Filter to

This volume introduces artists who were conscientious objectors during the World Wars and explores how they responded to the conflicts, including Percy Horton, whose 1917 Sketch of Seated Prisoner was drawn on lined paper from the guard room in Edinburgh prison, and Sven Berlin, who drew The Survivors in 1943 after witnessing attacks on convoys in the Atlantic convinced him to enlist.

Throughout his life, Paul Klee created images of angels in several different formats, extending the historical interpretation of them to express a variety of sentiments. Boris Friedewald explores the significance of these representations for Klee, from his colourful lithographs of Angel Brings the Desired to his pastel Doubting Angel, drawn just before he died.

With famous works of art, magnificently reproduced in colour on their embossed foil covers, silk page markers and scarlet endpapers, these journals could lend splendour to the most humble jottings. Each book has 176 ruled pages and a pocket for loose papers, and closes with a solid magnetic side flap.

Illuminating the complex cultural life of Nazi Germany, Petropoulos argues that modernist and avant-garde movements ‘persisted as an unresolved issue’ during Hitler’s reign. He examines ten artists that stayed in Germany: those who sought accommodation with the fascist regime, including Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith and Emil Nolde; and those who achieved it, among them, Richard Strauss, Leni Riefenstal and Albert Speer.

Bringing together a collection of 51 paintings spanning the entire career of Edvard Munch (1863–1944), the exhibition held in San Francisco, New York and Oslo in 2017–18 took as its point of departure the artist’s final self-portrait, Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–43). In essays and full-page reproductions, this catalogue explores both the well-known early works and the later paintings in which Munch returned to familiar motifs with increasing intensity.

Vienna, Gustav Klimt’s home city, was the most culturally diverse of the great European capitals in 1900, a centre of intellectual and creative activity that included the Vienna Secession, of which Klimt was a founder member. Illustrated with reproductions of paintings, sketches and informal photographs, this book explores the influence of the city and its cultural life on the artist’s work, discussing topics including Klimt’s personal life, scandal, patrons, the music of Mahler and contemporary attitudes to sex.

Born in Israel in 1932, Kadishman has received international acclaim for his sculptures, which have been installed in public places, museums and private collections around the world. Twenty of his most important works are reproduced and discussed in this volume, which traces his development from geometric minimalist pieces in the 1960s to an engagement with nature in the 1970s and concern with existential issues since the 1980s.

Founded in 1900, the Hagenbund was one of the great artistic associations in early 20th-century Vienna, dedicated to pursuing autonomous exhibition activities, new markets for art and the exchange of ideas across borders. Casting new light on the Hagenbund and its role in the history of Modernism, this volume sets the association in historical context, shows the international scope of the artists it promoted, lists details of its exhibitions and presents a gallery of 182 works exhibited.

From Pierre Bonnard’s exuberant Armistice, 1918 and Claude Monet’s gift of his Water Lilies to the French people in the hope they could ‘heal their souls with the spectacle of nature and eternity’, to Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection of the Soldiers in Sandham Memorial Chapel, this unusual history traces the events, and the responses of painters and sculptors, in the years that followed the Armistice of November 1918.

While known for creating radical, abstract art Bomberg honed his painting skills as a teenager by copying the work of old masters at the National Gallery in London. This well-illustrated catalogue explores the connections between some of his more ambitious works and those of the painters he admired, demonstrating the extent of his engagement with artists including Rembrandt and Michelangelo.

Inspired by Robert Henri’s insistence that artists should ‘make pictures from life’, the Ashcan group rejected Impressionism and academic realism in favour of a bold style that expressed the harsh reality of America’s urban poor in the early 1900s. Giving particular attention to twelve of George Bellows’ images, this introduction explores his work in the context of the wider movement.

In the early 1900s Nietzsche was a figurehead for many avantgarde artists, whose work helped create the enduring image of him as the prophet of modernity. With reproductions of 29 drawings and sculptures, including portraits by Edvard Munch and the bronze bust designed by Max Klinger for the Nietzsche Archive, this catalogue was published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2019.

