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Making Her Mark by
Winner, Alcuin Society Book Design Awards Second Prize (Prose Illustrated) and IPPY Award Silver Medal (Fine Arts) Gathering together just over 250 objects, including paintings, prints, scientific illustrations, textiles, sculpture, metalwork and furniture, Making Her Markilluminates the astonishing diversity and breadth of women's contributions to art of the pre-modern era (c. 1400-1800). In this important re-examination of early modern European art, an international team of scholars and curators assess the critical concepts that have shaped Western culture's understanding of what constitutes great art. In its recalibration of gender imbalances, this impressive volume offers an alternative view of the history of European art and sheds light on the collaborative nature of the creation of individual works and the interconnected histories of literature, politics, religion, science, and economics. Ambitious in its scope, Making Her Markis a bold corrective to the historical assumption that female artists of the past were rare and that their work was unremarkable. The result is a dynamic introduction to scores of women artists whose names are entirely new and a long-overdue reassessment of the art, culture, and history of early modern Europe.
Woman in Art by
Griselda Pollock reintroduces an important feminist forerunner in this new, full-colour setting of Helen Rosenau's 1944 book Woman in Art Helen Rosenau (1900-1984) was part of the influential migration of European Jewish intellectuals who fled to Britain and the United States during the 1930s, bringing with them exciting innovations in art history's methods. Only Rosenau, however, centred gender in her analysis. The result--her book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality--is a feminist art-historical project, as relevant today as when it was first published in 1944, in which Rosenau drew on contemporary discussions of gender in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, law, theology, history, and literature. In this new volume, ahead of the eightieth anniversary of its original publication, Rosenau's erudite and accessible text is prefaced with a personal memoir by Adrian Rifkin, who was once her student, new research into the refugee experience by Rachel Dickson, and a portrait of Rosenau as feminist intellectual by Griselda Pollock. In conversation with this new setting of the original text, richly illustrated with colour images, Pollock offers eye-opening new readings of key aspects of Rosenau's methods, concepts, arguments, and interpretations of famous artworks, establishing the place of Rosenau's "little book of 1944" in the historiographies of both feminist thought and cutting-edge art history across two centuries. A digital facsimile of Woman in Art (1944) can be found on the Internet Archive (archive.org)
Pigments by
A concise illustrated history of one of art's most important and elusive elements Over the millennia, humans have used pigments to decorate, narrate, and instruct. Charred bone, ground earth, stones, bugs, and blood were the first pigments. New pigments were manufactured by simple processes such as corrosion and calcination until the Industrial Revolution introduced colors outside the spectrum of the natural world. Pigments brings together leading art historians and conservators to trace the history of the materials used to create color and their invention across diverse cultures and time periods. This richly illustrated book features incisive historical essays and case studies that shed light on the many forms of pigments--the organic and inorganic; the edible and the toxic; and those that are more precious than gold. It shows how pigments were as central to the earliest art forms and global trade networks as they are to commerce, ornamentation, and artistic expression today. The book reveals the innate instability and mutability of most pigments and discusses how few artworks or objects look as they did when they were first created. From cave paintings to contemporary art, Pigments demonstrates how a material understanding of color opens new perspectives on visual culture and the history of art.
Infinity Net by
Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This extraordinary text tells the story of her life and remarkable career in her own words. 'I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions.' Infinity Net reveals Yayoi Kusama as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty-stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde.
Vermeer and the Art of Love Hb by
Vermeer and the Art of Love is about the emotions evoked in those elegant interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter's attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. In this engaging and beautifully illustrated book, Georgievska-Shine uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries to give the reader a fascinating insight into his unique understanding and interpretation of the subject.
