen printing.
With featured artists including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, this book introduces the full reach and influence of a defining modernist movement.
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 History series features:
approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
a detailed, illustrated introduction
a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist
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£11.40£14.30Pop Art
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£9.60
£10.40Kate Heiss Wall Calendar 2024 (Art Calendar)
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Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art
As seen in Forbes, Colossal, and The Art Newspaper
Over 100 global artists working with collage, as chosen by a team of art experts – an indispensable who’s who of the most exciting and innovative names working in the medium
Collage is an artistic language comprising found images, fragmentary forms, and unexpected juxtapositions. While it first gained status as high art in the early twentieth century, the past decade has seen a fresh explosion of artists using this dynamic and experimental approach to image making.
Organised in an A-Z sequence by artist, the book features both well-known collagists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby; Ellen Gallagher; Peter Kennard; Linder, Christian Marclay; Wangechi Mutu; Deborah Roberts; Martha Rosler; and Mickalene Thomas, and a plethora of lesser-known names deserving of greater attention. Taking a broad definition – from analog cut-and-paste compositions and photomontages to digital composed imagery and animations – Vitamin C+ showcases 108 living artists who employ collage as a central part of their visual-art practice, as selected by 69 leading experts, including museum directors, curators, critics, and collectors. The survey also features an engaging and informative introduction by Yuval Etgar, an internationally renowned expert in the area.
The 69 expert nominators include: Cecilia Alemani; Iwona Blazwick; David Campany; Raphael Chikukwa; Patrick Elliott; Max Hollein; Hettie Judah; Christine Macel; Roxana Marcoci; Duro Olowu; Scott Rothkopf; Russell Tovey; Zoe Whitley; and Heidi Zuckerman.
Artists include: Njideka Akunyili Crosby; Kader Attia; Adam Broomberg; Sara Cwynar; Moyna Flannigan; Ellen Gallagher; Lauren Halsey; Lyle Ashton Harris; Thomas Hirschhorn; Peter Kennard; Justine Kurland; Linder; Christian Marclay; Wangechi Mutu; Frida Orupabo; Heather Philipson; Tabita Rezaire; Deborah Roberts; Martha Rosler; Dee Shapiro; Eva Stenram; John Stezaker; Mickalene Thomas; Kara Walker; and Billie Zangewa.
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£36.90£47.50Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art
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Sketching from the Imagination: Dark Arts
Sketching and drawing are fundamental to creating great art; the simple doodle is often where the artist first brings their ideas and concepts to life. In Sketching from the Imagination: Dark Arts, we have gathered together fifty talented traditional and digital artists to showcase work from their sketchbooks, share inspiration, and give insight into how they create imaginative and dark illustrations. Featuring a range of artwork and artists from many fields, from concept design and animation to illustration and comic art, Sketching from the Imagination: Dark Arts is a collection of beautifully macabre sketches with plenty of useful tips and creative insightsan invaluable resource that will inspire artists of all abilities.
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£17.90£19.00Sketching from the Imagination: Dark Arts
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Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World
Disrupted Realism is the first book to survey the works of contemporary painters who are challenging and reshaping the tradition of Realism. Helping art lovers, collectors, and artists approach and understand this compelling new phenomenon, it includes the works of 38 artists whose paintings respond to the subjectivity and disruptions of modern experience. Widely published author and blogger John Seed, who believes that we are “”the most distracted society in the history of the world,”” has selected artists he sees as visionaries in this developing movement. The artists’ impulses toward disruption are as individual as the artists themselves, but all share the need to include perception and emotion in their artistic process. Six sections lay out and analyze common themes: “”Toward Abstraction,”” “”Disrupted Bodies,”” “”Emotions and Identities,”” “”Myths and Visions,”” “”Patterns, Planes, and Formations,”” and “”Between Painting and Photography.”” Interviews with each artist offer additional insight into some of the most incisive and relevant painting being created today.Read more
£34.60£43.70Disrupted Realism: Paintings for a Distracted World
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See What You’re Missing: 31 Ways Artists Notice the World – and How You Can Too
The internationally bestselling author on how art can help us appreciate life in all its strange and exhilarating beauty
Artists have learnt to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on autopilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In his typically engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists – from emerging stars to old masters – to show us how to look at and experience the world with their heightened powers of perception.
In See What You’re Missing we learn, for example, how Rembrandt can help us see ourselves, how David Hockney helps us to see nature, and how Frida Kahlo can help us see through pain. Each artist has their own unique way of looking, which when applied to our own lives stimulates our senses so we might know the intoxicating feeling of being truly alive.