While political events were tearing the country apart, Russian artists were pioneering new abstract styles that proved among the most influential of the century. This book, published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, explores the period through seven illustrated essays reviewing the work of artists including Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitsky.

Presenting almost 200 paintings and drawings, the exhibition mounted jointly by the National Portrait Gallery, London and Museu Picasso in Barcelona offered an in-depth exploration of Picasso’s creative process as a portraitist and his genius for caricature. This exceptional catalogue reproduces 197 works, with chapters discussing topics including the artist’s shifting styles; differences between his portraits of men and women; his ongoing dialogue with earlier portrait painters; and his motivation in transforming a sitter’s appearance.

Although ranked alongside Whistler and Sargent as one of the leading portrait painters of his age, John White Alexander (1856–1915) earned critical acclaim for his figure paintings, which often showed women in evocative poses and flowing dresses. Illustrated with 90 images, this first in-depth biography discusses the artist’s childhood poverty, the influence of his muse Juliette Very, and how he used techniques learned from his contemporaries to create his own style.

In a career spanning most of the 20th century Backus produced numerous paintings of Florida that now provide testament to its tropical past, with unspoilt beaches and tidal rivers edged with palms and mangroves, and the dramatic weather conditions it endures. With over 200 illustrations, this biography celebrates his life and art, revealing his talent and the humanitarian spirit that led him to mentor the group of African American artists known as the Highwaymen.

Full-blown cavalry charges were a feature of the First World War right up to the final months, in spite of the introduction of the machine gun, while horses were also a key part of supply lines. The contemporary illustrations in this volume accompany an extended history of the equestrian war, revealing how they were sourced from around the world and often kept in awful conditions with only rudimentary veterinary care.

A key figure in the Art Nouveau movement, Tiffany (1848–1933) is best known today for his glasswork but also worked with ceramics, metal and enamel. Following an introduction to his career, this title from the Masterpieces of Art series focuses on his windows, lampshades and the decorative pieces that exemplify his bold use of colour, illustrating them with over 90 full-page reproductions.

Using a range of media, including coloured pencils, watercolours and pen and ink, the artist Peter Gray presents a series of step-by-step illustrated tutorials on how to draw an array of nature-inspired fairies, goblins and other fantasy creatures.

William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) wanted to be a landscape painter but lack of funds made him turn to comic art in 1906, and eventually drew him into advertising. This definitive study of his commercial art is arranged by theme – from heavy engineering to finance – and presents over 280 illustrations, including some of his finest contraption drawings from promotional booklets such as The Gentle Art of Excavating, An Unconventional History of Hovis and Then and Now for Port of Manchester Warehouses Ltd.

A collaboration between Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, this in-depth study draws on the two galleries’ important collections to explore Klee’s legacy to 20th-century American art. The book comprises four essays, over 130 reproductions, and profiles of the ten American artists: Adolph Gottlieb, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mark Tobey, Norman Lewis, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos, Jackson Pollock, Gene Davis and Kenneth Nolan.

In 1907 Gustav Klimt collaborated with Franz Blei, illustrating a new translation of the ancient Greek Dialogues of the Courtesans by Lucian. The 15 erotic drawings made to accompany the Dialogues are at the heart of this catalogue and the exhibition it accompanied in Vienna: a great range of Klimt’s works are shown alongside ancient Greek artefacts, particularly red-figure vases, exploring the artist’s interest in erotic aspects of Greek art through an exceptional collection of paintings and drawings. Sexually explicit

Presenting almost 200 paintings and drawings, the exhibition mounted jointly by the National Portrait Gallery, London and Museu Picasso in Barcelona offered an in-depth exploration of Picasso’s creative process as a portraitist and his genius for caricature. This exceptional catalogue reproduces 197 works, with essays discussing topics including the artist’s shifting styles; differences between his portraits of men and women; his ongoing dialogue with earlier portrait painters; and his motivation in transforming a sitter’s appearance.

