The papers in this volume constitute a substantial body of work that provides a wide-ranging overview of current research on the technology and practice of Old Master paintings, covering some 700 years of European painting, from the thirteenth century to the early twentieth century, including works by Guido da Siena, Bellini, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Fernando Gallego, Holbein, Caravaggio, El Greco, Rubens, Murillo, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Whistler, van Gogh and Munch. Six of the contributions focus on technological or historical aspects of specific artists’ materials. These papers were presented at a conference held at the National Gallery to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin. The Bulletin has a long history of publishing interdisciplinary research on the technical examination of paintings to inform both art-historical study and issues relating to the material history of a work. This type of research was the central focus of the conference and provided the overall thematic link between the contributions presented. Contains essays on the work of a wide range of artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Albrecht Altdofer, Caravaggio, Rubens, Thomas Gainsborough, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Christen Købke, Bartolomé Esteban Murillom and El Greco.
Caroline Broadhead (b. 1950) is a highly versatile artist who started in jewelry in the late 1970s. Since then she has extended her practice from “wearable objects” and textile works to dance collaborations and installations in historic buildings. Broadhead’s work is concerned with the boundaries of an individual and the interface of inside and outside, public and private, including a sense of territory and personal space, presence and absence and a balance between substance and image. It has explored outer extents of the body as seen through light, shadows, reflections and movement. This comprehensive overview also comprises larger scale and collaborative works that aim to elicit a particular experience or to start a train of thought.
Published to accompany the Exhibition at CODA Museum Apeldoorn (NL), 4 February – 15 April 2018 and the Exhibition at Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins, London, 11 January – 2 February 2019.
James Tower (1919-1988) is best known for his elegant forms in glazed earthenware. During a career spanning four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, he worked unceasingly in a wide variety of media to achieve an elusive harmony of shape and surface, form and decoration, inert material and active design. His personal understanding of the purpose and meaning of abstraction embodies a perpetual dialogue between the visible world and the unseen dynamics which shape it. This centenary volume of essays considers Tower’s entire output from a wide variety of perspectives, embracing paintings and drawings, as well as sculpture in bronze, terracotta and fibreglass. The contributions of leading critics and historians approach his work, situated at the junction of art, craft and design, in a broad historical and cultural context, illuminating key episodes in postwar British art, and Tower’s unique place within it. This book accompanies an exhibition at Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, UK, 21 September – 24 November 2019
Open Space – Mind Maps pursues the current development in art jewelry that is positioned far from the merely decorative in the aesthetic and artistic discourse of our era. Thirty international artists present their works in this publication, which is arranged thematically by the buzzwords inhabiting current trends, such as the nomadic aspect and the tendency towards narrative imagery to provocation that infringes on boundaries and to the poetic imagination in jewelry. All these facets as open-ended chapters illustrate the iconographic focus of each of these protagonists from across the world. Contents: Berndt Arell: Foreword; Ellen Maurer Zilioli: Open Space – Mind Maps. Positions in contemporary jewellery; Inger Wästberg: The Swedish Perspective; Philip Warkander: Art Jewellery. A reflection on terminology; Catalogue; Appendix; Artists’ biographies; Authors’ biographies
Custodians brings together for the first time, in this beautifully compiled collection, images of many of Oxford’s most prestigious buildings along with some rarely seen, but wonderful venues and their ‘Custodians’. Photographer Joanna Vestey set out to explore the extraordinary colleges and buildings of Oxford, behind the closed doors, often beyond the reach of the 9.5 million visitors a year who come here, and to meet the ‘Custodians’ playing a pivotal role in perpetuating these world renowned institutions. Rarely do we get to catch a glimpse behind the closed facades of these iconic structures and to see the spaces that lie within. All the images have been captured in the University City of Oxford, known as the “City of Dreaming Spires” and show its extraordinary breadth of architecture since the arrival of the Saxons. It includes venues such as the 17th Century Divinity School, the mid-18th century Radcliffe Camera continuing through to the most recent award winning RIBA nominated chapel at Ripon College completed last year. Venues such as the Sheldonian Theatre and Christchurch College sit alongside perhaps lesser known venues such as The Real Tennis Courts or the John Martyr Pawsons cricket pavilion portraying the breadth and diversity constituting the city. The ‘Custodians’ and their surroundings enjoy equal status in Joanna’s formal compositions; they seem to belong together, yet do not fuse into one, thereby asking us to question how we are all largely shaped and influenced by the structures around us – how defined we are by them and how much they form us. Full of unexpected venues beautifully photographed, this book will appeal to the his-torian, city visitor, people interested in architecture and interiors as well as to the extensive alumni network of the colleges themselves. It will also appeal to an audience interested in contemporary photography.
