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A Circumpolar Landscape demonstrates that Canadian and Scandinavian landscape painting reaches far beyond national identity and a preoccupation with Eurocentrism. This study brings together the work of Emily Carr, the Canadian Group of Seven, Anna Boberg, and Gustaf Fjaestad among others, with each chapter highlighting the high level of interactivity between artists and the environment. Simultaneously, this book highlights the lack of awareness of the respective ecosystems in which many of these works were produced. Working around northern hemispheric latitudinal lines, this book considers how a similar ecology and topography - orientated around the themes of forests, wilderness, lakes, mountains, aurorae, and ice – was depicted and is shared across these northern landscapes.This powerful and timely book takes these respective art histories in the direction of the environmental humanities and an ecocritical art history, recognising the broader transnational and ecological framework of the Circumpolar North.

This book remains the definitive survey of the life and work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Carrington burst onto the Surrealist scene in 1936, when, as a precocious nineteen-year-old debutante, she escaped the stultifying demands of her wealthy English family by running away to Paris with her lover Max Ernst. She was immediately championed by Andre Breton, who responded enthusiastically to her fantastical, dark and satirical writing style and her interest in fairy tales and the occult. Her stories were included in Surrealist publications, and her paintings in the Surrealists' exhibitions. After the dramas and tragic separations of the Second World War, Carrington ended up in the 1940s as part of the circle of Surrealist European emigres living in Mexico City. Close friends with Luis Bunuel, Benjamin Peret, Octavio Paz and a host of both expatriate Surrealists and Mexican modernists, Carrington was at the centre of Mexican cultural life, while still maintaining her European connections. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art provides a fascinating overview of this intriguing artist's rich body of work. The author considers Carrington's preoccupation with alchemy and the occult, and explores the influence of indigenous Mexican culture and beliefs on her production.

Mary Fedden (1915-2012) is one of Britain's most popular artists. The focus of this acclaimed book is the artist's creative process in various different media - oil, gouache, pencil and collage.While Fedden is often considered almost exclusively a still-life painter, still life was far from being her only preoccupation, as this book shows. Fantasy and imagination always also played a strong part, as is particularly evident in her small gouaches. A quietly surreal, enigmatic streak runs through much of her work.Fedden's collages are a witty and affectionate homage to the work of her husband, Julian Trevelyan. They lived, worked and travelled together from 1949 to 1988. The book re-emphasises her debt to him, but also her independence, even during their early life together when he stimulated her move into Modernism.In an engaging text, which draws on numerous conversations with the artist during her final years, Christopher Andreae considers why Fedden has always had such a popular following, looks at the English quality of her work, and talks about the commercialisation of her art and her attitudes to the art market. Fedden is shown to be an original, serious and prolific artist, a draftsman of unusual sensitivity and prowess, and a colourist of power and subtlety.Profusely illustrated with works from private and public collections, this is a book for Mary Fedden's existing devotees as well as newcomers to her work.

This book lifts the lid on some of the excesses that the 21st-century explosion of the contemporary art market brought in its wake, notably at its very top end. The buying of art as an investment, temptations to forgery, tax evasion, money laundering and pressure to produce more and more art all form part of this story, as do issues over authentication and the impact of the enhanced use of financial instruments on art transactions.Drawing on a series of revealing interviews with artists, lawyers, dealers, law-enforcement agents, tax specialists and collectors, the author charts the voracious commodification of artists and art objects, and art's position in the clandestine puzzle of the highest echelons of global capital. Adam's revelations appear even timelier in the wake of the Panama Papers disclosures, for example incorporating examples of the way tax havens have been used to stash art transactions – and ownership – away from public scrutiny.With the same captivating style of her bestselling Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century, Georgina Adam casts her judicious glance over a section of the art market whose controversies and intrigues will be of eye-opening interest to both art-world players and observers.

