front cover of Capturing the British Landscape
Capturing the British Landscape
Alfred Augustus Glendening (1840–1921)
Alice Munro-Faure
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
The life and work of Victorian landscape painter Alfred Augustus Glendening, illustrating his rapid rise from railway clerk to an acclaimed artist.

Though critics often reviewed Alfred Augustus Glendening’s exhibitions, very little has been written about the artist himself. Here, new and extensive research removes layers of mystery and misinformation about his life, family, and career, accurately placing him amid the British art world during much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Glendening was a man from humble origins, working full-time as a railway clerk when he managed to make his London exhibition debut at the age of twenty—a feat that would have been almost impossible before the Victorian era ushered in new possibilities of social mobility. Although his paintings show a tranquil and unspoiled landscape, his environment was rapidly being transformed by social, scientific, and industrial developments, while advances in transport, photography, and other technical discoveries undoubtedly influenced him and his fellow painters.

Celebrating his uniquely Victorian story, the book places Glendening within his proper historical context. Running alongside the main text is a timeline outlining significant landmarks, from political and social events to artistic and technical innovations. Thoroughly researched, the narrative explores why and for whom he painted, his artistic training, and his various inspirations. The book uncovers new information about the Victorian art world and embraces such aspects as Royal Academy prejudices, the popularity of Glendening’s work at home and abroad, his use of photography, and the sourcing of his art materials. 
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Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity
Troy Thomas
Reaktion Books, 2016
Now in paperback, an accessible and beautifully illustrated account of Caravaggio as a catalyst for modernity.

Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius.
           
Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio’s early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio’s paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist’s final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy.

Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.
 
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Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape
Second Edition
Joseph Leo Koerner
Reaktion Books, 2009

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is heralded as the greatest painter of the Romantic movement in Germany, and Europe’s first truly modern artist. His mysterious and melancholy landscapes, often peopled with lonely wanderers, are experiments in a radically subjective artistic perspective—one in which, as Freidrich wrote, the painter depicts not “what he sees before him, but what he sees within him.” This vulnerability of the individual when confronted with nature became one of the key tenets of the Romantic aesthetic.

            Now available in a compact, accessible format, this beautifully illustrated book is the most comprehensive account ever published in English of one of the most fascinating and influential nineteenth-century painters.

            “This is a model of interpretative art history, taking in a good deal of German Romantic philosophy, but founded always on the immediate experience of the picture. . . . It is rare to find a scholar so obviously in sympathy with his subject.”—Independent

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Children of Mercury
The Lives of the Painters
Spike Bucklow
Reaktion Books, 2022
Following “the seven ages of man” from infancy to death, an innovative retelling of the lives of premodern painters both famous and forgotten.
 
Children of Mercury is a bold new account of the lives of premodern painters, viewed through the lens of “the seven ages of man,” a widespread belief made famous in the “All the world’s a stage” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Spike Bucklow follows artists’ lives from infancy through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, to maturity, old age, and death. He tracks how lives unfolded for both male and female painters, from the famous, like Michelangelo, through Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Beale, to those who are now forgotten, like Jehan Gillemer. The book draws on historic biographies, the artists’ writings, and, uniquely, the physical evidence offered by their paintings.
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Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene
Mary Lago
University of Missouri Press, 1995

Christiana Herringham (1852-1929), an expert copyist of the Italian Old Masters, was an extraordinary and accomplished woman. Her achievements required a delicate balance, for she had to negotiate old Victorian restrictions in order "to find and fortify a place for herself" in the male-dominated spheres of fine-art administration and public service.

Lady Herringham arrived on the Edwardian art scene with a translation of Il Libro dell' Arte o Trattato della Pittura, Cennini's fifteenth-century handbook on fresco and tempera. It aroused new interest in those techniques and led to the founding of the Society of Painters in Tempera in 1901. To preserve Britain's art heritage from buyers abroad, she provided the money that launched the National Art Collections Fund in 1903, creating what is still a vital and authoritative voice in Britain's cultural life. Her work as the only woman on the NACF's first executive committee prepared her to assist in founding the India Society, which urged respect for indigenous Indian traditions of the fine arts and encouraged appreciation for them in England.