Mr. Rossi | Papik Rossi, the renowned skateboarder, contributes to Drago’s 36 Chambers series, exhibiting the cutting-edge of contemporary Roman counterculture. His images, shrouded in monochrome with luminous yellow highlights, stunningly capture the spontaneity of the streets and the magic of Trastevere, the Roman neighborhood that Rossi calls home. This neighborhood is also home to the ‘funkhouse’, Rossi’s nest and creative factory that inspires the vibrant imagery showcased in this book. The so-called King of the Roman streets is known for his skateboarding, music, street photography and the clothing brand, Trustever. He has worked on some of Rome’s most notable exhibitions such as Mania at Termini station and 30% Acrilico at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere. He has also held the position of director at the ‘Cuattro’ gallery in Rome where he worked on a series of extraordinary initiatives such as the production of the book Just Push the Button, with clothing brands Slam Jam, Stussy and Carhartt.
The first monograph dedicated to Marc du Plantier (1901-1975), allows the reader to redeciscover one of the major decorators of the 20th century. Marc du Plantier began his career in 1928. From his earliest projects he began to implement his architectural vocabulary, characterized by precision of line, working with color, indirect light and the interplay of mirrors. His art reached its apogee in the rue du Belvédère, where Anne and Marc du Plantier welcomed the Parissmart set of the 1930s. This was followed by the apartment overlooking the Bay of Alger, considered to be one of the high points of interior decoration of its time, the palaces in Madrid where, from 1938 to 1949, he developed a remarkable form of neoclassicism, his Parisian apartments of the 1950s, and the drawing room of the French embassy in Ottawa. In the 1960s, the disappearance of private commissions drove the designer to settle in Mexico, where he founded the Artedecor Company, and then in Los Angeles, before returning to Paris via the Orient. His contact with American Pop Art inspired the work he developed in 1968, creating models with new materials edited by the Lacloche gallery and for the dining room of Maurice Rheims, still hewing to the precision of his classical aesthetic.
Text in French.
• Creator of exceptional interiors in Europe and the world, from 1928 to the end of the 1960s, Marc du Plantier was one of the leading decorators of the 20th century• The only monograph on Marc Du Plantier; the book covers the entire body of his workThe first monograph dedicated to Marc du Plantier (1901-1975), allows the reader to rediscover one of the major decorators of the 20th century. Marc du Plantier began his career in 1928. From his earliest projects he began to implement his architectural vocabulary, characterized by precision of line, working with color, indirect light and the interplay of mirrors. His art reached its apogee in the rue du Belvédère, where Anne and Marc du Plantier welcomed the Parissmart set of the 1930s. This was followed by the apartment overlooking the Bay of Alger, considered to be one of the high points of interior decoration of its time, the palaces in Madrid where, from 1938 to 1949, he developed a remarkable form of neoclassicism, his Parisian apartments of the 1950s, and the drawing room of the French embassy in Ottawa. In the 1960s, the disappearance of private commissions drove the designer to settle in Mexico, where he founded the Artedecor Company, and then in Los Angeles, before returning to Paris via the Orient. His contact with American Pop Art inspired the work he developed in 1968, creating models with new materials edited by the Lacloche gallery and for the dining room of Maurice Rheims, still hewing to the precision of his classical aesthetic. Text in French.