The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work.Carnegie’s work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude – all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie’s paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

This book assesses the paintings of Tal R (b. 1967), an Israeli-born Danish artist whose enigmatic work offers intersections of personal experience and wider history through a visual jigsaw, finely balanced between representation and abstraction, of what the artist has termed 'Kolbojnik', a Hebrew term for leftovers.Tal R's paintings are exceptionally idiosyncratic yet informed by an expansive view of the history of painting, with a diverse range of references including Fauvism, Symbolism and folk art. To the casual observer, his works depict amalgams of people, places and things. But deeper scrutiny reveals them as complex conceptual playgrounds where these seemingly simple categories are exploded and examined as 'construction' sites of both literal material (including collage, photography and sculpture) and meaning.For all students and lovers of painting, Tal R's works, like those of Chris Ofili or Laura Owens, have cleared a pathway for painting to continue after modernism and post-modernism without apology, beyond the worn-out 'death of painting' mantra. Martin Herbert's fascinating text offers an authoritative account of the twists and turns that path has taken so far.

This is the first comprehensive overview of the career to date of British artist Hurvin Anderson (b.1965). Anderson is known for painting loosely rendered ‘observations’ of scenes and spaces loaded with personal or communal meaning.Anderson’s painting style is notable for the ease with which he slips between figuration and abstraction, playing with the tropes of earlier landscape traditions and 20th-century abstraction. His paintings of barbershop interiors, country tennis clubs and tropical roadsides teem with rich brushwork and multitudes of decorative patterns or architectural features, at once obscuring and adding to underlying ruminations on identity and place.Drawing on interviews with the artist, Michael J. Prokopow offers a critical assessment of Hurvin Anderson’s painting practice to date that will be enlightening for all students, dealers and collectors of contemporary painting.

This book serves to establish Clara Peeters, one of the most talented and creative among the early practitioners of still-life painting in Europe in the early 17th century, as a leader in her field. The book not only discusses the artist’s biography but also examines the historical and cultural context of Peeters’ art, her artistry and the material culture reflected in her paintings. Part of the first generation of European artists to specialise in still-life painting, Peeters was in fact the only Flemish woman known to have focussed on this genre of painting in the early 17th century. She was also one of the few women to dedicate her professional life to painting in early modern Europe.This timely book sheds light on the limitations that Clara Peeters encountered because of her gender and how she responded to them in her art, while also assessing her importance as a painter of still-life.

Covering key aspects of provenance research for the international art market, this accessible publication, co-published with the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), explores a range of themes including challenges and best practice to considerations specific to Nazi looted art and the trade in illicit antiquities.Provenance research is a crucial component of any art-market transaction. Without a provenance it is often difficult to establish a work’s authenticity, its true value or who has legal title. Whether buying, selling or simply maintaining an artwork in either a private or a public collection, the days when a blind eye could be turned to the history (or the lack of a known history) of a work have long gone. Proper, thorough and effective provenance research is the minimum required and demanded in today’s art world – a world that is increasingly recognising the need for greater and more effective self-regulation in the face of fakes, forgeries and challenges to ownership or authenticity that are now commonplace.Provenance Research Today is essential reading for a broad audience, from those studying to become part of the art world or professionals starting a career in provenance research, to collectors or would-be collectors, dealers, galleries, auction houses, police and art lawyers.

Sir John Vanbrugh was one of Britain’s greatest architects and the designer of some of the most important and best beloved English country houses, including Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. This beautifully illustrated biography draws on close study of Vanbrugh's letters to bring to life his ideas, beliefs, friendships and buildings, as well as providing insight into his professional practice and working relationships. Vanbrugh was, by the standards of architects of the time, a worldly figure, friend and ally of the great, with a strong sense of the imaginative characteristics of architecture, its power of evocation, and the emotional impact of a building’s massing, particularly when compared to the more disciplined and scholarly work of his contemporaries Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor.Charles Saumarez Smith paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose architecture was shaped by his personality. The book also explores Vanbrugh's activities as a playwright and theatre manager, his circle of friends, his place in 18th-century society, and, in a final section, his influence on later architects from Robert Adam to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

