An uplifting celebration of spring and the power of art against lockdown: Hockney's new iPad drawings, in an intimate sketchbook format

A New York Magazine 2021 holiday gift guide pick

At the beginning of 2020, just as global COVID-19 restrictions were coming into force, David Hockney was at his new house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a method of drawing he has been using for over a decade.

Drawing outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney; we need art, and I do think it can relieve stress, he says. This uplifting publication--produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts--includes 116 of these new iPad drawings and shows to full effect Hockney's singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature. The book begins with an interview with the show's curator, Edith Devaney, in which Hockney discusses his heralding of the spring. It also features augmented reality, an exciting technology that enables smartphones and tablets to recognize printed images and play a related film or animation.

David Hockney (born 1937) is one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. He attended the Royal College of Art in London and exhibited in one of the first British Pop art shows. In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for many years before returning to his native Yorkshire for a time. In addition to painting, Hockney has pursued photography, collage and printmaking as well as digital illustration. He lives and works in Normandy, France.

Three Renaissance masters converge in 1504 Florence

In a single year at the turn of the 16th century, three titans of the Italian Renaissance briefly crossed paths while competing for the attention of the most powerful patrons in Republican Florence. In 1504, the city's prominent artists came together to advise on an appropriate location for Michelangelo's sculpture David. Among them was Leonardo da Vinci, who--like Michelangelo--had only recently returned to his native Florence. David was placed outside the Palazzo Vecchio, inside which da Vinci was planning a painting of the Battle of Anghiari for a council chamber wall. In short order, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Cascina on the opposite side of the room, creating a showdown between the city's celebrated sons. Although neither painting ultimately came to fruition, this flurry of conspicuous commissions was witnessed by a promising young painter: none other than Raphael.
In this beautifully designed book, Scott Nethersole and Per Rumberg take the Royal Academy's celebrated Taddei Tondo by Michelangelo as a starting point, and from there turn to such treasures as Leonardo's Burlington House Cartoon and studies by Leonardo and Michelangelo for their dueling battle murals. These pivotal works examine the rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo, and the influence of both artists on Raphael.

The Royal Academy fetes a founding female member, one of the most celebrated painters of the 18th century

Internationally renowned, highly educated and well connected, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) had a brilliant career as a pioneering history painter, an innovative portraitist and one of only two women among the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. Her patrons included nobility and celebrities across the continent. Apart from her portraits, her history paintings reinvented the genre by almost exclusively featuring female subjects. She was admired by Goethe and Herder, and one Danish diplomat even wrote during her lifetime: the whole world is Angelica-mad.
This exhibition at the Royal Academy, and its corresponding catalog, covers Kauffman's life and work: from her beginnings as a child prodigy and rise to fame in London to her later career across Europe, settling in Rome where her studio became a hub for the city's cultural life. The volume presents some of her most extraordinary artwork, including her self-portraits, history paintings of female subjects such as Circe and Cleopatra, and her ceiling paintings made for the Royal Academy's original location at Somerset House.

Hall's abstract works in gouache and charcoal illustrate his preoccupation with space and balance

One of the foremost sculptors of his generation, Nigel Hall (born 1943) has created acclaimed works in steel, aluminum and polished wood. This new volume reveals his skill as a draftsman and the importance of drawing to his sculptural practice.

A career-spanning survey on Marina Abramovic, created in close collaboration with the legendary performance artist

Over the past half century, Marina Abramovic has earned worldwide acclaim as a pioneer of performance art. In the fall of 2023 the Royal Academy in London is staging a massive exhibition featuring works from her entire career. Re-performances of some of her best-known and most radical works join new works created for the exhibition. Produced in collaboration with the artist, this important publication brings expert voices into the debate that Abramovic's work engenders. How far should an artist push herself in pursuit of her work? What role does the audience play in creating a performance? How can performance art outlive the moment in which it takes place?
Among the book's authoritative authors are Karen Archey, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London; Svetlana Racanovic, Professor of Theory of Contemporary Art in the Faculty of Fine Arts Cetinje at the University of Montenegro; Andrea Tarsia, curator of the exhibition and Director of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy; Devin Zuber, Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion and Literature at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley and George F. Dole Professor of Swedenborgian Studies at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies, Berkeley. In an interview with Tim Marlow, Abramovic reflects on her extraordinary career and expands on the ideas behind the exhibition. Using an image-recognition app, images in the book are linked to video content, so readers can see many of Abramovic's original performance pieces come to life.
Marina Abramovic was born in Belgrade, Serbia, former Yugoslavia, in 1946. Now an icon of performance art, Abramovic is known internationally for her endurance pieces in which she subjects herself to unusual and often extreme conditions. From 1977 to 1988 she worked closely with West German artist Uwe Ulay Laysiepen, with whom she produced several of her most significant works. Her 2010 solo piece The Artist Is Present served in part to introduce a new generation to Abramovic's oeuvre; in this piece, which took place over the course of three months, Abramovic sat at a table in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for eight hours a day as different strangers sat opposite her, holding one another's gaze for a minute each. She is one of the founders of the Marina Abramovic Institute.