On the whole, when one thinks of seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome, one has in mind the wonderful and famous works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, such as the Fountain of the Rivers or The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. The very idea of Roman baroque is commonly identified with the century’s great genius. And indeed, the influence of Bernini’s work on the sculpture and art in general of the period was, especially in Rome, decisive. However, this domination spread only during the second half of the seventeenth century, and less unequivocally than one might suppose.Other great sculptors, with personalities that were often very different form Bernini’s, contributed to making the extraordinary proliferation of Roman statuary extremely complex and varied at that time.
This book is aimed especially at students and museum visitors who would like to learn more about the topic and discusses the art in a straightforward and strictly chronological fashion. The narrative begins in the early decades of the seventeenth century with sculpture created by a motley and conspicuously cosmopolitan group of artists. Later, with the growing success of the great masters, commissions began to gravitate around Bernini, Alessandro Algardi, and François Duquesnoy. A new approach to Antiquity went hand in hand with a marked predilection for striking chromatic effects, borrowed from Venetian painting, and a desire to make a strong impact and achieve a particular tone, often with results of surprising originality.
Taking the most up-to-date and best founded historiographic observations on the subject we have tried to highlight the workshop relationships between the great masters and the ‘giovani,’ their pupils or occasional assistants, and in this way put into relief the experimental approach of some of these apprentices, such as Melchirro Caffà or Antonio Raggi, or the ability of certain others, for instance Ercole Ferrata, to fuse the most diverse influences. The book thus aims to show how marble and travertine were used throughout the century to create a whole army of statues that were positioned in the open and in churches, lending modern Rome its truly incomparable new face.
Around 1900, a small group of influential patrons, critics, writers, and artists turned Weimar into a utopian centre of modern art and thought. Several artists and writers sought to create a ‘New Weimar’ and position Friedrich Nietzsche at its head, as the radical prophet of modernity.
In 1902, two years after the philosopher’s death, Max Klinger was commissioned to carve Nietzsche’s portrait where his cult was organized. Starting from a heavily reworked death mask, Klinger executed the famous marble herm that still today adorns the reception room of the Nietzsche Archive. Only three monumental bronze versions were cast, one of which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. With this sculpture in focus, accompanied by a series of paintings, drawings, plaster casts, and small bronzes, Radical Modernism will show how Klinger and his patrons invented the ‘official’ Nietzsche, transforming a highly expressionist portrait into an idealised classical cult image. The exhibition and this catalog will also include a comprehensive series of early editions of Nietzsche’s most influential books and will bring together work by the other protagonists of the ‘New Weimar’, in order to shed light on this extraordinary artistic and cultural constellation of modernism for the first time in North America.
Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa – 18 April – 25 August 2019.
This book starts from the Lucio Fontana exhibition, curated by Enrico Crispolti, that was held from 1 October until 30 November 2009, at Tornabuoni Art Gallery, Paris. The same exhibition is presented again in Arezzo, as ‘Lucio Fontana – Hic et Nunc’, from 6 May until 24 June 2018 at the Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, for which this book acts as the catalog. The volume explores, through a selection of approximately seventy works, including sculptures and paintings, the Master’s artistic activity from the 1950s onwards. The critical essays by Enrico Crispolti enrich the text by providing some important insights into the life of Lucio Fontana, his visits to Paris and Milan, during which he continued to have an extensive range of exchanges with artists, architects and intellectuals of his time. Vintage photographs, direct quotations from the artist, and a thorough biography contextualize the art of Fontana in the specific cultural climate in which he lived and help to better understand the evolutionary spirit of this person who, until his death, was driven by a constant creative tension.
Text in English and Italian.
The Belvedere Fortress is the main location for this exhibition involving the whole city and including the Uffizi Gallery, Boboli Gardens, Palazzo Vecchio, Palazzo Pitti, Basilica of Santa Croce, Museo Novecento, and Museo Marino Marini. Each location exhibits the works of some of Italy’s most important contemporary artists. The 12 protagonists are: Giovanni Anselmo, Marco Bagnoli, Domenico Bianchi, Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Nunzio, Mimmo Paladino, Giulio Paolini and Remo Salvadori. The catalogue narrates this widely varied exhibition with contributions by recognized international art critics. Comprehensive data sheets provide detailed descriptions of the works by each artist on show. Extensive iconographic material, including images from archives and photos of the works on show, each in their respective location, will complete the narrative of this important event.
