105 Products

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.

St Ives, now a centre for modern British art, was one of many coastal art colonies established in small rural communities around the country in the late 19th century. Often linked by friendships made while studying, the artists offered mutual support ranging from shared studio space to marriage. With more than 100 reproductions and archive photographs, this collective study looks at eight such communities: Newlyn, Lamorna, St Ives, Walberswick, Staithes, Cullercoats, Cockburnspath and Kirkcudbright.

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.

Masatoshi is the last in a great tradition of Japanese craftsmanship, a carver of the ivory toggles that evolved into a sophisticated art form in the Edo period. He is also the first to set down his ideas in a book, explaining his methods, his materials, and his choice of subjects, from ghosts and goblins to owls and lizards. This handsome volume includes colour plates of more than 350 carvings.

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'.

With Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen on its cover (and in December), this fine collection of Scottish landscapes includes works by Turner, Crozier and Cadell.

Drawn from the Lowry collection in Manchester, this selection of paintings and drawings reflects the various phases of Lowry’s artistic career.

As art critic for various newspapers and magazines and presenter of radio programmes and television documentaries, Edwin Mullins met, and sometimes formed friendships with, many of the leading artists from the last half century. This book comprises his personal memories of artists including Henry Moore, Oskar Kokoschka, Barbara Hepworth and Graham Sutherland; shorter pieces on his ‘brief encounters’ with, among others, Picasso and Giacometti; and ‘strange encounters’ such as the odd episode involving Stephen Ward.

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.

An Eames chair or a Mies van der Rohe building, although functional designs, transcend their purpose to occupy a space between design and art, a category designated in this study as 'design art'. Charting 20th-century design across a range of media including furniture, interiors and architecture, Alex Coles explores the multi-disciplinary work of artists such as Matisse and Sonia Delaunay and examines examples of decorative or craft design work that could be considered art.

‘I’m an expatriate wherever I am’. Born to an American mother and Japanese father, Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) spent his life travelling restlessly around the world, synthesizing aesthetic values as he created items of furniture, massive sculptures and gardens. Drawing on Noguchi’s correspondence and illustrated with photographs of his work, this biography forms a meditation on art in a globalized milieu as it explores his journeys between East and West and his relationships with lovers and fellow-artists.

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.

Born in England, Colleen Browning (1918–2003) moved to New York in 1949, where she followed the Realist movement before moving toward Magic Realism in works such as Picture of a Painting of the Great Circus (1988). The very handsome, illustrated volume presents an overview of her life and work.

These magnificent volumes present a descriptive catalogue of 2,215 works by the Nicaraguan painter, draughtsman and lithographer Armando Morales (1927–2011). The catalogue starts in 1974, at which time Morales had moved away from abstraction to painting the human form, still life and tropical landscapes. The volumes include a number of essays in French, Spanish or English, but all technical notes in the catalogue are in English. Slipcased.

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.

In earlier studies, Gwen John (1876–1939) has been depicted as a lifelong recluse, on record as desiring ‘a more interior life’. Alicia Foster argues against that view and its implications for the interpretation of the artist’s work. Instead, this study looks at John’s work in London, in Paris and in the context of contemporary artists; and examines, in particular, the relationship between women and the interior in her painting.

This widely acclaimed critical introduction to the potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979) was first published in 1998, long before Edmund de Waal achieved such renown as a potter and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes. Reissued unrevised, this text explores Leach’s years in Japan, the duality in his career as maker and writer, and the complexities of his ceramic work.

Penelope Curtis, a Director of Tate Britain, describes the life and work of Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) and provides an up-to-date survey of the contexts in which her art can currently be understood. The book examines the impetus behind the formal clarity of Hepworth’s sculpture and her attempt at ‘holding the beautiful thought’ through the difficult times in which she lived.

Originating in a conference following the 2010 Tate Liverpool exhibition Picasso: Peace and Freedom, this volume of eight essays examines Picasso’s affiliation with communism and looks at his art from the perspective of his political beliefs.

There is no record that the painter Marc Chagall (1887–1985) and the storyteller Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) ever met, yet the connections between them are profound. Both moved to the West and absorbed Western influences, yet their art remained rooted in the Jewish shtetls of their native Russia (Chagall) and Poland (Singer). Illustrated with 19 colour plates, this perceptive and illuminating study demonstrates how both artists melded magic and realism in a joyous triumph over persecution.

Was it a betrayal of the modern movement to be in love, as John Piper was, with old churches? Harris finds the engagement of artists and writers with the English countryside during the interwar years ‘an expression of responsibility – towards places, people and histories too valuable and too vulnerable to go missing from art’. Among the now much-admired figures discussed are Paul Nash, Edward Bawden, Gertrude Hermes, John Betjeman and Daphne du Maurier, and the book features carefully chosen quotations and reproductions of their works.

Perhaps the most famous image to come out of the First World War is Alfred Leete’s poster of a pointing Lord Kitchener. No other form of propaganda had such a profound effect on ordinary people. This commemorative volume reproduces almost 100 posters from all the combatant nations in full colour. Whether in English or German, French or Russian, their message was the same: to demonize the enemy and win support for the war effort.

In 1912, trainee priest Frank Browne was given the unusual present of a trip on the Titanic from Southampton to his native Ireland. The photographs he took demonstrate the talent he had been honing since first acquiring a camera as a teenager. This portfolio of his documentary images mainly depicts life in Ireland between the 1920s and 1940s, but also includes photographs taken while serving in the First World War, and pictures from a trip to Australia in 1924.

Francis Bacon’s commitment to the human form set him apart from his contemporaries; but recent revival of interest in figurative art has made his work more relevant than ever. With over 100 reproductions, detailed and insightful commentary, and a selection of the artist’s statements, this book provides a concise and informative introduction to the work of one of the most important painters of the 20th century. Abbeville Modern Masters series.

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 contraptions.

Forced to flee her native Vienna by the Nazis, the artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906–1996) spent the rest of her life in London, where she continued to paint prolifically. This magnificent catalogue charts her background, influences and career, and presents her substantial oeuvre in its entirety, reproducing some 350 paintings, including still lifes, landscapes and portraits of her family and friends, among them the writers Elias Canetti and Iris Murdoch.

With newsprint increasingly viewed as an endangered species, this study examines the history and use of the newspaper clipping as object and as medium, from 1870 to 1930. Rethinking Art’s Histories series.

This study of the Cologne avant-garde in the 1920s focuses on the little-known Magic Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894–1970) and shows how women artists, critics and dealers played a major role in a flourishing artistic culture after Dada.