Skeletons, demons and ghosts rub shoulders with classically rendered ukiyo-e courtesans

The Japanese artist Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-89) was celebrated for his exciting impromptu painting performances at calligraphy and painting parties. Described by British scholar Timothy Clark as an individualist and an independent, perhaps the last virtuoso in traditional Japanese painting, Kyosai saw Japan transform itself from a feudal country into a modern state. The politically turbulent times in which he lived are reflected in his riotous images, in which skeletons, demons and ghosts rub shoulders with classically rendered ukiyo-e courtesans.
Among his most charming and inventive works are his brilliant depictions of animals--crows, frogs and elephants, among many others--which often stand in for political figures of the day. Overlooked for decades, particularly compared to his earlier counterparts Hokusai and Hiroshige, Kyosai is now celebrated for his ability to bridge popular culture and traditional art. His important place in the art of Japan is here explored in depth by Koto Sadamura, a leading authority on the artist, in this catalog of the exceptionally rich holdings of the Israel Goldman Collection, one of the finest Kyosai collections in the world.

Colonialism and its centuries-long impact on visual culture, from Joshua Reynolds to John Akomfrah

Informed by ongoing research, this handsome publication features the work of artists connected with the Royal Academy in an exploration of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging. Contemporary and historical works are brought together as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, abolition and colonialism, and how it may help set a course for the future. The life-size painted cut-out figures of Lubaina Himid's installation Naming the Money; Hew Locke's Armada, a flotilla of votive boats recalling different periods and places; paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings and prints by Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Mohini Chandra and Betye Saar; and historical works by artists such as Joshua Reynolds, J.M.W. Turner and John Singleton Copley create connections across time that examine questions of power, representation and history.

Exuberant monotypes play with the effects of light and movement in the changing cityscape

Born in London in 1943, Bill Jacklin moved to New York in 1985. Since then he has concentrated on making portraits of the city in all its guises, from large-scale compositions of crowds in flux to Seurat-like etchings depicting more intimate urban moments.

An essential overview of the beloved master colorist and pioneer of American modernism

Born in 1885 to a working-class family in Connecticut, Milton Avery left school at 16 to work in a factory. Intending to study lettering but soon transferring to painting, he attended evening school for 15 years before moving to New York in the 1920s to pursue a career as a painter.
Although he never identified with a particular movement, Avery was a sociable member of the New York art scene. He became a figure of considerable influence for a younger generation of American artists, including Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. His talent was praised by Rothko, who said of his work that the poetry penetrated every pore of the canvas to the last touch of the brush.
With more than 100 color reproductions, this volume is the first overview of Avery's pioneering work in many years. Edith Devaney introduces Avery and his work, while Erin Monroe looks at Avery's early years in Hartford, and Marla Price examines Matisse's influence upon his art. A conversation with the artist's daughter March Avery Cavanaugh and an illustrated chronology by Isabella Boorman complete the book.
Milton Avery (1885-1965) was born in upstate New York and studied at the Connecticut League of Art Students and the Art Society in Hartford before moving to Manhattan, where he began his career, in 1925. His works are in museum collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art, Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Pocket-sized watercolor sketches of tango aficionados

Born in 1942 in Worthing, David Remfry studied at Hull College of Art. His first solo show in London in 1973 has since been followed by more than 50 international solo exhibitions. He is well known both for his large-scale watercolors of dancers, and for his drawings and watercolors of his neighbors and friends at the Hotel Chelsea in New York, where he lived from 1995 to 2016.
Remfry's skill in capturing dancers in movement in spontaneous watercolor is shown to particularly good effect in these pocket-sized sketches of tango aficionados. Characteristically, he shows us neither their heads nor their feet, instead concentrating entirely on their midriffs in this charming celebration of the most seductive and passionate of dances.

