Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was the most prolific artist in the history of Western art, producing over two thousand oil paintings, as well as sculptures, ceramics, collages, prints, photographs, drawings and jewellery designs. Drawing extensively on recent research, this book provides an overview of the full range of Picasso’s art and career.
This is easily the best introduction to Turner that I have read in quite a while. It provides an informed audience with an excellent synthesis of the key issues regarding the artist’s life, work, and era… The Turner that emerges here is one that I find entirely congenial and transfixing and the Turner that a larger public should come to know.’ – Professor Kathleen Nicholson, author of Turner’s Classical Landscapes: Myth and Meaning.
He was famous throughout Italy for his fulminating temper, but also for his radical and sensitive humanization of biblical stories, and in particular his decision to include the brutal and dirty life of the street in his paintings. Caravaggio was a rebel and a violent man, but he eyed the world with deep empathy, realism, and an unrelenting honesty.
Salvador Dali is one of the most popular artists in the world, known for his lavish lifestyle, gravity-defying mustache, and bizarre art. This book tells the story of Dali’s life and explores the meaning of his Surrealist paintings.
Antoni Gaudà has a reputation as monastic, mad, and hermetic. But the architect of many of the buildings that define Barcelona’s cityscape was no mad eccentric. He was a genius inspired by his faith in nature and the divine.
Paul Gauguin created some of the most advanced art in a brilliant generation of artists – all of whom struggled against the stifling conformity of the late 19th century’s artistic mainstream.
Modern art begins with Goya. He was the first to create works of art for their own sake, and he lived in a time of incredible cultural and social dynamism when the old concepts of social hierarchy were being shaken by the new concept of equality for all.
Leonardo da Vinci lived an itinerant life. Throughout his career – from its beginnings in the creative maelstrom of fifteenth century Florence to his role as genius in residence at the court of the king of France – Leonardo created a kind of private universe for himself and his work.
Claude Monet is best known as a leader of the Impressionists, his paintings defining the style that triggered a revolution in art. During the eighty-six years of his life, Monet never rested, and was always driven by the urge to paint.
In 1956 Time magazine referred to Pollock as “Jack the Dripper”. His iconic paintings stretch out with the generosity and scale of America’s Western landscape where the artist grew up. Pollock said that he painted “out of his conscious”: the cathartic dribbled paint reflected his troubled mind.
Rembrandt van Rijn is the quintessential Old Master. His intimately observed, vivid and profoundly atmospheric works are what many museum-goers consider traditional painting ought to be. But in his own lifetime Rembrandt was not always so well regarded
‘Davis is a sort of new-fangled Luminist, attuned to visuality in our current variant of the frenetic urbane. Luminism starts from an initial wonder: What is it about objects that allows us to see them?’ – Bill Berkson. Throughout his various bodies of work, Tim Davis photographs ‘grand and gorgeous failures of light to sync…