James Cahill – författare

From Neolithic painted petroglyphs, early paintings on silk, and landscapes by twelfth-century literati to the traditional handscrolls being produced today, Chinese painting has always had the power to enthrall. This magnificent book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some three thousand years. Drawing on museum collections, archives, and archaeological sites in China—including many resources never before available to Western scholars—as well as on collections in other countries, the authors present and analyze the very best examples of Chinese painting: more than 300 of them are reproduced here in color. Both accessible to the general reader and revelatory for the scholar, the book provides the most up-to-date and detailed history of China’s pictorial art available today.In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found—in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting.Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture & Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes.Published in association with Foreign Languages Press, Beijing

In The Painter's Practice, James Cahill reveals the intricacies of the painter's life with respect to payment and patronage--an approach that is still largely absent from the study of East Asian art. Drawing upon such unofficial archival sources as diaries and letters, Cahill challenges the traditional image of the disinterested amateur scholar-artist, unconcerned with material rewards, that has been developed by China's literati, perpetuated in conventional biographies, and abetted by the artists themselves. His work fills in the hitherto unexplored social and economic contexts in which painters worked, revealing the details of how painters in China actually made their living from the sixteenth century onward. Considering the marketplace as well as the studio, Cahill reviews the practices and working conditions of artists outside the Imperial Court such as the employment of assistants and the use of sketchbooks and prints by earlier artists for sources of motifs.As loose, flamboyant brushwork came into vogue, Cahill argues, these highly imitable styles ironically facilitated the forger's task, flooding the market with copies, sometimes commissioned and signed by the artists themselves. In tracing the great shift from seeing the painting as a picture to a concentration on the painter's hand, Cahill challenges the archetype of the scholar-artist and provides an enlightened perspective that profoundly changes the way we interpret familiar paintings.

A panoramic view of 1960s LA and Californian culture through the eyes of artist and subject: the youthful fascination of David Hockney and the knowing gaze of enigmatic socialite Betty Freeman. In the summer of 1966, David Hockney paid a visit to a wealthy Los Angeles art collector. Her name was Betty Freeman. He had intended to paint her swimming pool, but was rapidly entranced by Freeman herself. Hockney, soon to embark on a series of Los Angeles paintings that would become icons of their time and place, immortalized Freeman in Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a sunlit vision of the collector on the terrace of her modernist home. Evoking the light and easy glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, the painting is one of the artist’s most seductive works, but it has always carried an air of mystery. Who was the woman in pink? Like Hockney driving through the Hollywood Hills, James Cahill meanders – interweaving the artist’s discovery of Los Angeles with Freeman’s own evolution from aspiring pianist to photographer, philanthropist and collector – but never loses focus on the art. Oscillating between art history and anecdote, this is an eclectic study of an artist, his enigmatic muse and the beginning of a friendship that would shape the course of each of their lives.

In this groundbreaking book, James Cahill expands the field of Chinese pictorial art history, opening both scholarly studies and popular appreciation to vernacular paintings, 'pictures for use and pleasure'. These were works commissioned and appreciated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the non-elites of Chinese society, including women. Traditional Chinese collectors, like present-day scholars of Chinese painting, have favored the 'literati' paintings of the Chinese male elite, disparaging vernacular works, often intended as decorations or produced to mark a special occasion. Cahill challenges the dominant dogma and doctrine of the literati, showing how the vernacular images, both beautiful and appealing, strengthen our understanding of High Qing culture. They bring to light the Qing or Manchu emperors' fascination with erotic culture in the thriving cities of the Yangtze Delta and demonstrate the growth of figure painting in and around Beijing's imperial court. They also revise our understanding of gender roles and show how Chinese artists made use of European styles.By introducing a large, rich body of works, "Pictures for Use and Pleasure" opens new windows on later Chinese life and society.

Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award“A book of immense breadth...With its profundity and richness...this book is one no serious student of Chinese art can afford to be without.”—Ellen Johnston Laing, Ars OrientalisThe definitive study of the evolution of Chinese painting during the tumultuous seventeenth century.In The Compelling Image, one of the foremost experts on Chinese art explores the radiant paintings produced during the tumultuous period of the Manchu conquest of China. As the Ming dynasty crumbled, brilliant masters of the seventeenth century reconsidered their artistic relationship to nature and to the painting of earlier times, while European pictorial arts introduced by Jesuit missionaries profoundly influenced Chinese techniques.James Cahill’s authoritative survey begins with a relatively neglected artist, Chang Hung, who moved traditional forms ever closer to literal descriptions of nature, in contrast with the theorist painter Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, who turned the same traditional forms into powerful abstractions. A chapter focused on Wu Pin offers bold and controversial arguments about the impact of European art, as well as a related phenomenon: the revival of the highly descriptive early Sung styles. Looking closely at Ch’en Hung-shou, the greatest of the late Ming figure painters, Cahill examines a curious mixing of real people and conventionally rendered surroundings in portrait art of the period. He analyzes the expressionist experiments of the masters known as Individualists, and distinguishes these artists from the Orthodox school, concluding with a bold reassessment of the most eloquent of later Chinese painters, Tao-chi.Richly illustrated with over 250 images drawn from collections in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China, The Compelling Image is an essential guide to an exquisite era of Chinese art history.

Creating paintings with poetic resonances, sometimes with ties to specific lines of poetry, is a practice that began in China in the eleventh century, the Northern Sung period. James Cahill vividly surveys its first great flowering among artists working in the Southern Sung capital of Hangchou, probably the largest and certainly the richest city on earth in this era. He shows us the revival of poetic painting by late Ming artists working in the prosperous city of Suchou. And we learn how artists in Edo-period Japan, notably the eighteenth-century Nanga masters and the painter and haiku poet Yosa Buson, transformed the style into a uniquely Japanese vehicle of expression.In all cases, Cahill shows, poetic painting flourished in crowded urban environments; it accompanied an outpouring of poetry celebrating the pastoral, escape from the city, immersion in nature. An ideal of the return to a life close to nature—the “lyric journey”—underlies many of the finest, most moving paintings of China and Japan, and offers a key for understanding them.

The inaugural collection in the new VERVE Voices series, Queerphoria is a joyful and defiant queer-authored anthology proudly supporting Switchboard, the national LGBTQIA+ support line.Four housemates welcome the reader into their home for a birthday party. An elderly widow visits her first queer bar, beneath the flat she shared with her husband. A couple invite a shipwrecked sailor into their isolated lighthouse on the stormy night of their thirtieth anniversary. A single woman embarks on a romantic relationship with a sex robot. A married couple secretly prepare for their baby's arrival in a world where procreation is controlled by the Establishment.Through prose, poetry, essays, illustrations and more, thirty-one writers bring their visions of euphoria to life. These pages celebrate, subvert, expand and reimagine what joy can look like, even in uncertain times.

'An enthrallingly intricate novel . . . impressive'GUARDIAN'There's something of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the way Cahill writes about the very rich'DAILY MAIL'A biting satire of the art world's glamour, pomp and greed . . . lucid and evocative'DAILY TELEGRAPH'I really loved The Violet Hour . . . On one level it functions as a highbrow whodunnit, and grippingly so, but it's much more than that, building into a meditation on mortality and the unreliable consolations of art, love and materialism'PATRICK GALE, author of Mother's Boy'A thrilling story told in seductive, shimmering prose. Beauty, money, power, seduction, betrayal. It's all here in this bewitching and all too often troubling backstage pass to the commercial art world'CHLOË ASHBY, author of Wet Paint'I'm overwhelmed by the beauty of James Cahill's writing and storytelling'SANTANU BHATTACHARYA, author of Deviants'Artists are slaves to their vanity. But in the end, in time, they see things as they really are.'Thomas Haller has achieved the kind of fame that most artists only dream of: shows in London and New York, paintings sold for a fortune. The vision he presents to the world is one of an untouchable genius at the top of his game. It is also a lie. Who is the real Thomas Haller? His oldest friend and former dealer, Lorna, might once have known - before Thomas traded their early intimacy for international fame. Between his ruthless new dealer and a property mogul obsessed with his work, the appetite for Thomas and his art is all-consuming. On the eve of his latest show, the luminaries of the art world gather. But the sudden death of a young man has put everyone on edge, and a chain of events begins that will lead the friends back into the past, to confront who they have become. A story of deception, power play and longing, The Violet Hour exposes the unsettling underbelly of the art world, asking: who is granted admission to a world that only seems to glitter and who is left outside, their faces pressed to the glass?PRAISE FOR TIEPOLO BLUE'The best novel I have read for ages . . . masterly'STEPHEN FRY'An exhilarating, erudite read'VOGUE.COM'Electric'GUARDIAN'Startlingly impressive'DAILY MAIL

