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.

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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.

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In a study that goes beyond the label ‘St Ives’, Michael Bird focuses on the artists, their art and its relationship to place and time, namely the post-war years to 1965. He discusses major figures including Terry Frost, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon, but also sets the St Ives phenomenon in the contexts of wider British culture and international modernism. Groundbreaking when first published in 2008, the book has been revised and updated, with new illustrations and a new author’s preface.

Paul Nash (1889–1946) began writing his ‘personal history’ in 1936–7, but ended the narrative with the outbreak of the First World War, in the chapter entitled ‘End of a World’. Described by David Boyd Haycock in his introduction as ‘one of the finest autobiographies by an English artist of any era’, Outline is accompanied here by Nash’s notes for its continuation, his letters to his wife from France, 1917, and the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs of Paul Nash, 1913–1946' by his wife, Margaret.

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.

Paul Nash (1889–1946) is now recognized as a major British artist, who drew on Modernism and Surrealism to create a distinctive vision of the English landscape. Illustrated with 100 colour images, this survey of his life and work assesses the impact his time as a war artist had on him, explores his work as a book illustrator, and considers what his poetry and other writing reveals about his personal mythology.

An Edinburgh Scot, Paolozzi studied during the Second World War at the Edinburgh College of Art, St Martin’s and the Slade. Best-known today for his metal sculptures, including a number of large-scale public commissions, his most significant early works were, by contrast, collages of commercially printed material that influenced the development of British pop art. This comprehensive appraisal of his output dedicates a chapter to each aspect of his artforms, including sculpture, collage, printmaking, ceramics, tapestry and film.

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.

In this first in-depth study and catalogue raisonné of the work of Ivor Roberts-Jones (1913–1996), the authors explore the career of this exceptional British sculptor in a number of essays, beginning with a biographical sketch. The essay topics include Roberts-Jones’s most familiar work, the statue of Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square; other portraits of Churchill in Oslo, New Orleans and Prague; and the portrait heads; while the catalogue illustrates and comments on over 156 works, with sketches and variants.

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.

Beginning with Otto Freundlich’s own Confessions of a Revolutionary Painter, written in 1935, this volume provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work and his influence as a pioneer of modernism. Published to accompany a major retrospective at Museum Ludwig in Cologne and Kunstmuseum Basel in 2017, the book comprises several essays on topics including Freundlich’s aesthetics and The Large Head shown in the Nazis’ Degenerate Art exhibition, and reproductions of over 170 paintings and drawings.

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.

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.

Mid 20th-century classics, such as Charles Eames' Model No.670 lounge chair and Arne Jacobsen's Egg chair, are among the extensive selection featured in this design compendium. Each example is afforded its own page and profiled with a brief description and example photograph. Organized chronologically, from the 1800s to the present day, the sourcebook demonstrates how different approaches to the same design problem reflect changing tastes, differing ideals and new technologies.

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.

In the Soviet Union the years 1927 to 1933 were ones of intense industrialization and collectivization, aiming to transform old Russia into a modern, mechanized society. Designers played their part and motifs such as gears, aeroplanes and locomotives, sports and agriculture appeared in fabrics, reinforcing industrial and social ideas. This book draws on the Lloyd Cotsen fabrics collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to examine this short-lived but intriguing experiment in thematic design.

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.

In the immediate post-war period, lifelong partners Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were, with Freud and Bacon, among the most admired artists of their generation but during the 1950s their work fell out of fashion and alcoholism and poverty hastened their decline. Published to accompany the exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, this retrospective charts their careers and turbulent private lives, and includes reproductions of their most significant paintings, prints and drawings.

Christopher Alexander (1926–82) studied at the Royal College of Art and after becoming a teacher produced a vast body of work, specializing in figure drawing. This volume, compiled by his son, comprises a biography and over 150 sketches, portraits and landscapes.

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.

In the early 1920s, a group of Dutch artists and architects, among them Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld and César Domela, formed the profoundly influential De Stijl (‘The Style’) movement. Illustrated with reproductions and photographs of their works in a variety of media, this innovative volume profiles the artists and collaborators of De Stijl and describes how they ‘built bridges between art, design, architecture and society’.

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 and the Confessions of St Augustine. These 31 letters document their friendship, Spencer’s combat in Macedonia and his evocative memories of the village of Cookham. Illustrated with facsimiles and Spencer’s own drawings, they shed light on his artistic development.

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.

An ‘outbreak of talent’ was how Paul Nash described the group of students he taught at the Royal College of Art in 1924–5. Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman and Enid Marx formed the core of a network of artists, friends and lovers influenced by Nash. This group biography explores their lives and relationships from the 1920s to Ravilious’s death in 1942 and, with reproductions of over 200 examples, it examines their painting, illustration and a variety of work in commercial design.

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.

When Constructivism emerged after the 1917 Revolution in Russia, its central aesthetic principles concerned the nature of materials, konstruktsiya (constructedness), efficiency and rationality. In this study, Taylor examines the legacy of Constructivism, tracing a path from the Cubists in Paris and Tatlin, Malevich and Rodchenko in Russia to artists such as Anish Kapoor, Amy Sillman and Tomma Abts working in the 21st century. With 144 illustrations.

Not only can one find the greatest variety of bird species in Norfolk as well as view spectacular mass migrations, but it is also one of the best spots to find rare birds and infrequent visitors to Britain. This celebration of the county’s avian scene offers research and statistics about the different types of habitats and the resident and visiting bird populations of each, together with almost 200 atmospheric watercolour illustrations by James McCallum.

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.