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This lavishly-illustrated book re-assesses the work of the nineteenth-century botanical painter Marianne North (1830-1890) and the purpose-built gallery that houses her paintings at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. Lynne Howarth-Gladston, a trained botanical illustrator and scholar, re-examines North's working methods, which extend beyond those of conventional botanical illustration, and discusses North's painterly techniques, in addition to her use of photography as a possible aid to her extraordinarily prolific output. Marianne North: A Victorian Painter for the 21st Century situates North both as an unconventional botanical painter and as a technically progressive artist who melded differing stylistic approaches, techniques and media from both scientific and aesthetic perspectives. The study presents North as a progressive, multi-faceted individual who was rooted in the complex circumstances of her own time. Yet it also reveals how her legacy continues to resonate with the concerns of the present day, such as contemporary intersections between art and science, artistic uses of multi-media, feminism, and climate change. Drawing on North's travel writing as well as her visual record, the book offers a unique view of one of the most intriguing figures in the history of botanical art.
Zaha Hadid is widely regarded as a visionary and influential architect, who became globally acclaimed by the time of her untimely death in 2016. This book is the first to focus on how painting was fundamental to her practice. During the first 20 years of her career, she earned her reputation through 'paper architecture' projects which were widely published in architecture journals and exhibited, but which remained largely unbuilt. Influenced by the Suprematists, she used her paintings as design tools and abstraction as an investigative structure for imagining architecture.
Drawing extensively on interviews with Hadid's contemporaries and her team of assistants and her past presentations and in-depth interviews, this book is the first to focus on the important aspect of Hadid's work. It examines selected paintings in detail, both critically assessing them in the wider context of 20th-century fine art - in relation to the Suprematists, de Stijl, Cubism and Futurism - and offering insights into how Hadid used the paintings to develop architectural and spatial ideas, which she would later realise in her buildings. The paintings were created at a pivotal time in architecture, just before the move away from hand drawing to computers and many of Hadid's paintings pre-empt the potential of digital and virtual reality.
Offering a radical rewriting of the history of contemporary art from a feminist perspective, four distinguished authors explore the lineages of performance, abstraction, craft and ecofeminism in ways that reveal the debt these important genres owe to the work of pioneering women artists. Tracing these influences over time, Mothers of Invention underscores the enormous impact of feminist ideas on the work of contemporary artists of all genders.
The painters, sculptors and performance artists featured here have shaped ideas now dominating the art world: the vulnerability of the environment, the rise of activist art, the challenge to the reign of high technology (including digital culture), and the development of a new language of abstraction. Having demolished the linear narrative of modernism, the privileging of a white male ethnocentric vision, the division of high and low art and the separation of art from larger social issues, feminist artists laid the groundwork for the globalised, multi-media, postmodern art world of today.
Illustrated with a spread of work from the last sixty years (and including contextual discussion of earlier practitioners), this book makes a compelling case for placing feminist art and artists at the heart of contemporary art.
In May 1949, the Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) visited the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland. It was a trip which would have a profound and lasting impact on her work. Charting the journey, the beautiful work it stimulated and wider questions around glacial landscapes, then and now, this publication provides insights that will expand our understanding of both an acclaimed body of work and the artist who created it.
That Barns-Graham produced her final glacier painting in 1994, some 45 years after her sole visit to Switzerland, is testament to the influence that the experience had on her. So too are her 100 or so individual glacier works - made first between 1949 and 1952 and then in revisiting the subject between 1976 and 1994. Including a complete catalogue of the glacier paintings, this book presents the definitive account of a trip that would transform the artistic imagination of one of the foremost British painters of the twentieth century.
AI and the Art Market is the first book to offer an approachable introduction to AI for art-market professionals, considering AI's impact on and possible applications within the art world, whether as a business tool or as an artistic medium. The two primary topics of how AI is affecting the art market, and the growing market for AI art, are united under the broad theme of how art-market professionals can be better equipped to work with AI in an art-world context, as relative novices.