Throughout the 1970s Francesco Clemente (b.1952) travelled regularly from Rome to India and created a body of drawings that question Western rationality and capitalism and helped define neo-expressionism. This collection of over 100 of his images focuses predominantly on his depictions of the human body, and the themes of spirituality, sexuality, myths and dreams that would influence his later paintings.

In the early 1960s Andy Warhol was a successful fashion illustrator and graphic designer and one of his early clients was the reptile leather company Fleming-Joffe Ltd. When the company won a prestigious award, Warhol created a slide show of ‘Noa the Boa, a snake with a passion for fashion’ for the presentation. This is Noa’s story, published for the first time from the original drawings now in the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Off-mint.

Slightly off-mint

Off-mint

Slightly off-mint.

Slightly off-mint

Slightly off-mint

Slightly off-mint

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this catalogue analyses the ideas and visual material that influenced Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) during the early 20th century, when he was living in New York. Carmen Ramos’s text juxtaposes many of his iconic works with those of his contemporaries, including Matisse and Picasso, and considers his role in the city’s transformation into a leading centre for avant-garde art.

Lampooning the Kaiser and the German army, this satirical cartoon illustration, a parody of the Bayeux Tapestry, was first published in 1915 and, like the original, is printed as a continuous frieze and ‘concertina folded’ into the book covers. Slightly off-mint.

Edward Ardizzone’s career began as an illustrator in the late 1920s, he served as a war artist from 1939 to 1945, and after the war his work ranged from illustrating literary classics to advertising Guinness. With over 230 reproductions, this study looks at every aspect of Ardizzone’s career, but particularly his own books, starting with Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain (1936), and his illustration for other children’s authors, notably Walter de la Mare and Eleanor Farjeon.

The art historian Katy Norris presents the first account of the short life and prolific career of the British artist Christopher Wood (1902–1930), illustrated with over 130 reproductions and photographs of his paintings, drawings and stage designs. Norris provides analysis of the works and discusses the influence of fellow artists in Cornwall and Cumbria, Wood’s engagement with the Parisian avant-garde, and the ‘gathering storm clouds’ of his final year in Brittany.

Now housed in the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden, these scrapbooks, described by Edward Bawden himself as a ‘mass of ancient rubbish’, are in fact a vast and intriguing collection of Christmas cards, letters, cuttings, photographs and drawings. With reproductions of pages from all five scrapbooks and notes on the ‘scraps’ and the people mentioned, this volume is the closest thing we have to an autobiography of one of the finest, but most reclusive British artist-designers of the 20th century.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has been helping people recognize risk since the increase in road traffic and traffic accidents during the First World War. Drawing on a recently discovered archive of artwork, this book looks back at how public information posters – dealing with safety at work and at home as well as on the roads – used slogans and colourful graphics to keep people safe in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s.

Growing up in Poland in the early 1900s, Arthur Szyk made his name as a book illustrator and political artist between the wars. He became more widely known for his paintings satirizing the policies and leaders of the Axis powers, produced after he settled in America in 1940. This comprehensive account of his life and work, with over 200 examples of his illustrations, sketches and paintings, examines and decodes his highly detailed compositions.

Reproductions of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s green-faced woman once hung in countless suburban homes. This illustrated biography reveals how, despite being born in poverty in Siberia, he made his name as an artist in Singapore. He fled the island when it was invaded by the Japanese and almost drowned when his boat was sunk, but then relaunched his career in South Africa, receiving both massive popular success and critical disdain.

Edward J Sullivan’s unconventional study, comprising ‘eight histories of visuality’, examines the ways in which art in the Americas was modernized in the period between two major exhibitions that heralded changes in the way artists created and marketed their work: the Armory Show in New York, 1913, and the first Bienal de S?o Paulo in 1951. Part of the Global Perspectives series.