‘Art can amaze us into changing our minds. This remarkable book teaches us how’ Es Devlin
‘Highly engaging and thought-provoking’ Philip Hook, author of Breakfast at Sotheby’s
‘Lucid and revealing’ Michael Prodger, The Times
‘Will Gompertz is the best teacher you never had’ Guardian
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£15.20£19.00 -
Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s
Worlds Beyond Time is the definitive visual history of the spaceships, alien landscapes, cryptozoology, and imagined industrial machinery of 1970s paperback sci-fi art and the artists who created these extraordinary images.
In the 1970s, mass-produced, cheaply printed science-fiction novels were thriving. The paper was rough, the titles outrageous, and the cover art astounding. Over the course of the decade, a stable of talented painters, comic-book artists, and designers produced thousands of the most eye-catching book covers to ever grace bookstore shelves (or spinner racks). Curiously, the pieces commissioned for these covers often had very little to do with the contents of the books they were selling, but by leaning heavily on psychedelic imagery, far-out landscapes, and trippy surrealism, the art was able to satisfy the same space race–fueled appetite for the big ideas and brave new worlds that sci-fi writers were boldly pushing forward.
In Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, Adam Rowe―who has been curating, championing, and resurrecting the best and most obscure art that 1970s sci-fi has to offer on his blog 70s Sci-Fi Art―introduces readers to the biggest names in the genre, including Chris Foss, Peter Elson, Tim White, Jack Gaughan, and Virgil Finlay, as well as their influences. With deep dives into the subject matter that commonly appeared on these covers―spaceships, alien landscapes, fantasy realms, cryptozoology, and heavy machinery―this book is a loving tribute to a unique and robust art form whose legacy lives on both in nostalgic appreciation as well as the retro-chic design of mainstream sci-fi films such as Guardians of the Galaxy, Alien: Covenant, and Thor: Ragnarok.
Includes Color IllustrationsRead more
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Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting
An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston.Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston’s entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible and revealing analysis of his work.
With more than 850 images, the book illustrates Guston’s key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications and other ephemera drawn from the artist’s archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston’s life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions.
Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston’s own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.
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£48.60£57.00Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting
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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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Pollock
The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing.
Pollock’s most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewer’s search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.
Notoriously reclusive and volatile, struggling with alcoholism, married to fellow Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and killed in a car crash aged just 44, Pollock is as much a compelling celebrity icon as an artistic pioneer. This essential artist introduction explores both his work and his fame to shed light on masterpieces of the modernist story, and the making of a cultural icon.
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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£12.50Pollock
£12.50 -
Peter Doig (Rizzoli Classics): -compact edition-
In every generation of artists, there are a few who propose a new set of ques- tions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. This handsome monograph considers the painter’s entire career, beginning with the early work produced in the 1990s when Doig’s enigmatic but wholly new conception of painting was first introduced to audiences. Doig was born to Scottish parents, spent several years as a child in Trinidad, later settling in Canada for his formative early teen years. He found his voice while at art school in London, albeit one that was out of step with the work of the time (much of it installation-based and dripping with neo-conceptualist leanings). He had developed a small following of fellow artists and critics when the rest of the art world caught up and took notice. In 2002, he left London for Trinidad, where he has remained. The small Caribbean island-with its own distinctive light and landscape-has deeply influenced his recent work. This volume was designed in close collaboration with the artist, with a cover and various interior elements created especially by the artist.Read more
£41.70£47.50Peter Doig (Rizzoli Classics): -compact edition-
£41.70£47.50 -
Salvador Dali. The Paintings (Bibliotheca Universalis)
The seminal surrealistExploring Dalí’s grandiose and grotesque oeuvre
Picasso called Dalí “an outboard motor that s always running.” Dalí thought himself a genius with a right to indulge in whatever lunacy popped into his head. Painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the century s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics and was rewarded with fierce controversy wherever he went. He was one of the first to apply the insights of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis to the art of painting, approaching the subconscious with extraordinary sensitivity and imagination.
This publication presents the entire painted oeuvre of Salvador Dalí. After many years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret finally located all the paintings of this highly prolific artist. Many of the works had been inaccessible for years in fact so many that almost half the illustrations in this book had rarely been seen.