The first full-length publication in English on influential modernist landscape designer Mien Ruys, this book offers rich insight into her character and the timeless lessons which can still be learnt from her work.From 1923 until 1980, Mien Ruys created over 3,000 gardens and landscapes. While most of these are in her native Netherlands, the influence of her designs and approaches spread far wider: many of us will have a little bit of Mien in our gardens, be it a railway sleeper, a diagonal line, a Phlomis russeliana or a water ball. Her work was extraordinary in combining two exceptional elements. Firstly, Mien was one of the leading proponents of modernist design: having trained and collaborated with architects such as Ben Merkelbach, Charles Karsten, Aldo van Eyck, Jan Piet Kloos, Hein Salomonson and Gerrit Rietveld, she introduced clean lines, geometric shapes and innovative materials into garden and landscape design. One of the few women members of CIAM, she was also one of the first to call for architects and landscape architects to collaborate fully from initial design onwards. She did so regularly, often on much needed social housing schemes, but also on schools, hospitals and nursing homes. All her projects shared a desire to offer users a better quality of life. One of her most well-known collaborations was with Gerrit Rietveld in Bergeijk on the Ploeg factory and Park, which has since been listed as a historic monument.Uniquely, Mien Ruys combined this modernist design approach with an extensive knowledge of plants and planting, which she learnt from a very early age in her father’s Royal Moerheim Nursery in Dedemsvaart. Her father had close links with international gardeners, such as Gertrude Jekyll, who greatly influenced Mien as she developed her own loose, natural style of planting. Her book on perennials, published in 1950, was internationally influential and, in seeking deeper understanding about plants and planting, Mien created more than 20 experimental gardens at Dedemsvaart, many of which are now also historic monuments.

In 1679, the commentator Joachim von Sandrart described Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) as a painter who had perfected the art of the miniature and of flower painting, a high and deserved honour. Posthumously, however, it is Merian’s status as an entomologist or naturalist that has garnered the most attention; she has not received her due as an artist. This book remedies this situation and assists the reader in understanding Merian’s life as a woman and as an artist in the early modern Dutch Republic. Using Merian’s hundreds of extant watercolours and book illustrations as sources, in combination with her surviving correspondence and with contemporary art treatises, Catherine Powell-Warren recognizes the artistic contributions of Maria Sibylla Merian, and situates them in their socio-cultural and creative context.This book is the first to consider Merian's art and art-historical significance: her artistic range; her techniques; the rich visual rhetoric she deployed in her works; and her innovations. Merian may not have been a guild member, but she was for all intents and purposes the head of a for-profit business (a 'master'), seeing to the training of her daughters and managing a successful workshop, publishing her works, and networking to secure patrons and resources. Considering the impediments she faced as a woman, her achievements as an artist, as well as in other realms, can be considered noteworthy and perhaps even extraordinary.

Bernini and His World is a unique exploration of Gian Lorenzo Bernini the sculptor, offering new insights and including discussions of the artist’s stylistic innovations and the ways in which he approached sculpture. Placing his life and work within a social, anthropological and historical context, Livio Pestilli gives a fascinating and in-depth account, from the Rome in which Bernini lived and its reception of foreign sculptors to the myth-making narrative of his biographers, and the judgements of his critics.Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book draws on a deep familiarity with both historic and modern Italian culture to give readers a vivid account of sculpture and sculptors in early modern Rome, and of Bernini’s lasting legacy.

Gary Hume RA (b.1962) is one of the foremost British painters of the last 40 years. In this new book, Martin Gayford explores the evolution of the artist's oeuvre and examines the opportunities and dilemmas that helped to shape Hume's singular pathway. Profusely illustrated, the book underlines Hume's important and unique contribution to British contemporary art and provides a fascinating window into the creation of a rich and varied body of work.Hume came to prominence alongside other artists associated with the Young British Artists generation and his work, often completed using high-gloss industrial paint, fuses high-modernist abstract formalism with an enigmatic, sign-like quality. Although his early work was concerned with the representation of hospital doors, Hume's restless spirit has led him to continue to probe and experiment with his chosen medium and expand his subject matter - from snowmen and wonky wheels to birds, flowers and people.

Exploring the ways in which painting, applied design and illustration intertwined over the course of the accomplished career of Paul Nash (1889-1946), this book provides a new perspective on one of the most gifted and celebrated English artists of the twentieth century. Skilfully navigating the diversity of Nash’s design output, which drew in illustration, book jackets, posters, set design, pattern papers, fabrics, glass, ceramics and photography, in the context of Nash’s painting and wider pre-occupations, James King presents an artist who strove to resolve his artistic vision. With Nash's work informed by seismic shifts within the visual arts during his lifetime – from the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement on the one hand, to Surrealism and Abstraction on the other – this fascinating book reveals the considerable gifts that allowed Nash to create a wholly original vision in turn.