When Picasso exhibited his portraits of Sylvette, ‘the girl with the pony tail’, in Paris in 1954, he created an international media sensation. Sixty years later, the Kunsthalle Bremen held an exhibition that explored the relationship of Picasso with Sylvette and his other female models. This accompanying catalogue, with informal photographs, reproductions of the paintings and drawings and 13 essays, reveals something of the artist’s creative processes at work in a series of portraits that range from realistic likenesses to abstraction. Slightly off-mint.

Based on two 2017 exhibitions in Bern, at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Paul Klee Centre, this catalogue explores the impact of the Russian revolution on contemporary art, from socialist realism to the subversive artwork inspired by the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union. Artists featured include Kazimir Malevich, the founder of suprematism, and Russian constructivists such as Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. The book also traces the revolution’s impact on avant-garde movements worldwide.

Discussing and reproducing 103 works, from Stone Head (1933) to Easter and the Totem (1953), this catalogue, with essays and commentary, focuses on Jackson Pollock’s artistic development as a figurative artist, leaving aside the familiar ‘drip’ paintings. Originally accompanied an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Bound in grey linen.

With an introduction, five illustrated essays and examples from 30 cities – altogether around 100 reproductions – this volume focuses on the printed work of avant garde artists in manifestos, artists’ books, little magazines and photo-books from the period 1900–1937.

Esphyr Slobodkina (1908–2002) emigrated to New York in 1928. In the 1930s and 1940s, she helped to translate European modernist art into an American idiom, and continued painting and illustrating into her nineties. Published to accompany a centennial exhibition, this volume comprises six illustrated essays along with reproductions of over 90 works.

From the Blitz to the Swinging Sixties, London was home to a major art scene. Several key players – Auerbach, Bacon, Freud – were figurative painters rebelling against the prevailing Abstract orthodoxy. Others – Bridget Riley, John Hoyland – found their own distinctive forms of abstraction. Gayford’s study profiles the artists and explores their influences and connections. Drawing on first-hand interviews and illustrated with 114 paintings and photographs, it recreates the Soho bohemia these painters inhabited, with its friendships, feuds and legendary drinking sessions.

Best known as a furniture designer and architect, Irish-born Eileen Gray was a pioneer of Art Deco in the Paris of the 1920s and a follower and associate of Le Corbusier, among other luminaries of the period. This collection of her private and essentially unknown artworks was assembled for an exhibition at London’s Osborne Samuel Gallery in 2015 and comprises drawings, paintings, collages and photographs made between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Twentieth-century war at sea posed problems for artists: gone were the traditional naval confrontations; in modern, long-range battle the enemy could be invisible, in the sky or under the surface. Drawing on the National Maritime Museum’s outstanding collection of modern British art, this volume looks at how artists rose to the challenge of depicting the Navy and Merchant Marine at war. With over 160 colour reproductions, it discusses works by artists including Norman Wilkinson, John Everett, Eric Ravilious and Charles Wheeler.

Started in 1936, four years before her marriage to Francis Picabia (1879–1953), and left unfinished two years before his death, this album of photographs, sketches and cuttings was compiled by Olga Picabia (1905–2002) and chronicles the life of the French avant-garde artist and poet. Reproducing 207 pages of the album, this book offers a unique view of a great romantic and artistic partnership.

This study examines four pairs of artists – Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon – whose friendship turned to enmity, arguing that early influences that fostered creativity must, after a certain point, be rejected in order to pursue originality. American cut pages with a felt-tip mark on the lower trimmed edge.

The artist Stanley Spencer made several attempts to write an autobiography, but completed none of them. His grandson has combined these fragments with his notebooks, diaries and letters to provide a first-hand account of his life. Illustrated with Spencer’s paintings and drawings alongside period photographs, the resulting narrative records the development of his art and personality from his childhood in Cookham through his training at the Slade to his experiences in the First World War.