The book addresses questions like: Can AI benefit your business? How can you best support artists working with AI and approach selling their work? What risks should you be aware of, and how can you distinguish between truly cutting-edge innovation and outlandish, unsubstantiated claims about AI? More broadly, how/is AI reshaping practices within the art market and what cultural changes should we be prepared for in the long term?
AI and the Art Market puts forward a balanced overview of this increasingly Hot Topic, considering the benefits of AI while never shying away from its ethical complications and practical limitations.
Nithurst by Adam Richards Architects is a much-lauded, multi-award-winning house designed by the architect for his family, and situated in the picturesque South Downs National Park. The building intentionally feels both ancient and contemporary and the character of the house is informed by Renaissance drawings and by Palladio's plan for the Villa Barbaro. With influences ranging from Vanbrugh to Tarkovsky, the design has multiple layers of reference and association, each informing the whole, enhancing its meaning, whilst creating a beautiful place to live.
This book tells the full story of the evolution of the house, offering thematic essays written by specialists in the fields of film, architectural history, interiors and art - Geoff Dyer, Takero Shimazaki, Jeremy Musson and Corinna Dean - which explore specific aspects of the design in greater detail. Central to it all is a detailed and analytical narrative by Adam Richards, illustrated by beautiful colour photography and architectural drawings.
Classicism is ubiquitous, from the facade of Selfridges to the letterhead of The Times, to the pedimented porches of neo-Georgian housing estates. This book invites readers to discover in their surroundings a rich language of form which is there to be revealed.
It discusses the pleasures and problems of post-medieval architectural classicism, both its rigour and flexibility, its perfections and incompleteness, its continuities and innovations, and its expressiveness - from the camp to the sublime, and from originality to plagiarism. Abandoning conventional chronological, biographical or stylistic arrangements, the book makes connections between familiar art historical periods, focusing on looking closely at the buildings and their details, from which useful generalisations emerge.
The book discusses how Renaissance architects, when faced with the bewildering variety of classical antiquity, produced canonical versions of the orders and thus a systematic method of designing in the antique manner. It asks how the highly regulated language of classicism can sustain the originality of a Michelangelo, a Soane or a John Simpson and looks at the human body in relation to classical architecture. It examines the various treatments of the wall and of lettering on classical buildings, before concluding with a chapter on architectural backgrounds in Quattrocento art, revealing how this can lead to a different kind of looking at painting and sculpture.
Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman's Painter situates Esther Estelle Pressoir's body of work within the effervescent art scene of the early 20th century, both in America and abroad. The first book to present the wide-ranging oeuvre of this American modernist, it covers the span of Pressoir's long life (1902-86) with a particular focus on the interwar decades (1920-40). Coming of age in the 1920s, Stella, as she was known to her friends, cast off societal expectations of a working-class immigrant family in New England and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of New York. Following an unprecedented 18,000 km bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, where she kept a daily journal and made hundreds of sketches, Pressoir developed an expressionistic style that straddled figuration and abstraction. She made provocative renderings of the female nude that challenged historical models, including unabashed self-portraits and intimate depictions of her longtime model, muse, and lover, a black dancer from Harlem named Florita. Pressoir's work is illuminated here in an examination of her private travel journal, letters, and numerous paintings, prints and drawings, some of which were recovered from the veritable time capsule of her art studio after she died.
Placing Pressoir's work in relation to trailblazing contemporaries such as Alice Neel, Florine Stettheimer and Suzanne Valadon, this book establishes Pressoir as a force to be reckoned with in the decades of emergent feminism and modern art in America and restores her to her rightful place in the expanding canon of art and women's histories.
At a time of increased pressure for new urban development, where there is a focus on either object-based architecture or the rolling out of developer-designed suburban sprawl, there is a concern that the lessons learned about the creation of a general attractive 'townscape' or 'streetscape' have become forgotten or obscured.
Featuring 26 of the most attractive and interesting historic town centres, this book analyses key routes and the urban or visual incidents along them and explains why they might provoke different sensations of joy, interest or containment for the inhabitant or passer-by.