Edward Schröder Prior (1852-1932) is not easily labelled. His reputation as an Arts and Crafts architect is well-earned but his output is much broader and more complex, offering a fascinating window into the debates surrounding English architectural and design culture around the turn of the 20th century. This book brings together the various strands of his work to present a far more complex, holistic understanding of his particularly rich and insightful thinking and his creative approaches.A contemporary and close friend of C.F.A. Voysey and W.R. Lethaby, as well as C.R. Ashbee and Ernest Gimson, Prior was perhaps most famous in his lifetime for his writings, including his books and articles on English medieval art, and as Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University, where he set up the first architecture course. In subsequent decades, his writings have been upstaged by his original, innovative and varied architecture, with his best-known building, St Andrew’s, Roker (Sunderland), dubbed the ’cathedral’ of the Arts and Crafts movement.When taken together, Prior’s writings and architecture demonstrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in his work, as well as contemporary and visual cultures. The topics which were at the heart of his work – the conflicts between architecture as a creative process, a profession and a business; the translation of design intentions through a project; the challenge of representing architecture to clients and the public; the position and treatment of architecture students in practices; the nature of work in ‘historic’ buildings – make fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in architectural and visual culture, then and now.

Since the construction of the first skyscrapers in the 19th century, urban environments have been increasingly marked by verticality. The advent of the modern metropolis transformed the experience of gravity in ways which resonate acutely today. At a time of instability, the rise of tall buildings poses new challenges to our sense of balance, yet the implications of vertigo remain unacknowledged. This book reflects on the precarious equilibrium at the heart of contemporary cities, where the drive to conquer ever greater heights has reconfigured our notion of abyss. Exploring the spatial thrills as well as anxieties associated with vertigo, it traces how different subjects experience, represent and transgress buildings and the spaces in between.On Balance tackles this complex subject through an interdisciplinary approach informed by social and medical sciences. After providing a historical overview of how the discourse on vertigo has permeated Western culture, it explores the work of modern and contemporary artists who have engaged with architecture as a field of dizzy visions. It then shifts focus to spatial practices predicated on the mastery of vertigo, such as climbing and funambulism, which have found in cities new stages for gravity-defying performances. Moving into the realm of architectural culture, the book offers a critical analysis of design projects and spaces that challenge the user’s stability, revealing architecture to be central to our perception of balance at multiple sensory, spatial and social levels.

This timely exploration of the skilful illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478–1548) demonstrates her artistry within this sometime neglected artistic medium. Within the convent walls of San Domenico in Lucca where she lived and worked, Burlamacchi attained high levels of artistic proficiency through her knowledge of drawing and colour technique, composition, treatment of space and proportions.This book highlights that Sister Eufrasia was aware of the progress illumination underwent in contact with the artists we now include in the High Renaissance. She quickly established a style which she then passed on to younger sisters to establish a convent workshop where mutual exchange was the norm. Here, for the first time, Eufrasia Burlamacchi is recognized and discussed as an influential and gifted artist in her own right.

Sofonisba Anguissola (c.1532–1625), an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a noble family, was one of the first women artists of Europe to establish an international reputation during her lifetime. This book explores the evolution of Sofonisba Anguissola’s art from her training in Cremona, through her service at the court of Philip II in Madrid, to her later years as a married woman in Sicily and Genoa.It was at the Spanish court that Sofonisba Anguissola secured her reputation as a painter of international renown. Therefore, the volume places special emphasis on the social, political and cultural preconditions surrounding her role and status at the Spanish court, where she became a lady-in-waiting and painting instructor to Queen Elizabeth of Valois. In order to interrogate the circumstances of her service and her painting practice in Spain, and thus to better explain her later artistic career in Italy, the book focuses on her education, her noble status, her family ties, and her connections with noble courts in Spain and Italy. It draws on recent discoveries made by the author, as well as archival documentation, to reinterpret Anguissola and her artistic legacy.

Rose Wylie RA (b.1934) trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie's fascinating artistic journey, celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice.Rose Wylie's large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject-matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core.Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language, so providing an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation of a significant and increasingly celebrated figure in contemporary British art.

