John-Paul Stonard – författare

The Books That Shaped Art History provides an invaluable roadmap of the field by reassessing the impact of the most important texts of art history published during the 20th century. Each of the sixteen incisive chapters, focusing on a single book, is written by a leading art historian, curator or one of the promising scholars of today. In bringing these cross-generational contributions together, the book presents a varied and invaluable overview of the history of art, told through its most enduring literature. Each essay – with writers including John Elderfield, Boris Groys, Susie Nash and Richard Verdi – analyses a single major work, mapping the intellectual development of its author, setting out the premises and argument of the book, discussing its position within the field of art history, and looking at its significance in the context both of its initial reception and its legacy. Enlivening debates and questioning the very status of art history itself, this is a concise and brilliant study of the discipline and an invaluable resource for anyone interested in visual culture and its histories.

Germany Divided explores a selection of unpublished and unseen works from some of the leading names in contemporary art. Showcased are key works from six artists who re-defined art in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century: Georg Baselitz; Marcus Lüpertz; Blinky Palermo; A.R. Penck; Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. In-depth biographical essays on each artist show how the division of Germany into separate states affected their work; and the importance of the experience of migration from East to West. The new consumer culture in the West contrasted starkly with the planned economy of the East. Artists on both side of the Wall were faced with the difficult emotional task of negotiating with the past; not only the recent history of the Third Reich, but the ‘lost’ traditions of German painting, particularly Expressionism, from which they had been cut adrift. Germany Divided explores the work of these artists in the broader historical context of Germany and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how these debates placed crucial emphasis on the creation and display of art. Graphic traditions, reaching back through Expressionism to older traditions of print-making in Germany, were an essential part of the reconstruction of artistic life, and a basis for the phenomenal international success of German art on an international stage in the decades to follow.

From the 1960s drawing assumed a prominent position in the practice of a rising generation of post-war artists in Germany and Austria. This publication examines works on paper by four artists still comparatively little known in the UK. While Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter, household names in German contemporary art, are well known for their large and commanding works, a quieter and more reflective strand is found in the work of Rudi Tröger (b. 1929), Karl Bohrmann (1928–1998) and Carl-Heinz Wegert (1926–2007). Small and intimate in scale, their drawings focus on the abstracted, minimalist figure, the studio interior and landscapes, through a sensitive use of line and a spare, self-effacing gesturalism. By contrast, the Austrian actionist Hermann Nitsch (1938–2022) presents visceral depictions of the human anatomy in his large lithographs, which come out of his notorious actionist performances. This publication celebrates a second major gift to the British Museum from the German collector Count Christian Duerckheim, whose first gift featured in Germany Divided: Baselitz and his generation, published by the British Museum Press in 2014.

This stunning volume provides an enchanting visit to one of the most storied and beautiful English country houses.No place embodies the spirit of the English country house better than Chatsworth. From best-selling books such as Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshireand Chatsworth: The House by Deborah Mitford, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, American audiences have long been transfixed by this remarkable place and its extraordinary collection of art and decorative objects. Today, Chatsworth’s facade is newly cleaned and its windows freshly gilded. The forward-looking current Duke of Devonshire, who likes to say that “everything was new once,” has redone the public and private rooms. This tour-de-force volume is his telling of the story of Chatsworth through seven historical periods accompanied by stunning photo-graphic portraits of the house, its collections, and the grounds. Chatsworth contains countless treasures from Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Antonio Canova’s Endymion to seminal modern works by Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Though filled with works from different time periods, the collection represents the very best of the “new” from each artistic era.

This stunning volume provides an enchanting visit to one of the most storied and beautiful English country houses.No place embodies the spirit of the English country house better than Chatsworth. From best-selling books such as Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshireand Chatsworth: The House by Deborah Mitford, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, American audiences have long been transfixed by this remarkable place and its extraordinary collection of art and decorative objects. Today, Chatsworth’s facade is newly cleaned and its windows freshly gilded. The forward-looking current Duke of Devonshire, who likes to say that “everything was new once,” has redone the public and private rooms. This tour-de-force volume is his telling of the story of Chatsworth through seven historical periods accompanied by stunning photo-graphic portraits of the house, its collections, and the grounds. Chatsworth contains countless treasures from Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Antonio Canova’s Endymion to seminal modern works by Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Though filled with works from different time periods, the collection represents the very best of the “new” from each artistic era.

**SELECTED AS A BEST ART BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE SUNDAY TIMES**'Stonard traverses the sweep of human history, moving between cultures and hemispheres ... His book consists of myriad flashes of brilliance and inventiveness' LITERARY REVIEW'A worthy and richly illustrated successor to Ernst Gombrich's fabled The Story of Art' SUNDAY TIMES'This bountifully illustrated book is a history of connections ... Lucid and thoughtful' COUNTRY LIFE_____________________________________A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind’s creative impulse.Fifty thousand years ago on an island in Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a pig on a limestone cave wall.Around the same time in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from a fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind.Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around them, and to thrive. Now, art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art – from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist on America's Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting and on to Rachel Whiteread's House.Brilliantly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Stonard's Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind’s creative impulse, and asks how – and why – we create.