Each of the town studies includes two historical maps - one created by John Speed in the C16th, which explains the general overall layout of a town, its shape, size, defensive walls, and river crossings, and the other a first edition OS map from the late C19th, which reveals the extent that medieval arrangements have survived, or not. Key routes within selected towns are then selected and illustrated as a way to explaining the topography and layout of these towns and how one still experiences them. In particular, there is the recurring theme about how the town might naturally draw you through to its centre, the subtlety of character and placing of key buildings as markers, each of which is uniquely different for each town. The drawings which illustrated the town studies are not only beautiful, but can be discriminate in aspects emphasised.
While, individually, the case studies are insightful and full of fascinating history and detail, as the book moves through these towns, themes, patterns and natural groupings of towns emerge. Thus, as a whole, the volume allows comparisons and explores similarities and contrasts which enrich the book's findings and lessons.
Paul Huxley RA (b.1938) has enjoyed a distinguished career both as a painter and a teacher. Huxley's fascinating artistic life, expertly surveyed by Jeremy Lewison, is at last given the attention that it deserves in this, the first monograph on the artist.
Huxley's early interest in abstraction chimed with the dynamism that pulsed through London's art scene in the 1960s. Recognised as a new talent by pioneering curator Bryan Robertson, Huxley enjoyed early success in exhibitions including The New Generation, which opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964. Building from this positive critical reception, and immersing himself in the vibrant artistic communities of London and New York, Huxley built a career characterised by an instinct to push boundaries and find new ways to advance the language of abstract painting. Constantly evolving, the artist's rich body of work, highlights of which are presented here, stands as testament to a life committed to tirelessly investigating and challenging form, space and colour.
The first full-length publication in English on influential modernist landscape designer Mien Ruys, this book offers rich insight into her character and the timeless lessons which can still be learnt from her work.
From 1923 until 1980, Mien Ruys created over 3,000 gardens and landscapes. While most of these are in her native Netherlands, the influence of her designs and approaches spread far wider: many of us will have a little bit of Mien in our gardens, be it a railway sleeper, a diagonal line, a Phlomis russeliana or a water ball. Her work was extraordinary in combining two exceptional elements. Firstly, Mien was one of the leading proponents of modernist design: having trained and collaborated with architects such as Ben Merkelbach, Charles Karsten, Aldo van Eyck, Jan Piet Kloos, Hein Salomonson and Gerrit Rietveld, she introduced clean lines, geometric shapes and innovative materials into garden and landscape design. One of the few women members of CIAM, she was also one of the first to call for architects and landscape architects to collaborate fully from initial design onwards. She did so regularly, often on much needed social housing schemes, but also on schools, hospitals and nursing homes. All her projects shared a desire to offer users a better quality of life. One of her most well-known collaborations was with Gerrit Rietveld in Bergeijk on the Ploeg factory and Park, which has since been listed as a historic monument.
Uniquely, Mien Ruys combined this modernist design approach with an extensive knowledge of plants and planting, which she learnt from a very early age in her father's Royal Moerheim Nursery in Dedemsvaart. Her father had close links with international gardeners, such as Gertrude Jekyll, who greatly influenced Mien as she developed her own loose, natural style of planting. Her book on perennials, published in 1950, was internationally influential and, in seeking deeper understanding about plants and planting, Mien created more than 20 experimental gardens at Dedemsvaart, many of which are now also historic monuments.
Art in Hong Kong is a fascinating analysis of the history, current status and possible future of Hong Kong as an international art hub, written by a local journalist who has reported on the city's cultural landscape for many years. Enid Tsui presents a balanced and insightful picture of recent changes in the city which was once the poster-child of artistic freedom in Asia as well as the undisputed leader of the region's booming contemporary-art market. Some of Hong Kong's traditional advantages now look precarious following new laws imposed by China curbing freedom of expression and the city's long period of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet despite the exodus of talent from Hong Kong and growing uncertainties over the 'red lines' of censorship, there are more world-class art institutions in the city than ever before and the market has proved resilient, with international auction houses and galleries continuing to expand their presence there.