On New Year's Day 1986, encouraged by her dealer Andras Kalman, artist Mary Newcomb, then aged 64, began to keep a diary. She wrote in its opening pages: 'I wanted … to remind ourselves that – in our haste – in this century – we may not give time to pause and look – and may pass on our way unheeding'. This beautiful new book, compiled by the artist's daughter and grandson, reveals Mary Newcomb as an acute observer of her surroundings, reproducing her copious sketches alongside more finished paintings and short diary extracts to draw out the many themes which preoccupied her throughout her career as an artist.Mary Newcomb's world was rural East Anglia, where she managed a small mixed farm with her husband Godfrey Newcomb. The working life of the countryside engrossed her quite as much as the cycle of Nature: she noticed and relished everything, with as keen an eye for the colour of the bridesmaids' dresses at a wedding as for the yellow and brown of a dragonfly’s body.Mary's daughter Tessa Newcomb, also an artist, introduces the key themes of the book with short texts which provide fascinating insight into her mother's world. A reflective introductory essay by art critic William Packer considers Mary Newcomb's written diary observations alongside the poetic language of her art.

This is the first monograph to give an overview of the entire career to date of artist Ding Yi (b. 1962), whose work, unlike most other well-known Chinese painters, is wholly abstract. Large in scale, and extraordinary in detail, Ding Yi's paintings invite a myriad of questions, not least how an intuitive artist works with recurrent patterns and symbols. Tackling this paradox, the authors discuss a range of questions pertinent to the artist, primary of which is how China has shaped his work, both culturally and environmentally, over the past thirty years.Based on extensive interviews with the artist, Ding Yi presents a definitive portrait of an important contemporary painter, who holds a unique position in Chinese art history. As such, it is essential reading for fans and the uninitiated alike.

Since the mid-1970s, American painter Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of colour within grids of multi-coloured blocks. Matthew Jeffrey Abrams's thoughtful book, the first full monograph on the artist, highlights Whitney's unique and sophisticated understanding of line and colour and his commitment to abstract painting over four decades of consistent practice. Abrams brings together Whitney's personal and professional narratives to weave a chronological analysis of the work and the artist's wider cultural contribution. Born in Philadelphia in 1946, Whitney moved to New York in 1968, and under the guidance of Philip Guston he began to experiment with abstraction, drawn to the basic formal qualities of Abstract Expressionism, the pure chroma of the Color Field movement, and the minimalist approach of such artists as Donald Judd. Steadfastly pursuing abstraction at a time when critical interest was focussed on figurative art and photography, Whitney has not received the critical recognition due to him until late in his career. This book affirms his outstanding achievement.

Radical Women tells an original story of British modernism from the perspective of Jessica Dismorr's career, along with the women artists - some famous, some lesser-known - she worked and exhibited with.The work of Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939) has been described as encapsulating 'the stylistic developments of twentieth-century British Art', and her oeuvre certainly encompasses some of its most exciting moments - from Rhythm in the early 1910s, through Vorticism, towards post-war modernist figuration and finally into the abstraction she shared with radical political artists groups in the 1930s. Within this period of intense creativity, which extended beyond art to literary and design accomplishments too, Dismorr was privileged to work and exhibit alongside some of the most exciting female artists of the time, including Barbara Hepworth and Winifred Nicholson, to lesser-known figures such as Dorothy Shakespear, Anne Estelle Rice and Helen Saunders. Bringing a web of fascinating connections to light for the first time, this publication provides a fresh interpretation of a pioneering period and the role women played within it.

This book offers the first critical account of Studio Aalto’s religious modern architecture. Aalto’s ecclesiastical oeuvre is viewed as an evocative subgenre of the practice's portfolio, but its relationship to religion has eluded enquiry. Where previously discussed, the longstanding collaboration between Aalto and the Church has been put down to reciprocal expediency, and the buildings perceived as spatially and structurally stirring experiments, yet devoid of religious meanings or implications. The idiosyncratic plasticity of the Church of the Three Crosses (1955–58) in Imatra, Finland—the most famous and architecturally impressive of Aalto’s churches—is cited as ultimate evidence of Aalto’s exploitation of the religious brief for the creation of a 'sculptural irrationality'.This book challenges the assumed autonomy of Studio Aalto’s ecclesiastical oeuvre from religion. Analysing designs for churches, parish centres, funerary chapels and cemeteries in Finland, Denmark, Germany and Italy, the book shows that Aalto’s engagement with religion transcended artistic opportunism. The book addresses Aalto’s sacred oeuvre in its entirety, yet pays particular attention to the Church of the Three Crosses, broadly considered the apotheosis of Aalto’s sacred career. Through a detailed analysis of the religious actors and factors that shaped the design and construction of Aalto’s sacred works—from local parish building committees to bishops, and from liturgical reform movements to post-war debates on sacred art—this book shows that religious influences were neither extrinsic nor peripheral to Aalto’s modernism, but intrinsic and intimately related to it. The study of previously uncovered primary archival materials establishes that Aalto’s engagement with the Church was a consciously and productively symbiotic partnership which drew from shared interests and values, yet which also encompassed compromise and conflict. The resultant buildings neither glorify nor deny institutional religion — instead, this book argues, they challenge rigid dogmatism in religion as much as in modern architecture.