Nonconformers by
A global history of self-taught artists advocating for a nuanced understanding of modern and contemporary art often challenged by the establishment When the art world has paid attention to makers from outside the cultural establishment, including so-called outsider and self-taught artists, it has generally been within limiting categories. Yet these artists, including many women, people with disabilities, and people of color, have had a transformative influence on the history of modern art. Responding to growing interest in these artists, this book offers a nuanced history of their work and how it has been understood from the early twentieth century to the present day. Nonconformers includes work by well-known figures such as Henry Darger, Hilma af Klint, and Bill Traylor alongside many other artists who deserve widespread recognition. After reviewing how self-taught artists factored into key movements of twentieth-century art, the book shifts to highlighting the voices of contemporary practitioners through new interviews with artists William Scott, Mamadou Cissé, and George Widener. An international group of contributors addresses topics such as the development of the Black Folk Art movement in America and l'Art Brut in France, the creative process of self-taught artists working outside of traditional studios, and the themes of figuration, landscape, and abstraction. Global in scope and with chronological breadth, this alternative narrative is an essential introduction to the genre long known as "Outsider Art."
Venice by
A Sunday Times Art Book of the Year A visual journey through five centuries of the city known for centuries as 'La Serenissima' - a unique and compelling story for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art. Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm. The achievements of the Bellini brothers, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese are a key part of this story. Nowhere else has been depicted by so many great painters in so many diverse styles and moods. Venetian views were a speciality of native artists such as Canaletto and Guardi, but the city has also been represented by outsiders: J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Howard Hodgkin, and many more. Then there are those who came to look at and write about art. The reactions of Henry James, George Eliot, Richard Wagner and others enrich this tale. Nor is the story over. Since the advent of the Venice Biennale in the 1890s, and the arrival of pioneering modern art collector Peggy Guggenheim in the late 1940s, the city has become a shop window for the contemporary art of the whole world, and it remains the site of important artistic events. In this elegant volume, Gayford - who has visited Venice countless times since the 1970s, covered every Biennale since 1990, and even had portraits of himself exhibited there on several occasions - takes us on a visual journey through the past five centuries of the city known 'La Serenissima', the Most Serene. It is a unique and compelling portrait of Venice that will delight lovers of the city and lovers of its art.
Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business of Art by
A new account of the renowned Baroque painter, revealing how her astute professional decisions shaped her career, style, and legacy Art has long been viewed as a calling--a quasi-religious vocation that drives artists to seek answers to humanity's deepest questions. Yet the art world is a risky, competitive business that requires artists to make strategic decisions, especially if the artist is a woman. In Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business of Art, Christopher Marshall presents a new account of the life, work, and legacy of the Italian Baroque painter, revealing how she built a successful four-decade career in a male-dominated field--and how her business acumen has even influenced the resurrection of her reputation today, when she has been transformed from a footnote of art history to a globally famous artist and feminist icon. Combining the most recent research with detailed analyses of newly attributed paintings, the book highlights the business considerations behind Gentileschi's development of a trademark style as she marketed herself to the public across a range of Italian artistic centers. The disguised self-portraits in her early Florentine paintings are reevaluated as an effort to make a celebrity brand of her own image. And, challenging the common perception that Gentileschi's only masterpieces are her early Caravaggesque paintings, the book emphasizes the importance of her neglected late Neapolitan works, which are reinterpreted as innovative responses to the conventional practices of Baroque workshops. Artemisia Gentileschi and the Business of Art shows that Gentileschi's remarkable success as a painter was due not only to her enormous talent but also to her ability to respond creatively to the continuously evolving trends and challenges of the Italian Baroque art world.
Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography by
The first English-language volume about Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography who helped transform the burgeoning medium into an art form. Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) is often characterized as an underdog in the early history of photography. From the outset, his contribution to the invention of the medium was eclipsed by others such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877). However, Bayard had an undeniable role in the birth of photography and its subsequent evolution into a form of art. He was a pioneer in artistic style, innovator in terms of practice, and teacher of the next generation of photographers. Alongside an exploration of Bayard's decades-long career and lasting impact, this volume presents--for the first time in print--some of the earliest photographs in existence. An album containing nearly 200 images, 145 of those by or attributed to Bayard, is among the Getty Museum's rarest and most treasured photographic holdings. Few prints have ever been seen in person due to the extreme light sensitivity of Bayard's experimental processes, making this an essential reference for scholars and enthusiasts of the very beginning of photography. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from April 9 to July 7, 2024.