Lightning was created in 1975, during a very controversial period in India’s history, to be the backdrop of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency speech. Given the short time frame that M.F. Husain had to complete the work, it was titled Lightning, because it came about in a flash. The masterpiece was made up of twelve massive panels with ten wild, white horses charging through an open space. The significance of the painting is heightened not only by its sheer size or the brilliant rendering of its subject by the artist but also the time it was executed and the ideologies it stands for. The painting included depictions of family planning, farmers and their families, and a builder with an axe in hand. The work portrayed the political climate of the time in India post-separation. This book was conceived in honor of Husain, and various anecdotal stories and interviews on the painting form a part of this book. The selected authors invited to write on Lightning address the painting as well as its creator from various angles. It is an attempt to create a whole story around this masterpiece; every brush stroke and every inch of the canvas has a story, secretly tucked away in the midst of the powerfully rendered horses, that is left for the beholder to decipher. Published in association with TamarindArt, New York, and Asia Society Museum, New York. Contents: Foreword; Journey of Lightning, its Creator and the Progressive Movement; A Personal Commentary; Biography; The Advent of a Masterpiece; The Roar of Crores; East Meets East in Husain’s Horses; Like Thunder and Lightning; A Narrative of the Nation; Husain’s Journey; Troublesome Entanglements: Art and the Asian Nation; In Conversation with M.F. Husain; The Unveiling of Lightning in New York; M.F. Husain; Selected Exhibitions.
The first to describe in detail a community of potters working for the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, eastern India, Temple Potters of Puri explores the role of the temple servant and how it affects the potters’ understanding of their work and of themselves. As a pilgrimage center of national importance, supported by the patronage of successive regional dynasties and by fervent popular belief, the Jagannatha Temple requires earthenware in great quantities for the creation and distribution of the sacred food that is an integral feature of daily ritual and pilgrimage. Several hundred potters participate as temple servants in maintaining the temple’s ritual cycle by performing their divinely assigned task. This study observes the potters’ technical prowess, sustained by devotion, but also examines the tensions within their relationships to more powerful temple servants and authorities. The role of the potter as temple servant is at once glorious, as demonstrated by texts and personal interpretations of the potters’ divinely-appointed service, and pathetic, as shown in the brutality of caste-based hierarchy and cash-based exchange penetrating the modern temple’s daily operations. The accompanying DVD shows the potters at work and records their skills and products as well as the annual festival that celebrates their role as temple servants.
Since taking the helm of the National Galleries of Scotland in 1984, Sir Timothy Clifford has overseen the acquisition of some of the finest, and best-loved works in the national collection. This book chronicles the development of the collection under his directorship and casts light upon the wide range of acquisitions, including the fascinating stories behind their purchase. Lavishly illustrated, highlights of the book include The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child by Botticelli, The Three Graces by Canova (purchased jointly with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London), and the most recent major acquisition, Venus Anadyomene by Titian. Works from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s internationally renowned Surrealist collection are also featured, as well as paintings from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Since the practical invention of photography in the 1840s, Scotland has been at the centre of the history and development of the medium. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery – which houses the Scottish National Photography Collection – and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, hold outstanding collections of photographic art spanning three centuries. Included are figures such as D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Annan, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Capa, Bill Brandt, Annie Leibovitz and Andreas Gursky. This book offers a detailed guide to the collections as well as an accessible and informative introduction to photography. This revised edition includes recently commissioned photography and significant new acquisitions, with works by Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe.