The definitive study of the most important movement in postwar American art, now in paperback

Now available in paperback, this is the definitive book on abstract expressionism, with superb color plates of major works by the protagonists of the movement as well as lesser-known figures, and essays by key scholars. Working primarily in New York and San Francisco from the 1940s on, a generation of American artists injected a new sense of confidence in painting, experimenting with improvisation, spontaneity and color. This bold publication reevaluates the movement, making the case that, far from being unified, abstract expressionism was in fact complex and ever-changing. Included here are full-color plates of works by Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin and Jack Tworkov, among others. Among the abundant archival materials are images of Hans Hofmann's famous classes; artists such as Krasner, Frankenthaler, Pollock and de Kooning in their studios; installation shots of some of the key international exhibitions of the era, both internationally and at the galleries of Betty Parsons and others; and photos of famous locations where these artists thrashed out their aesthetic concerns, such as the Cedar Street Tavern. Also featuring a superb chronology of the period, this landmark publication is a thrilling survey of an incredibly energetic moment in American art.

Monochromatic prints and drawings of polar regions, volcanic areas, deserts and other shifting landscapes

Working principally on paper, Emma Stibbon (born 1962) depicts landscapes and environments undergoing dynamic transformation. She undertakes field research alongside geologists and scientists, working from her sketches to create large-scale artworks that testify to the fragility of our existence.

Habits of creation: a thematic overview of Kentridge's multimedia art

The South African artist William Kentridge is internationally renowned for the expressionism of his work in numerous mediums, among them charcoal, printmaking, sculpture and film, as well as his acclaimed theatrical and operatic productions. As elusive as it is allusive, Kentridge's art is shaped by apartheid and grounded in the politics of the post-apartheid era, and in science, literature and history, while always maintaining space for contradiction and uncertainty.
This volume presents early drawings and etchings from Ubu Tells the Truth; stills from Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris and other films; six tapestry works; various drawing series, including Kentridge's drawings of trees on various supports; a model theater; and more. These are punctuated by six meditations on the exhibition's themes by Stephen Clingman: Drawn through Time; The Enigmas of Soho; Shadows of the Past, Shadows of the Present; Dualities, or How I Did Not Become; Timespaces, or Two Dancers; and Coda: Vanishings. Along the way, thought-collages, allusions and assemblages come together to create a connective, dimensional way of thinking inspired by Kentridge's own habits of creation.

Bright, colorful and minimalist, Michael Craig-Martin's paintings and sculptures tackle the semiotics of everyday objects

Michael Craig-Martin (born 1941) is an important figure in British Conceptual Art, and among the most influential artists and teachers of his generation. Since his rise to prominence in the late 1960s, he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and print, creating works that fuse elements of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. His work transforms everyday objects--from buckets and ladders to sneakers, mobile phones and laptops--with bold colors and simple, uninflected lines. Renowned as an art educator, he has inspired generations of artists, most notably the Young British Artists (YBAs). This handsome book, the catalog of the largest exhibition of Craig-Martin's work to have been mounted in the UK, contains thought-provoking text by critics Michael Bracewell and Richard Cork and an illuminating conversation between the artist and the writer Carolina Grau.

Transformative works on paper by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist innovators

Best known for their superlative oils on canvas, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and their contemporaries also regularly used paper as a base for their works. They experimented with materials including watercolor, gouache, pencil, ink and the temperamental pastel. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists often found working on paper to be a better conveyance of the fluctuating surroundings they sought to capture. Their practices transformed the status of these works from preparatory studies left in the studio to works of art in their own right. Indeed, prints and drawings were hung alongside oil paintings in all eight canonical Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886. At the last of these, Degas exclusively exhibited pastels on paper.
This sumptuous collection of some 70 works on paper, exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, includes sketches for well-known masterpieces such as George Seurat's figure of a youth for The Bathers at Asnières (1883) to scenes with no known painted counterpart such as Van Gogh's Entrance to the Pawn Bank, The Hague (1882). Insightful texts by Royal Academy curators and experts in 19th-century European art explore three topics: the artistic development of the Impressionists through their works on paper; the role of drawing in arts education; and commercial innovations to artist's materials that made paper a more popular option. The catalog is arranged chronologically from the 1860s to the 1900s, charting the rapid progress of techniques and subject matter. The bold innovations of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists challenged traditional attitudes and radically transformed the future direction of art, ultimately paving the way for later movements such as Abstract Expressionism.

In 2015 Scottish painter Barbara Rae (born 1943) traveled to Greenland on the trail of her namesake, the surgeon and explorer Dr John Rae. Like the artist, John Rae came from Scotland; in 1846, he traveled to the Arctic, where his cooperation and collaboration with the Inuit--almost unheard of at the time--allowed him to discover the fate of Sir John Franklin's lost expedition, and to confirm the existence of the Northwest Passage. Hiking, sketching and creating paintings in her cabin among the icebergs, Barbara Rae stepped into the snowshoes of John Rae. Through her deft handling of color and line, the frozen tundras of the Arctic jump from the page into life. This publication takes the reader on a journey of discovery from Scotland to the Arctic and back again.