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£15.20£19.00 -
Subway Art: (reduced format edition) (Street Graphics / Street Art)
In 1984, photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant captured the imagination of a generation with Subway Art, a groundbreaking book documenting the work of graffiti writers who illegally painted subway cars in New York City. The 2009 edition of the book is now available in a new, slightly reduced format. Henry Chalfant’s images of the trains retain their impact, while Martha Cooper’s narrative pictures tell the story. In the introductions, the authors recall how they gained entry to the New York graffiti community in the 1970s and 1980s and describe the techniques that they used to photograph it. Afterwords report how the lives of the original subway artists have unfolded, and chronicle the end of the subway graffiti scene in the late 1980s and its unexpected rebirth as a global art movement. This is an essential book for all fans of graffiti, stunning photography and 1980s-cool.Read more
£13.70£17.10 -
Haring
One of the key figures in the New York art world of the 1980s, Keith Haring (1958–1990) created a signature style that blended street art, graffiti, a Pop sensibility, and cartoon elements to unique, memorable effect. With thick black outlines, bright colors, and kinetic figures, his public (and occasionally illegal) interventions, sculptures, and works on canvas and paper have become instantly recognizable icons of 20th-century visual culture.
From his first chalk drawings in the New York City subway stations, to his renowned “Radiant Baby” symbol, and his commissions for Swatch Watch and Absolut Vodka, Haring’s work was both emblematic of the manic work ethic of 1980s New York, yet distinctive for its social awareness. Belying their bright, playful aesthetics, his pieces often tackled intensely controversial socio-political issues, including racism, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, and the increasing impact of AIDS on New York’s gay community, the latter foreshadowing his own death from the disease in 1990.
In this vivid introduction to Haring’s work, we explore the dynamic life and innovative spirit of this singular artist, who spent little more than a decade in the spotlight, but through the accessibility of his visual vocabulary and the strength of his political commitment became one of the most significant artists to emerge from New York’s vibrant, downtown community.
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
Read more
£11.40£14.30Haring
£11.40£14.30 -
Women of Abstract Expressionism (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities/Princeton University Press Lec)
The celebrated survey of female Abstract Expressionist artists revealing the richness and lasting influence of their workThe artists Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and many other women played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts.
Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole.Published in association with the Denver Art Museum
Exhibition Schedule:
Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C.
(10/22/16–01/22/17)Palm Springs Art Museum
(02/18/17–05/28/17)Read more
£47.50 -
Marina Abramović: Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places
Never before published, this self-curated, intensely personal collection of travel notes and sketches by the world’s most revered performance artist offers readers a kind of iconography of Abramović’s daring and utterly original body of work.
An artist’s notebooks are arguably the most authentic means of understanding her process, techniques, and impulses. And, for a performance artist, a rare, permanent record of how she develops her craft. Compiled over the course of four decades on stationery from various hotels, and other temporary residences, this collection of Marina Abramović’s original drawings, collages, poetry, writings, cut-outs, photographs, and doodles offers glimpses of a brilliant mind in constant motion. Beautifully produced and packaged, it takes readers on a journey through Abramović’s thoughts―and traces the evolution of the most fruitful phase of her career.
“I believe we humans need to keep moving forward, and my own life was purely nomadic,” Abramović writes of her travel diaries. “My home was everywhere I went because my home was my own body.” With the archival material elegantly reproduced in the original size on high-quality paper, this collection offers Abramović’s enormous fanbase unprecedented access to her creative process.
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£29.30£38.00 -
George Little: The Ugly Lovely Landscape
No artist has been more committed to recording and interpreting such environments than George Little. Born in the east end of Swansea in 1927 he grew up next to the abandoned copper works, slag heaps and still-busy docks of Dylan Thomas’s ‘ugly, lovely town’.Read more
£16.70£19.00George Little: The Ugly Lovely Landscape
£16.70£19.00 -
Grayson Perry
In this major monograph on Grayson Perry, now updated and expanded, writer and art historian Jacky Klein explores the artist’s work through a discussion of his major themes and subjects. Klein’s text is complemented by intimate and perceptive commentaries by Perry on individual pieces, giving unique access to his imaginative world and creative processes. This third edition not only has updates throughout, but also includes two new chapters, on the ‘House for Essex’, designed and built in 2015 with Living Architecture (a UK not-for-profit holiday rental company founded by philosopher and writer Alain de Botton, which aims to promote, educate and enhance appreciation of modern architecture), and on ‘Identity Politics’, covering new work made since the previous edition of this book was published in 2013.Read more
£23.70£28.50Grayson Perry
£23.70£28.50 -
Rave Art: Flyers, invitations and membership cards
In the mid- to late 1980s, rave culture developed. It influenced music, design, art, drugs, fashion, language and even the law. Originally emerging in the USA, it was refined in the UK by people who wanted to dance, party and express themselves in terms of art and music. It started in in small, sweaty clubs but such was the popularity that soon enormous Raves, with tens of thousands of people, were common.