As a subject, Waterloo Bridge fascinated writers and artists such as Dickens, Constable, Monet and Derain. This book tells the story of a bridge’s place in the city – its history in use, its inextricable connection with the great river which it crosses, and the character and activities of the two shores which it joins together. While focusing on Waterloo Bridge, the book also explores the evolution of the surrounding districts and the character of the Thames as it flows through Central London: tidal, wide, difficult to navigate and bridge, and intensely busy during its heyday. It sets Waterloo Bridge alongside the other London river bridges, revealing the complex politics and economics of bridge building.Full of fabulous characters and stories, the book takes us from the geology and ancient history to the history of the docks and on to the great bridge built in the 18th and 19th centuries. It reveals the complex politics and economics behind these bridges, who designed them and how they were constructed. The book explores how the surrounding districts evolved, the creation of the Thames embankments, and Waterloo bridge’s notoriety as a site for suicides – a subject that fascinated Dickens, Watts and Millais. It also reveals why it became a focus for artists such as Constable, Monet and Derain. It concludes with a poetic and honest description of the contemporary city.

Examined through the lens of cutting-edge scholarship, Artemisia Gentileschi clears a pathway for non-specialist audiences to appreciate the artist's pictorial intelligence, as well as her achievement of a remarkably lucrative and high-profile career. Bringing to light recent archival discoveries and newly attributed paintings, this book highlights Gentileschi's enterprising and original engagement with emerging feminist notions of the value and dignity of womanhood. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Artemisia Gentileschi brings to life the extraordinary story of this Italian artist, placing her within a socio-historical context. Sheila Barker weaves the story with in-depth discussions of key artworks, examining them in terms of their iconographies and technical characteristics in order to portray the developments in Gentileschi’s approach to her craft and the gradual evolution of her expressive goals and techniques.

The private collector’s museum has become a phenomenon of the 21st century. There are some 400 of them around the world, and an astonishing 70% of those devoted to contemporary art were founded in the past 20 years. Although private museums have been accused of being tax-evading vanity projects or ‘tombs for trophies’, the picture is far more complex and nuanced, as art-market journalist Georgina Adam (author of best-selling Big Bucks and Dark Side of the Boom) shows in her compelling new book.Georgina Adam’s investigation into this extraordinary proliferation, based on her recent visits to over 50 private spaces across the US, Europe, China and elsewhere, delves into the reasons behind this boom, the different motivations of collectors to display their art in public, and the various ways in which the institutions are financed. Private museums can add greatly to the cultural life of a community, giving a platform to emerging artists, supplying educational programmes and revitalising declining or neglected regions. But their relationship with public institutions can also be problematic. Should private museums step in to fill a gap left by declining public investment in culture, and what are the implications for society and the arts? At a time of crisis in the museums sector, this book is an essential and thought-provoking read.

This book is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades, with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s identity as the programmes and people that they housed. Borrowing from the architectural writer Christopher Hussey’s characterisation of Broadcasting House as a ‘palace of the ether’ Elizabeth Darling asks how the immaterial medium of the broadcast was given material and spatial form by the BBC, and the engineers, architects and designers whom they commissioned.The book traces the development of the BBC both technologically and organisationally, and the changing demands it had of the spaces which accommodated it. It shows how associational networks and personal affiliations affected who was commissioned to work on what became Broadcasting House and offers a detailed account of the work of Val Myer, who designed the exterior and shell of the new building, and the team of architects who designed the studio interiors (Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates, Edward Maufe, Raymond McGrath and Dorothy Warren). In documenting the design of Broadcasting House, and the responses to it, Palace of the Ether offers new insights into British architectural culture at a pivotal moment in the profession’s history.