Pocket Perspectives – serie

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times A Financial Times Book of the Year: T.J. Clark offers profound insights on Bruegel’s art, where we encounter a reality formed from wholly worldly materials, yet suspended between belief and disbelief. Renowned art historian T. J. Clark unveils the hidden depths of Bruegel the Elder’s work in this captivating analysis of some of the artist's most famous masterpieces. Taking the medieval concept of Schlaraffenland, a whimsical dreamland of milk and honey, as his starting point, Clark reveals the satire behind Bruegel’s depictions of paradise and damnation. In an age marked by enforced orthodoxy, religious wars and threats of burning hellfire, Bruegel the Elder reflected on the powers as well as limitations of religion, deriding the sanctimonious and ridiculing the righteous. At the heart of this book stands Bruegel’s ironic yet highly tender picture of The Land of Cockaigne, where we encounter a vision not of heaven above, but on earth. A parody of paradise, Bruegel’s heaven is consumptive, empty, idle and irresponsible; made of wholly worldly materials, just on the precipice of possibility.

Renowned art historian and pioneering feminist Linda Nochlin explores how, from the late 18th century, fragmented, mutilated and fetishized representations of the human body came to constitute a distinctively modern view of the world. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

Britain’s most distinguished historian of ancient Greek art recounts what the Parthenon and its sculptures meant to the citizens of 5th-century BCE Athens. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

Excerpts from art critic, historian, lecturer and broadcaster James Hall’s lively and comprehensive cultural history of self-portraiture, including such artists as Dürer, Gentileschi, Van Gogh and Kahlo. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

Respected painter and writer Julian Bell offers original insights into the art, practice and ongoing importance of painting. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times An interpretation of the history of mural painting from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century by one of most eminent art historians of all time, who wielded huge influence over both his professional peers and a vast popular readership. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

Griselda Pollock, feminist art historian and longstanding advocate of gender and racial inclusivity, unpacks the racist, sexist and imperialist underpinnings of works by Gauguin and others as they competed for pre-eminence in the European avant-garde of the 1880s and 90s. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times Explore the dynamic world of 1960s Pop Art through Lucy Lippard's insightful analysis in this new addition to the Pocket Perspectives series. Pop Art epitomized the free spirit of the 1960s, blending carnival-like qualities with bold colours and monumental scale, but based on a tough, no-nonsense, no-refinement standard appropriate to its time. Renowned art critic and curator Lucy Lippard's classic, contemporaneous study enriches our understanding of this groundbreaking art movement. Across three chapters, the author first outlines the phenomenon of Pop Art, its antecedents and related styles ranging from folk art, Surrealism and Dada as well as the work of key artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. She then focuses on Pop Art in New York, discussing key iconic figures including Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann, who appropriated advertising, comics, and the conventions of commercial art and its specific techniques. Finally, Lippard provides an extensive overview of Pop Art's impact and evolution across Europe, particularly in France, Germany and Italy; and Canada, and so touches upon the work of Christo, Mimmo Rotella and many others, including Niki de Saint Phalle and Joyce Weiland, whose work are now experiencing a resurgence of interest.

‘Thames & Hudson’s new, affordable, covetable ‘Pocket Perspectives’: beautifully illustrated essays by canonical writers’ Financial Times A highly acclaimed exploration of the way in which the landscape has both influenced and been represented in British Romantic literature. Margaret Drabble on the Romantics presents an image of Britain as seen through the eyes of some of its most celebrated authors. Many of the Romantics, as well as their successors, are closely associated with particular landscapes – the Wordsworths with the Lake District, Walter Scott with the Scottish Borders, the Brontë sisters with West Yorkshire. Margaret Drabble deepens our understanding of this connection, unpacking the Romantics' fascination with all varieties of rural landscape, from roaring seas to tranquil villages, while also exploring their writing's subtler associations. Herself a star in the literary firmament, Drabble illuminates how this love of place fashioned some of the Romantics' greatest works. She considers the resonances of myth and legend, art and earlier literature that the Romantics found in places such as North Wales and Cornwall and investigates how their writing has, in turn, shaped our visual attitudes, taste in landscape and relation to nature.