How do we know Islamic art? What tells us that images and artifacts are products of the Muslim world, a culture that has historically extended from Spain to Southeast Asia and spanned a period from A.
James Stirling (1924-1992) is acclaimed as the most influential and controversial modern British architect. His partnership with James Gowan (b. 1923) between 1956 and 1963 put postwar British archite
James Wyatt (1746–1813) is widely recognized as the most celebrated and prolific English architect of the 18th century. At the start of his lengthy career, Wyatt worked on designs for the Oxford Stree
Inigo Jones (1573-1652) is widely acknowledged to have been England's most important architect. As court designer to the Stuart kings James I and Charles I, he is credited with introducing the classic
"Under the rule of Henry VII (r. 1485-1509) England became a powerful nation. The Tudor court sought to express its worldliness and political clout through major artistic commissions, employing Floren
From their early beginnings in the Restoration until the final closure in Queen Victoria's reign, Vauxhall Gardens developed from a rural tavern and place of assignation into a dream-world filled with
By the time of Richard Parkes Bonington's tragic death from tuberculosis in 1828, the 25-year-old artist, who was born in England and moved to France as a teenager, was already a seminal figure in the
To speak of 'the British' in conjunction with 'the Modern' suggests a linkage that goes against the grain of the narrative which dominates our understanding of the history of western art from the eigh
Pacific Art in Detail introduces the riches of Oceanic art through astonishing close-up views of rarely seen treasures, allowing behind-the-scenes insight into this vibrant work that no conventional g
The late 17th and early 18th centuries saw profound changes in Britain and in its visual arts. This volume provides fresh perspectives on the art of the late Stuart and early Georgian periods, focusin
Discusses the group of modern artists known as The Blue Rider, who met and became friends in Munich and went on to portray in their art a highly imaginative view of the world around them.
Explores how still-life paintings can look three-dimensional, how open doors can lead nowhere, and how other optical illusions are created in paintings by artists ranging from Raphael to Escher.
Realism in the art of the twentieth century is striking for its diversity. Although not bound together stylistically or by a manifesto of intention, a common thread in realist art is a commitment to the modern world and to things as they appear, whether it be the domestic claustrophobia depicted in Sickert's 'Ennui' or the social observation of urban nightlife in Weimar Germany in the work of Christian Schad and Georg Schrimpf. James Malpas examines the so-called 'socialist realism' of Stalin's Soviet Union and the condemnation of artists and works not conforming to the acadmic-realist scruples of Adolf Hitler. With the triumph of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s realism may have been thought outmoded, but its varied and vibrant quality was to be revealed in the 'Pop Art' backlash in the United States and Britain, in the work of David Hockney, Richard Hamilaton, and Andy Warhol.
Surrealism was one of the most interesting and influential art movements of the twentieth century. A collective adventure begun by a small group of intellectuals in Paris in the early 1920s, amongst them Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, its influence was felt through the rest of continenal Europe and in Britain, the Americas, Mexico, and Japan. This introduction offers new insights into the complexities of the Surrealist imagination. It documents how the artists met, the relationship of Surrealism to Dada, and the influences that informed the movement, particularly the work of Sigmund Freud. The position of women, as Surrealist subject matter as well as artists in their own right, is also examined.
