Alison Rowley – författare

This ground-breaking and extraordinary examination of the work of Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler overturns assumptions about the artist, whose work has been burdened by its label as ‘the bridge between Pollock and what was possible’. Trained as a painter, Alison Rowley brings a keen eye to Frankenthaler’s paintings, returning to the fore the artist’s debt not only to Jackson Pollock but also to Cezanne, and speculating for the first time as to her artistic responses to wider political events, in particular the Rosenberg trial.Making a fascinating case, too, for the connections between the ‘breakthrough’ work Mountains and Sea and Lily Briscoe’s painting in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, this beautifully written book provides crucial insights into Frankenthaler’s practice.With her bold and radical painting now appearing in major international exhibitions, this paperback re-issue of Rowley’s original 2007 study comes at a significant moment of reappraisal, and confirms Frankenthaler’s status as one of the most important artists of her generation.

During the fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary eras, picture postcards were an important medium of communication for Russians of all backgrounds. In Open Letters, the most comprehensive study of Russian picture postcards to date, Alison Rowley uses this medium to explore a variety of aspects of Russian popular culture. The book is lavishly illustrated with more than 130 images, most of which have never been published before.Through her examinations of postcards, Rowley addresses a diverse range of topics: how landscape postcards conveyed notions of imperialism; the role of postcards in the rise of celebrity culture; depictions of the body on erotic and pornographic postcards; how postcards were employed to promote differing interpretations of the First World War; and the use of postcards by revolutionary groups seeking to overthrow the Tsarist government. Rowley determines the extent to which Russia was embedded in Europe-wide cultural trends by situating the Russian case within a larger European context.