107 Products

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.

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.

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.

The spread of jazz beyond its American birthplace in the 1920s had a profound effect on art and culture, with leading artists such as Otto Dix, Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse taking inspiration from performers, dances and songs. With contextual essays and reproductions of more than 120 works, this dual-language exhibition catalogue from the Stuttgart art museum celebrates almost a century of art produced in response to jazz, from Max Beckmann to Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.

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.

Christopher Alexander studied at the Royal College of Art, became a teacher and 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.

The Russian art historian Igor Golomstock presents an illustrated, comparative study of the official art of Stalin’s USSR, the Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italy and the People’s Republic of China under Mao, with a postscript on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Translated by Robert Chandler.

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’.

From László Moholy-Nagy writing on avant-garde photography in the 1920s to Joanna Sassoon’s discussion of the negative effects of digital reproduction of ‘material’ photographs, Sri-Kartini Leet presents over 100 extracts arranged by 18 themes including portraiture, the nude, commercial practice, landscape and the photograph as a cultural document. Leet introduces each chapter and provides notes setting every selection in context and briefly profiling its author.

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 World War I, 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 unique magic of the county. Written as a companion to a 2011 exhibition that took place after their deaths, this guide provides short biographies of each artist, personal photographs, and many colour 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.

In 1939, the first attempts of the government to bolster morale with poster campaigns were largely ineffective but as the war progressed, propaganda became more sophisticated, using contemporary design, memorable slogans and humour to inform and direct the public. This analysis draws on the collection of the Imperial War Museum and explores such classic campaigns as 'Dig for Victory' and 'Make Do and Mend'.

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 richly illustrated study of Patrick Pye (1929–2018), who lived and worked in Ireland, argues against the view of Pye as an outsider, and explores his religious art in the contexts of the Byzantine icon tradition, early Renaissance painting and Modernism.

Designed by William Morris’s friend and collaborator, the architect Philip Webb, in 1860, when they were both young men, Red House became the realization of Morris’s vision of a home unified in its architecture, decoration, furniture and garden. Richly illustrated with reproductions of original artworks and photographs of the house as it is today, this study of the architecture and contents of Red House shows how Morris and his circle of Pre-Raphaelite friends together created his ‘Palace of Art’.

In this third collection of his meticulously detailed paintings, Malcolm Root presents a chronological pageant of transport, tracing the development of travel by land, sea and air over the last century or so. Each painting sets the vehicles within an evocative, often nostalgic scene – such as the AEC lorry and Royal Navy airship at an airfield in 1919, or steam traction engines towing a locomotive through Glasgow in the 1950s – all accompanied by Tom Tyler’s informative narrative.

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) developed his abstract geometrical idiom in dialogue with the spaces that surrounded him, from urban architecture to the interiors of his studios. Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Tate Liverpool, this book reproduces 44 of his paintings in colour, alongside vintage photographs. Essays by noted Mondrian scholars, original texts by the artist and contemporary descriptions of his working spaces reveal the aesthetic philosophy that gave rise to his distinctive, instantly recognizable style.