‘House’ music and illegal drug ecstasy were the driving forces behind what turned into a global phenomenon. Events that started as secretive nights in underground clubs, with word-of-mouth advertising grew from one-off take-overs of unusual venues into huge open land-based events. Pager and telephonic communication became the medium of message-passing, and flyers were key to it all: informing the right people about the right place at the right time. Chelsea Berlin was there from the beginning, attending many of the now legendary events, from Club Shoom to Energy and beyond.
In Rave Art, the whole exciting movement is documented through the flyers that were handed out freely (often privately) to inform partygoers of the next venue. Flyer design became an artform, and this book contains hundreds of the most significant and rare examples from Chelsea’s huge collection.
Together with personal reminiscences and quotes from famous, infamous and not-so-famous attendees, Rave Art paints a vivid picture of what is probably the last significant youth culture movement of modern times.
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£13.00£16.10Rave Art: Flyers, invitations and membership cards
£13.00£16.10 -
Banksy You Are an Acceptable Level of Threat and if You Were Not You Would Know About It
New expanded 248pp 2019 Edition.
The single best collection of photography of Banksy’s street work that has ever been assembled for print. If that isn’t enough there are some words too. You Are An Acceptable Level of Threat covers his entire street art career, spanning the late ’90s right up to the ‘Seasons Greetings’ Christmas 2018 piece in Port Talbot, Wales. This new edition includes his self-destructing ‘Love is in the Bin’ intervention, which according to Sotheby’s is “the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction.” The groundbreaking ‘Dismaland’ show, his Paris ’68 revisited works, The Walled Off Hotel, Brexit, Cans Festival, Brookyln and Basquiat, as well as new works from Gaza and New York. Also featuring the controversial ‘Cheltenham Spies’ as well as ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, ‘Art Buff’ and the spectacular ‘Mobile Lovers’ which appeared outside Bristol Boys Boxing Club.
248 pages featuring his greatest works of art in context.Read more
£23.50£28.50 -
Rothko
Resisting interpretation or classification, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was a prominent advocate for the artist’s consummate freedom of expression. Although identified as a key protagonist of the Abstract Expressionist movement, first formed in New York City, Rothko rejected the label and insisted instead on “a consummated experience between picture and onlooker.” Following a repertoire of figurative works, Rothko developed his now iconic canvases of bold color blocks in red, yellow, ochre, maroon, black, or green. With these shimmering, pulsating color masses, Rothko stressed that he had not removed the human figure but rather put symbols or shapes in its place. These intense color forms contained all the tragedy of the human condition. At the same time, Rothko explicitly empowered the viewer in the expressive potential of his work. He believed “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.” From his early development through to his most famous color fields, this book introduces the intellect and influence of Rothko’s dramatic, intimate, and revolutionary work.
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£11.40£14.30Rothko
£11.40£14.30 -
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
£27.50£33.30 -
Remedios Varo: Science Fictions
An exploration of the captivating work and mystical outlook of the modern artist Remedios Varo, focusing on her years in Mexico City
This publication offers a definitive look at the artistic practice of Remedios Varo (1908–1963) following her emigration from Spain to Mexico City in 1941. Her work from 1955 to 1963 made a lasting contribution to modern art and the legacy of Surrealism. In Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, fresh historical and material findings establish the integral relationship between Varo’s layered interests―in alchemy, architecture, magic, mysticism, philosophy, and science―and her beguiling technical approach to art making. Essays detail specific works’ complex stories and spectacular surfaces. An illustrated taxonomy of Varo’s artistic techniques, including automatic mark making as well as careful manipulation of materials and media, offers new insights into the artist’s craft. An illustrated inventory of a major portion of Varo’s library―published here for the first time―reveals the artist’s engagement with a wide range of subjects. Stunning new photography of many of her artworks are presented within a dynamic geometric design inspired by the artist’s work. Situating Varo as a woman working in midcentury Mexico City and living among a tight-knit community of local and émigré artists, poets, and thinkers, the catalogue illuminates the complex worldview that shaped her search for individual and collective transcendence.
Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago, in partnership with the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
Exhibition Schedule:
Art Institute of Chicago
(July 29, 2023–November 27, 2023)Read more
£37.30 -
Joan Mitchell
A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped herJoan Mitchell (1925–1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist’s sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell’s life, social circle, and surroundings.
Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell’s admirers and those just discovering her work.Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition Schedule:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022)
Baltimore Museum of Art
(March 6–August 14, 2022)
Fondation Louis Vuitton
(October 5, 2022–February 27, 2023)Read more
£33.40£47.50Joan Mitchell
£33.40£47.50