A luminous loneliness: reveries from Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert, rival of Ensor and exponent of Nietzsche and Poe

Although often associated with Belgian symbolism, Léon Spilliaert, largely self-taught as a painter, demonstrated a peculiarly individual style. He was born in the coastal city of Ostend, and created many of his most radical works there. An introvert and insomniac who suffered from poor health as a youth, Spilliaert wandered the night-time streets of the North Sea resort, creating mysterious and highly atmospheric depictions of its dark docks, beaches and promenades. He drew influence from such painters as Odilon Redon and James Abbott McNeill Whistler as well as the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche; his visual explorations of the self and potent images of solitude also align him with European modernists such as Edvard Munch and Vilhelm Hammersh i.

This book brings together more than 100 works from international public and private collections across Belgium, France and the US, including a series of haunting self-portraits that Spilliaert created in his twenties. Various authors, among them the scholar behind the artist's catalogue raisonné, discuss the artist's singular approach and put his career in context alongside that of his more famous compatriot and contemporary James Ensor. Acclaimed Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, in many ways the heir to Spilliaert's legacy, provides a foreword.

Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946) was born in Ostend and moved to Brussels at the age of 20. He lived and worked between the two cities for the rest of his life. From 1903 to 1904 he worked for Edmond Deman in Brussels, a publisher of symbolist writers, whose work Spilliaert was to illustrate; that same year he stayed in Paris, where he discovered the work of Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec, whose influences he acknowledged.

The artist stripped bare by himself: Lucian Freud's self-portraits redefine the genre

In 1964 Lucian Freud set his students at the Norwich College of Art an assignment: to paint naked self-portraits and to make them revealing, telling, believable ... really shameless. It was advice that the artist was often to follow himself. Visceral, unflinching and often nude, Freud's self-portraits chart his biography and give us an insight into the development of his style.

These paintings provide the viewer with a constant reminder of the artist's overwhelming presence, whether he is confronting the viewer directly or only present as a shadow or in a reflection. Freud's exploration of the self-portrait is unexpected and wide-ranging. In this volume, essays by leading authorities, including those who knew him, explore Freud's life and work, and analyze the importance of self-portraiture in his practice.

Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922, and permanently relocated to London in 1933 during the ascent of the Nazi regime. After seeing brief service during World War II, Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London. Despite exhibiting only occasionally over the course of his career, Freud's 1995 portrait Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was sold at auction, at Christie's New York in May 2008, for $33.6 million, setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist. Freud died in London in 2011.

Though little known outside her native country, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is one of Finland's best-loved artists, and has influenced artists far beyond its borders. Her career, which stretched from the late 1870s to the end of World War II, spanned both impressionism and modernism.

Helene Schjerfbeck is published to accompany a major survey exhibition at London's Royal Academy of the Arts, the artist's first solo exhibition in the UK since she exhibited in London in 1890. The full range of her exceptional work is presented, with 70 paintings in all genres, including portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and still lifes. With essays about Schjerfbeck's technique, her social and cultural context and her influence on later artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, this volume offers a thorough introduction to the artist's work and legacy.

Vallotton's vivid, enigmatic and sometimes unsettling paintings and woodcuts made him a key commentator on the social mores of fin-de-siècle Paris

By the end of the 19th century, Paris was the unrivaled capital of the Western art world. Impressionism had transformed the visual arts and post-impressionism was flourishing in its wake; new boulevards and parks had modernized the city; theaters and department stores provided endless opportunities for entertainment and consumption. Artists were seen by many as the avant-garde of a new society.

Into this dynamic world arrived the 16-year-old Félix Vallotton, who became closely involved with a group of artists known as the Nabis, which included Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Vallotton adopted their decorative painterly language, also sharing their interest in journalistic illustration and Japanese ukiyo-e prints. His paintings and woodcuts offered witty and often unsettling observations of domestic and political life, and he is now considered one of the greatest printmakers of his age. As his work evolved, the sharp realism and cool linearity of his later style made him one of the most distinctive artists of the early 20th century.

Generously illustrated throughout with the finest of his paintings and prints, this book accompanies a new presentation of Vallotton's oeuvre in New York and London that includes works never before seen in public and aims to reevaluate his output and legacy. Texts by leading authorities on the artist look at his life, work and reception.

Swiss artist Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) was born in Lausanne, but spent much of his working life in France. Although he produced some of his most important work in Paris in the 1890s in painting and print, his original and innovative approach persisted throughout his career.