This book lifts the lid on a diverse art scene in a city of fascinating contradictions: a former British colony where artists have long been inspired by the interplay between east and west, and where the new M+ museum and other venues have to tread a tightrope between celebrating a distinct and vibrant culture based on different influences and abiding by the new national security regime.
For sculptors Alfred Gruber (1931-1972) and Jacqueline Stieger (b.1936), their meeting in 1962 marked the start of a bountiful partnership - their artistic chemistry conjuring works that exploited the transformative qualities of common and precious metals. Chronicling their intertwined stories, which saw Gruber reach his pinnacle as a solo artist and Stieger establish innovative sculptural techniques that informed her onward career, their individual achievements are also given due focus in this ambitious publication.
Tracing each artist's early history, their meeting in Switzerland and their eventual move to Yorkshire, the book includes assessment of their work with pioneers of modern church architecture in both Switzerland and the UK, their contribution to the development of art jewellery from the mid-1960s, the debt owed by European artistic friends and collaborators - including David Weiss, later of Fischli and Weiss - who worked for both Gruber and Stieger in the 1960s, and the development of Stieger's artistic language after Gruber's untimely death. Drawing on the Gruber Stieger art collection and supporting archive, together with numerous interviews conducted with Jacqueline Stieger, this book sheds much-needed light on the pair's unique oeuvre, both as a couple and as individuals.
Exploring Emily Young's carved works from the 1980s to the present, Jon Wood's thoughtful survey places her sculpture within its resonant contexts, both art historical and more broadly cultural. In doing so, it draws attention to the richness of her sculptural imagination and the issues that charge it, from ecology and environmentalism to poetry and philosophy. The inclusion of Young's early paintings also draws out her long-standing preoccupation with narrative. Probing the relationship between the artist's sculpture and the material life of things, Young's original way of thinking, seeing and feeling is skilfully presented, so enriching our understanding of this important contemporary figure.
In a painting career spanning half a century, Helen Clapcott (b.1952) has remained consistent in both her choice of subject and her disregard of the art establishment's playbook. In this, the first major monograph on the artist, Andrew Lambirth charts Clapcott's unconventional path and presents a painter with an uncompromising vision.
Clapcott is a painter pre-occupied with the destruction and regeneration of the landscape of her native North-West England. Depictions of the mutation and evolution of what was once Stockport's industrial valley, now a commuter corridor, are expressions of our developing environments and the growth of vernacular townscapes.
Based on numerous conversations with the artist, and an in-depth understanding of Clapcott's oeuvre, Andrew Lambirth's text provides a lively account of the artist's background, training and working methods, including her mastery of tempera. Above all, this is a study of an artist's very personal relationship with the evolving landscape of her childhood and her lifelong artistic engagement with the city that she loves.
Nina Möntmann's timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to 'decentre' their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie, Paris, ANO, Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra or Savvy Contemporary, Berlin), which have the flexibility, based on informal infrastructures, to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South.
For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.
Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) painted pictures that critics praised for their ability to exude the fragrance of field flowers and glow with the plumage of birds. Raised in Salem and long residing in Connecticut, she maintained a studio in New York City, where she exhibited her art for over forty years at the National Academy, American Watercolor Society and other prestigious venues. Transforming flower painting from a domestic outlet for female amateurs to a marketable commodity for professionals, she never wavered in her conviction that women had the right to shape independent careers on their own terms. She delineated both cultivated flowers and clumps of weeds with an intensity of focus unmatched by any other artist of her era. Often, she combined plants with local birds to convey a sophisticated understanding of their environmental interaction that encouraged others to appreciate and conserve nature. She made an extended European tour in the 1860s and regular trips to Great Britain in later years but preferred home nature.
Assembling a cross-section of her stunning oil paintings, watercolours, chromolithographs and illustrated volumes for the first time, and analysing them against letters, diaries and periodical reviews, Fidelia Bridges combines a recovery of the artist's biography with close readings of her artworks. Living an outwardly conventional life, she embraced the bicycle and later the automobile as vehicles of female liberation, cultivated her garden with the skill of a horticulturalist, and left a lasting pictorial legacy to be found in US public museums and private collections nationwide.