Piano Nobile Publications – förlag

Peter Coker: Mind and Matter is a fully-illustrated catalogue presenting a selection of exceptional works by Peter Coker (1926-2004), bringing together pieces spanning the early 1950s through to the mid-1980s. The first publication focusing on Coker’s works in over a decade, the catalogue will seek to reassess Coker’s contribution to post-war figurative British art. Situating Coker within his contemporary British zeitgeist, Peter Coker: Mind and Matter will also focus on the significance of international artists to Coker’s work, particularly Gustave Courbet and Nicolas de Staël. Undertaking modern day pilgrimages across France, Coker toured the sites favoured by the artists he revered, filtering their influence through the specificity of place. Coker was too talented an artist to mimic, but with acute sensitivity and perception, his vision of the world was constantly altered by the art that touched him. Correspondingly, his mode of depiction was subject to an ever-persistent evolution but with the materiality of paint and the primacy of process always at the heart of his practice. In Coker’s words: “I think when you see exhibitions…you challenge your own thoughts, you refurbish the mind and eye, you are remoulded.”The publication includes an introductory essay, a catalogue of carefully selected works with accompanying descriptions, a chronology, a bibliography, and numerous colour illustrations.

Sickert: The Theatre of Life explores the human side of Walter Sickert's art. Among the sources of inspiration which sustained him over a long career, none won him so much acclaim and infamy as the human face and body. After a short period as an actor, he spent his life fashioning new identities for himself and his sitters. This fully-illustrated book provides an overview of Sickert's figurative work, from theatre subjects in the 1880s, through Camden Town period nudes, concluding with visionary late works including photo-based paintings and his controversial 'English Echoes'. The publication features essays by leading specialists on Sickert's work. Richard Shone has written an introduction and catalogue entries which provide new information about the artist's friends and sitters. Wendy Baron has contributed a memoir about her 'life with Sickert' and a scholarly article about a newly-discovered painting by the artist. Also included are first-hand accounts of Sickert written by Basil Jonzen and Duncan Grant.

Augustus John & the First Crisis of Brilliance tells the story of a remarkable generation and its artistic achievements. Accompanying Piano Nobile’s exhibition of the same title, the publication explores the artistic networks around Augustus John before the First World War. John was closely acquainted with many of his highly talented contemporaries and this publication considers his relationship to Jacob Epstein, James Dickson Innes, Gwen John, Henry Lamb, Derwent Lees, Wyndham Lewis and William Orpen. The publication includes an introductory essay by Dr David Boyd Haycock discussing Augustus John and the notion of genius. A selection of over forty paintings, drawings and sculptures illuminates some of the key themes at play in John’s milieu, and each work is accompanied by thoroughly researched catalogue entries by Dr Haycock. Themes and subjects include friendship and family portraits, the muses Dorelia McNeill and Euphemia Lamb, and the landscapes of Wales, Provence and Ireland.

Barbara Hepworth: Strings is the first publication dedicated to the artist’s stringed sculptures, paintings and drawings. In 1939, Hepworth (1903–1975) made her first sculpture threaded with strings. For the rest of her career, she intermittently combined string with works made from plaster, wood, metal and stone. These were some of her most personally distinctive artistic achievements. Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death, Barbara Hepworth: Strings provides for the first time a comprehensive thematic account of string in the artist’s work, exploring the different ways that she used it and the symbolism she invested it with.This publication includes a fully-illustrated catalogue of Piano Nobile’s accompanying exhibition. It features essays by some of the leading specialists on Hepworth’s work. The exhibition co-curator Michael Regan offers a personal response to the stringed sculptures and considers their affective quality. In his essay, Dr Stephen Feeke explores fresh perspectives and previously unpublished source materials relating to Hepworth and string. A further text by Eleanor Clayton, senior curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, gives a close reading of the most significant stringed works including the artist’s celebrated commission for John Lewis’s flagship store on Oxford Street. The book also includes a comprehensive, illustrated list of Hepworth’s stringed sculptures.

First published to accompany major retrospective exhibitions at West Cork Arts Centre and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), this full-colour illustrated monograph explores William Crozier’s whole career, taking in the second half of the twentieth century – a key period in the development of British and Irish art. The catalogue is furnished with essays presenting brand new research by renown art historians and curators, Illuminated by unpublished sources and personal memoirs. What emerges is a picture of the continuum that runs through all of Crozier’s work, revealing a fascinating narrative that, far from a story of transformation from darker, earlier imagery into the apparent hedonism of later landscapes, is one of continuity of purpose in Crozier’s mind-set that connects 1950s Britain and Ireland with the concerns of the new millennium.  Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, towards painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. The landscape became the source of visceral paintings: For Crozier, ravaged landscapes symbolised the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism. Only ten years separate these images of traumatized humanity from the luxuriantly colourful works inspired by the landscape of West Cork. His early skill as a colourist reaches its zenith in paintings that capture the essence and appearance of the West Cork landscape in ways immediately recognisable to the viewer, but they are also concerned to capture a landscape during a period of great physical and social change. Crozier believed that when painting the Irish landscape he must, “Tell the truth. Say it simply.”