This concise guide reviews the nude photography, erotic art and cheeky pin-ups of the 1940s, from Norman Pett's famous Jane cartoons to American Mutoscope illustrations, sold from vending machines at amusement arcades.

Head of Painting at Falmouth School of Art from 1960 to 1981, Francis Hewlett (1930–2012) remained a figurative artist, exploring what he called the ‘essential geometry’ of observed objects, despite the prevailing fashions of the period. Including over 200 paintings and drawings, this biography charts his lifelong dedication to art, from his early studies in Bristol, London and Paris to his completion of a major series of paintings in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In this illustrated volume, art historian Marina Linares explores Impressionists’ interpretations of gardens in the city and the country, examining the light, colour and technique used in over 200 paintings. Incorporating early 19th-century works by Constable, which transformed landscape painting as a genre, and subsequent pieces by artists including Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne and Morisot, the book concludes with a selection of Monet’s water lily paintings. Text in six languages.

Focused on the period 1912 to 1925, this catalogue and the exhibition it accompanied explore the diversity of work developed by Picasso against a backdrop of war and change. Essays discussing his shift from Cubism to Neoclassicism, his friendship with Cocteau, and the Parisian art world during the First World War, accompany reproductions of works by Picasso and his contemporaries, his designs for the ballet Parade (1917), and Cocteau’s snapshots of Picasso and friends in Paris, 1916.

A contemporary of Francis Bacon and Euan Uglow, Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison (1926–2009) employed saturated colours and vivid shapes in his work, which included landscapes, portraits and still-lifes, with deceptive simplicity. This illustrated retrospective, containing detailed analyses of his paintings, explores his life and career and examines the motifs of black men, dogs and crucifixions which recurred in his work time and again, from his student days at the Slade School of Art to his later sojourns in Tuscany.

‘I think of my paintings as a source of imagery, something that generates imagery rather than contains it.’ This beautifully illustrated, in-depth survey of St Ives artist Bryan Wynter’s life and work reveals much of the inspiration for his paintings, including his experimentation with mescaline during the 1950s which, presaging 1960s counterculture, added a fluid, calligraphic dynamism to his evolving abstract style. The book also explores the politics and personalities of the St Ives group, particularly Wynter’s great friend Patrick Heron.

Discussing art made in Spain during the Civil War, 1935–9, in the democracies of the UK, USA and the Commonwealth, in occupied France, the USSR, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, and with chapters devoted to the art of the Holocaust and responses to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this volume presents an illustrated overview of the complex and often disturbing relationship between war and the fine arts – painting, sculpture, print-making and drawing – during the Second World War.

While serving as an orderly at a military hospital during the First World War, the artist Stanley Spencer met Desmond Chute, the aesthetic son of a Bristol theatre family, who introduced him to classical literature, including the Confessions of St Augustine. Illustrated with facsimiles and drawings that shed light on Spencer’s artistic development, these 31 letters document the men’s friendship, Spencer’s service in Macedonia and his memories of the village of Cookham.

Often exhibiting together during their lifetimes, contemporaries Joan Gillchrest, Bryan Pearce and Fred Yates were inspired to record the people and scenes of Cornwall in their individual, instantly recognizable styles, and to try to capture the essence of the county. Written as a companion to a posthumous 2011 exhibition, this guide includes short biographies of each artist, personal photographs and reproductions of their work.

Painter, photographer, object maker and filmmaker, Man Ray (1890–1976) was, with Duchamp and Picabia, a leading artist of Dada and Surrealism. This volume brings together his writings and artworks from a great range of sources to illuminate his character, thinking and art.

Born Helmut Herzfeld in 1891 and anglicizing his name in protest against German nationalism in 1916, John Heartfield became a political artist unrivalled in the 20th century, who pushed political satire to surrealist extremes in anti-Nazi and anti-capitalist graphic art and photomontage. This volume presents a short biography of Heartfield and reproductions of his finest work, setting the original artworks alongside the published versions.