'An enthrallingly intricate novel . . . impressive'GUARDIAN'There's something of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the way Cahill writes about the very rich'DAILY MAIL'A biting satire of the art world's glamour, pomp and greed . . . lucid and evocative'DAILY TELEGRAPH'A highbrow whodunnit, and grippingly so, but it's much more than that'PATRICK GALE, author of Mother's Boy'As sensuous and glimmering as it is dark and unsettling . . . a novel to get sucked into'JENNY MUSTARD, author of Okay Days'It's brilliant . . . the human drama of it is just pitch perfect . . . Hypnotic'SEÁN HEWITT, author of All Down Darkness Wide'Artists are slaves to their vanity. But in the end, in time, they see things as they really are.'Thomas Haller has achieved the kind of fame that most artists only dream of: shows in London and New York, paintings sold for a fortune. The vision he presents to the world is one of an untouchable genius at the top of his game. It is also a lie. Who is the real Thomas Haller? His oldest friend and former dealer, Lorna, might once have known - before Thomas traded their early intimacy for international fame. Between his ruthless new dealer and a property mogul obsessed with his work, the appetite for Thomas and his art is all-consuming.On the eve of his latest show, the luminaries of the art world gather. But the sudden death of a young man has put everyone on edge, and a chain of events begins that will lead Thomas and Lorna back into the past, to confront who they have become. A story of deception, power play and longing, The Violet Hour exposes the unsettling underbelly of the art world, asking: who is granted admission to a world that only seems to glitter and who is left outside, their faces pressed to the glass?

'An enthrallingly intricate novel . . . impressive'GUARDIAN'There's something of F. Scott Fitzgerald about the way Cahill writes about the very rich'DAILY MAIL'A biting satire of the art world's glamour, pomp and greed . . . lucid and evocative'DAILY TELEGRAPH'The real deal . . . The Violet Hour offers a convincing and compelling portrait of a very rarefied world'NEW YORK TIMES'A highbrow whodunnit, and grippingly so, but it's much more than that'PATRICK GALE, author of Mother's Boy'It's brilliant . . . the human drama of it is just pitch perfect . . . Hypnotic'SEÁN HEWITT, author of All Down Darkness Wide'Artists are slaves to their vanity. But in the end, in time, they see things as they really are.'Thomas Haller has achieved the kind of fame that most artists only dream of: shows in London and New York, paintings sold for a fortune. The vision he presents to the world is one of an untouchable genius at the top of his game. It is also a lie. Who is the real Thomas Haller? His oldest friend and former dealer, Lorna, might once have known - before Thomas traded their early intimacy for international fame. Between his ruthless new dealer and a property mogul obsessed with his work, the appetite for Thomas and his art is all-consuming.On the eve of his latest show, the luminaries of the art world gather. But the sudden death of a young man has put everyone on edge, and a chain of events begins that will lead Thomas and Lorna back into the past, to confront who they have become. A story of deception, power play and longing, The Violet Hour exposes the unsettling underbelly of the art world, asking: who is granted admission to a world that only seems to glitter and who is left outside, their faces pressed to the glass?