With vivid memories of his first visit to the Scottish National Gallery in the 1970s and his initial encounter with Hugo van der Goes’ The Trinity Altarpiece, Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed, Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Degas’ Diego Martelli, Robert Storr discusses the shifting balance of museum collections from historically ‘certified’ classics to art whose status and significance remains in active contention and from singular ‘treasures’ to ensembles that speak to the larger scope of an artist’s endeavor. Also available: Unfinished Paintings: Narratives of the Non-Finito Watson Gordon Lecture 2014 ISBN 9781906270919 ‘The Hardest Kind of Archetype’: Reflections on Roy Lichtenstein The Watson Gordon Lecture 2010 ISBN 9781906270384 Picasso’s ‘Toys for Adults’ Cubism as Surrealism: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2008 ISBN 9781906270261 Sound, Silence, and Modernity in Dutch Pictures of Manners The Watson Gordon Lecture 2007 ISBN 9781906270254 Roger Fry’s Journey From the Primitives to the Post-Impressionists: Watson Gordon Lecture 2006 ISBN 9781906270117
Through the early works of Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi, this book traces the development of their deep obsession with the machine. Looking at the way that both artists began in the late 1940s and the years following, the book illustrates their fascination with popular culture and the methods that they used in creating their art. Common to all their methods of making works was their hand-made quality. Only in the 1960s did the artists make the step to mechanical means to create their own artworks, resulting in the iconic images that are integral to our culture. As Warhol said of himself, there is only surface, with nothing underneath.
Joan Eardley (1921-1963) is one of Scotland’s most admired artists. During a career that lasted barely fifteen years, she concentrated on two very distinct themes: children in the Townhead area of central Glasgow, and the fishing village of Catterline, just south of Aberdeen, with its leaden skies and wild sea. The contrast between this urban and rural subject matter is self-evident, but the two are not, at heart, so very different. Townhead and Catterline were home to tight-knit communities, living under extreme pressure: Townhead suffered from overcrowding and poverty, and Catterline from depopulation brought about by the declining fishing industry. Eardley was inspired by the humanity she found in both places. These two intertwining strands are the focus of this book, which looks in detail at Eardley’s working processes. Her method can be traced from rough sketches and photographs through to pastel drawings and large oil paintings. Identifying many of Eardley’s subjects and drawing on unpublished letters, archival records and interviews, the authors provide a new and remarkably detailed account of Eardley’s life and art.
The Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) is one of the most celebrated paintings of the nineteenth century. It was acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2017. In this new book, the first to focus in detail on this iconic picture, Christopher Baker explores its complex and fascinating history. He places Landseer’s work in the context of the artist’s meteoric career, considers the circumstances of its high-profile commission and its extraordinary subsequent reputation. When so much Victorian art fell out of fashion, Landseer’s Monarch took on a new role as marketing image, bringing it global recognition. It also inspired the work of many other artists, ranging from Sir Bernard Partridge and Ronald Searle to Sir Peter Blake and Peter Saville. Today the picture has an intriguing status, being seen by some as a splendid celebration of Scotland’s natural wonders and by others as an archaic trophy. This publication will make a significant contribution to the debates that it continues to stimulate.
This is the first study of a fascinating, international phenomenon in the art of the past century. Naked portraiture is an original hybrid of the traditional genres of the nude and portrait, and has been created by an astonishing range of major artists, in many different media and in a variety of major artistic centres. Martin Hammer’s ground-breaking book compares work by painters such as Egon Schiele, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Pierre Bonnard, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin and Jenny Saville. The analysis encompasses a rich tradition of naked portraiture using photographic media, produced by figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin, Gary Schneider and Melanie Manchot. The subjects are men and woman, old and young, black and white, healthy and disabled. They might be lovers, close relatives or friends, with their nakedness suggesting the intimacy and tenderness existing between artist and subject. Conversely, the artist might not know them beyond the circumstance of making the pictures. Many of the images represent the artists themselves, with nudity carrying connotations of self-exploration, vulnerability, playfulness or fantasy. Martin Hammer’s innovative study seeks to explain naked portraiture as a symptom of wider currents in modern culture, a visual parallel to various other manifestations of an impulse to reveal what is hidden, profound, or authentic, beneath the surface facade. The book also opens up for consideration the wider issue of how and why the genre of portraiture has been radically extended and reinvented, in so many different ways, within the art of the last hundred years.