This is the first biography of Sir Robin Darwin (great-grandson of Charles), a painter best remembered for his time at the Royal College of Art, where he was rector for 30 years. Includes 100 archive photographs and 80 colour reproductions.

Unity Spencer (1930–2017) was the daughter of two artists, Stanley and Hilda Spencer, and a significant painter in her own right. In this memoir, written shortly before her death, she looks back over her unconventional upbringing, her studies at the Slade School of Art and her subsequent career. Extensively illustrated with her own work, that of her parents and vintage photographs, it offers a unique glimpse of the artistic life. With a foreword by Jon Snow.

From the 1880s to around 1914, a group of young painters based in Glasgow challenged the traditional art of the Scottish Academy, favouring instead the naturalistic ideas of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and en plein-air painting. The realism and freedom of their portraits, informal scenes and landscapes was to revolutionize Scottish art. This book introduces the Glasgow Boys – among them James Guthrie, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and David Gauld – and presents over 85 reproductions of their work.

This study of the Latvian-born portrait and landscape artist Kalman Aron (1924–2018) includes his own account of surviving the Holocaust and the impact of that experience on his life and art.

Terry Frost (1915–2003) was one of Britain’s great abstract painters. His career spanned seven decades, starting with his introduction to art in a Second World War prisoner-of-war camp and stretching into the 21st century. First published in 2000, this was the first book to present the extent of Frost’s art, placing it within historical context and in relation to the work of his international contemporaries.

Clarrie Wallis reassesses the influences and legacy of Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005), who came to prominence through The New Generation exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964 and whose iconic and vibrant paintings of modern life reinvigorated the subject matter of traditional still life, interiors and landscape.

Social commentator, illustrator, cartoonist and landscape artist, William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) was gifted in many fields, but his fame today rests on the cartoons poking fun at human foibles and his marvellous contraptions, such as The Pilsner Pump for Tapping the Enemy’s Beer (1916). In this volume from the Masterpieces of Art series, Susan Grange introduces Heath Robinson’s life and many-faceted artistic career, and presents around 90 full-page reproductions of his literary illustrations, cartoons and creations.

This monograph includes reproductions of over 200 paintings, sculptures and collages by contemporary British artist David Harrison, plus studies of his work and an interview with fellow artist Peter Doig.

Now a major reference work on Scottish art, Hardie's book was the first comprehensive study devoted to Scottish painting. Revised and updated in this third edition, the book traces the history of painting in Scotland and discusses its major artists since 1837, with emphasis on the period from about 1860 to 1914 and three important groups: William McTaggart and his contemporaries; the Glasgow School and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; and JD Fergusson and the Scottish Colourists. With 150 colour reproductions.

Osbert Lancaster found fame inventing the pocket cartoon for the Daily Express in 1939, and his gallery of eccentrics kept the nation chuckling for 40 years. After the war, he became a leading stage designer and illustrator, working with John Piper and Nancy Mitford. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wallace Collection, this beautifully illustrated account of his life and work will be a joy to fans and a revelation to those new to his art and humour.

This is the second of Tom Cross's two books that are now standard works on the history of the Newlyn and St Ives Schools. First published in 1984, it was based on interviews and discussions with those artists who were still working in and around St Ives in the 1970s and 1980s. The book begins with the war years, when several artists sought refuge in Cornwall from the bombing in London. Among those discussed are Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Roger Hilton and the potter, Bernard Leach.

Described by Joseph Simas as 'the Goblin Master', Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was one of the leading artists of the golden age of illustration, first achieving popularity with his illustrations for Rip Van Winkle in 1905. Examples from that book are among the 90 pictures reproduced here, along with illustrations for works by Shakespeare, children's books, notably Peter Pan and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, adult fiction, Wagner's Ring cycle and silhouettes from Cinderella and The Sleeping Beauty.