'The best novel I have read for ages. My heart was constantly in my throat as I read . . . There is so much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in' Stephen Fry'Meticulous and atmospheric . . . delicious unease and pervasive threat give this assured first novel great singularity and a kind of gothic edge' Michael Donkor, GuardianCambridge, 1994. Professor Don Lamb is a revered art historian at the height of his powers, consumed by the book he is writing about the skies of the Venetian master Tiepolo. However, his academic brilliance belies a deep inexperience of life and love. When an explosive piece of contemporary art is installed on the lawn of his college, it sets in motion Don's abrupt departure from Cambridge to take up a role at a south London museum. There he befriends Ben, a young artist who draws him into the anarchic 1990s British art scene and the nightlife of Soho. Over the course of one long, hot summer, Don glimpses a liberating new existence. But his epiphany is also a moment of self-reckoning, as his oldest friendship - and his own unexamined past - are revealed to him in a devastating new light. As Don's life unravels, he suffers a fall from grace that shatters his world into pieces.'A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling . . . wildly enjoyable' Financial Times'Tiepolo Blue really has blown me away . . . The last debut novel I read that had this much talent buzzing around inside it was Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library.' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

***OUT NOW: James Cahill's new novel THE VIOLET HOUR***SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB FIRST NOVEL AWARD'Divine . . . the smart, sexy read you need' Evening Standard'Startlingly impressive' Daily Mail'An electric new novel' GuardianExiled from his university position for an inexcusable blunder, art historian Don Lamb flees to London, a city alive with sex and creativity. There, over the course of a long, hot summer, as he is immersed in the anarchic art and gay scenes of the mid-90s, Don sees his carefully curated life irrevocably changed. But his epiphany is also a reckoning, as his unexamined past is revealed to him in a devastating new light.Intense and atmospheric, Tiepolo Blue traces Don's turbulent awakening, and his desperate flight from art into life.'Wildly enjoyable . . . A novel that combines formal elegance with gripping storytelling' Financial Times'Dizzying and exciting and unsettling, and beautifully told' Reverend Richard Coles, Daily Mail

Matisse or Kahlo - Hirst or Emin - whose artworks have been the most influential? The most shocking? The most expensive? These cards allow art lovers of all ages to play off popular artists and compare them to the trailblazing women we should all know...the battle to redefine the art world is on!

Maggi Hambling has over time responded to the sound of song in her work, consistently capturing it in gold against a black ground—to date her diverse subjects have included the singers Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, P J Harvey, and Will Young. More recently, and following a night spent in the Sussex wilderness in the company of folk singer Sam Lee listening to the song of the nightingale, the artist embarked on a new series of paintings, capturing the song of this small migratory songbird.  James Cahill’s text places Hambling’s striking new nightingale series in context and considers the long history of the nightingale, which has been celebrated by writers, poets, artists and musicians for thousands of years.  Distributed for Pallant House Gallery

The latest addition to the 'Lives of the Artists' series: highly readable short biographies of the world's greatest artistsDavid Hockney is the most famous living British artist. And he is arguably one of the more famous American artists as well. Emerging from the north of England in the 1960s, he made quite a splash in Swinging London as a portaitist, and went on to make a even bigger splash in Los Angeles when he moved there in the 1970s. His figurative paintings of the 1970s and 1980s captured the zeitgeist of West Coast living, while he also explored new avenues by constructing mosaics out of polaroids. By the beginning of the millennium, he returned to his Yorkshire roots, embarking on a new period of painting. This came to an end with the death by misadventure in his home of a young studio assistant in 2013. He went 'home' to LA and has in the intervening years begun a new period of contemplative portraiture.

Featuring an exceptional range of reproductions of Maggi Hambling's work, including unique archival materials, this authoritative and visually stunning new volume offers the most comprehensive account of Hambling s oeuvre to date. Essays by leading critics, curators, and art historians trace Hambling s formative period from her time at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in the early 1960s, to her rise to fame in the 80s, the centrality of drawing to her eclectic practice, and the virtuoso series of paintings that have defined her output in recent decades. Hambling's work and legacy are explored in vivid detail here, emphasizing her importance to British art over the past half century, as well as her singular place in the global sphere of contemporary art. Love, death, and remembrance are revealed as her enduring themes, and are reflected in her intimate portraits as much as her epic-scaled evocations of war, the climate emergency, and the natural world. Shining a light on Hambling's fearless spirit, this tour-de-force publication takes you deep into the heart and mind of one of the most influential and provocative artists of her generation.