Art Publishing Inc. – förlag

Before the Second World War, an art school stood in a pair of mews houses off Kensington High Street in London. Although the school was small and short-lived, it would be linked to an extraordinary range of talent. Leonora Carrington was one of its students; Henry Moore taught there; Francis Bacon and Eduardo Paolozzi both cited its creator as the reason they had become artists. The school bore his name: the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts.  Ozenfant and his school are largely forgotten, yet in the 1920s the man who, with Le Corbusier, invented the style they called Purism, was as well known as Picasso. His academy was a solitary outpost of the Parisian avant-garde in London; Ozenfant was, said France’s education minister, “the man who represented French art in Britain”. As war drew nearer, this lent him an importance that was not just cultural but political. Charles Darwent’s book quietly redraws the history of Anglo-French relations in the late 1930s.  Distributed for Art Publishing Inc.

Selected criticism, essays and lectures by Sir Alan Bowness, critic, art historian and former director of the Tate Gallery. With a foreword by Dawn AdesThis book comprises the selected writings of the eminent art historian, critic and museum director, Sir Alan Bowness (1928-2021). In the 1950s and early 1960s he was a regular and acute critic of contemporary art for Art News and Review, The Observer, The Spectator, Times Literary Review and the New York-based magazine Arts, among others. His reviews were often among the first substantial articles on the post-war generation of British artists, many of whom became his friends, and the first significant writings published in Britain on leading contemporary European and American artists. Many of these important but long out of print articles and essays are re-published here, as are others on the subject Bowness taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art from 1957 to 1980: nineteenth century French painting.Bowness left the Courtauld in 1980 to take up the post of director of the Tate Gallery. Under his leadership, the museum expanded its collection, deepened its commitment to scholarship, established itself as a major patron of contemporary art, not least through the Turner Prize which he initiated, and embarked on an expansion programme that led to the opening of Tate Liverpool, Tate St Ives and a new wing of what is now Tate Britain. His writings on museums (he also set up the Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, and was involved with The Hepworth, Wakefield) and his reflections on criticism and reputation, also published here, remain especially relevant for the present era of mega-museums and art hype.

The story of Ramses Wissa Wassef and the Wissa Wassef Art Center's unique experiment in tapestry weaving that has become world renowned and continues to develop three generations laterOver the past 75 years, the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center in the village of Harrania, near Cairo, has reached world renown through the beauty of its tapestries and the sensitivity of its philosophy. What these works, and the other artistic creations of the centre reveal, is a beautiful truth: that all of us are born with a potential to be artists which, in the right circumstances, can flourish throughout our lives. Today tapestries by the Wissa Wassef weavers grace museums in the Middle East, North America and Europe, but when the project began in the streets of Old Cairo in the early 1940s no one could have predicted it would achieve such recognition. Then its founder Ramses Wissa Wassef was just a young man with an improbable dream. This book tells the story of where that dream came from, how he realised it and the ways in which it continues to develop three generations later.