Sarah Lea – författare

The first monograph to explore the narrative, dreamlike paintings of British artist Tom AnholtThrough layered storytelling and vivid allegory, Tom Anholt’s paintings traverse between the cosmic and the everyday. Anholt constructs serene, psychologically rich scenes in which the natural meets the manmade, often illuminated by glowing moonlight that reflects off watery expanses. His modern-day fables speak to our perpetual and vital desire for wonderment, human interaction, and love.This book, the first to survey his career from 2016 to the present, shows the range of Anholt’s work through a selection of sixty carefully chosen paintings. An art-historical overview is followed by short texts on individual paintings from world-leading curators as well as writers that cross the disciplines Anholt is drawn to, including music, education, and astrophysics.

The novelist, poet and politician, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) was a towering figure in French 19th-century public life. The author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame became a symbol of the French Republic’s ideals of equality and freedom during his long exile in the Channel Islands. His ink-and-wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes may be less well known than his writings, but they inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists, including the Surrealists; Vincent van Gogh compared them to ‘astonishing things’.This handsome book – the catalogue of an exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Paris Musées – Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque nationale de France – includes new texts by leading authorities on Hugo and reproductions of many of his finest works on paper, from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and experiments in abstraction.