Her concern for undervalued art led her to India to copy the Buddhist wall paintings in the Ajanta caves near Hyderabad. Her copies are the only color record of their condition during those years. Sadly, as she returned from India in 1911, Lady Herringham began to suffer from delusions of pursuit and persecution and withdrew to an asylum, where she remained until her death. There were then no satisfactory explanations for her symptoms, only the Victorian medical premise that insanity was an extension of physical illness.

A distinguished Edwardian scholar, Mary Lago has used her knowledge of the cultural history of the period to bring significant insight into the personal and professional conflicts Lady Herringham faced during a time of limited opportunities for women. Lago also discusses the issue of nationalism in art and the role of colonial imperialism in defining and preserving art. As a postscript, she presents the fascinating possibility that Christiana Herringham's experience may have inspired the character of Mrs. Moore in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.

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front cover of Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert)
Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert)
Performance Pieces, 1979–2004
Joanna Frueh
Duke University Press, 2008
The performance artist Joanna Frueh has emerged over the past twenty-five years as a wildly original voice in feminist art. Her uninhibited performances are celebrations of beauty, sensuality, eroticism, and pleasure. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert), which features eighteen of her essential performance texts, is a celebration of this remarkable artist and her work. Arranged chronologically, from The Concupiscent Critic (1979) through Ambrosia (2004), the pieces reveal Frueh’s evolution as an artist and intellectual over the course of her career. Many of these texts have never before been published; others have not been readily available until now. Among the sixteen color photographs in this richly illustrated book are pictures of Frueh performing and images from Joanna in the Desert, a 2006 collaboration between Frueh and the artist and scholar Jill O’Bryan.

Frueh’s performances are unabashedly autobiographical, as likely to reflect her scholarship as a feminist art historian as her love affairs or childhood memories. For Frueh, eros and self-love are part of a revolutionary feminist strategy; her work exemplifies the physicality and embrace of pleasure that she finds wanting in contemporary feminist theory. Scholarly and rigorous yet playful in tone, her performances are joyful, filled with eroticism, flowers, sexy costumes, and beautiful colors, textures, and scents. Recurring themes include Frueh’s passionate attachment to the desert landscape and the idea of transformation: a continual reaching for clarity of thought and feeling.
In an afterword as lyrical and breathless as her performance pieces, Frueh explores her identification with the desert and its influence on her art. Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert) includes a detailed chronology of Frueh’s performances.

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Clyfford Still
The Artist’s Materials
Susan F. Lake
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
This groundbreaking book provides the first detailed account of the materials and techniques of perhaps the most radical—and until now, least studied—major American Abstract Expressionist.
 
Among the most radical of the great American Abstract Expressionist painters, Clyfford Still has also long been among the least studied. Still severed ties with the commercial art world in the early 1950s, and his estate at the time of his death in 1980 comprised some 3,125 artworks—including more than 800 paintings—that were all but unknown to the art world. Susan F. Lake and Barbara A. Ramsay were granted access to this collection by the estate and by the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which houses this immense corpus today.
 
This volume, based on the authors’ materials research and enriched by their unprecedented access to Still’s artworks, paints, correspondence, studio records, and personal library, provides the first detailed account of his materials, working methods, and techniques. Initial chapters provide an engaging and erudite overview of the artist's life. Subsequent chapters trace the development of his visionary style, offer in-depth materials analysis of selected works from each decade of his career, and suggest new approaches to the care and conservation of his paintings. There is also a series of technical appendices as well as a full bibliography.
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front cover of The Collaborative Artist's Book
The Collaborative Artist's Book
Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art
Alexandra J. Gold
University of Iowa Press, 2023
The Collaborative Artist’s Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist’s book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose.

Gold presents five case studies and details not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Taking several of these books out of special collections libraries and museum archives and making them available to a broad readership, Gold brings to light a whole genre that has been largely forgotten or neglected.
 
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Come Walk with Me
The Art of Dorris Curtis
Dorris Curtis
University of Arkansas Press, 2004
Come Walk with Me: The Art of Dorris Curtis has enormous appeal both as a memoir and as a collection of wonderful paintings. Dorris Curtis, like Grandma Moses, began painting at a late age. She worked as a school teacher for over forty years and upon retirement at the age of sixty-five, began to study art. Curtis looked up to Grandma Moses and was heavily influenced by her achievements. This book includes 103 images of Curtis’s artwork, each with an extended caption, as well as an introduction by Robert Cochran which places Curtis’s art into the larger context of both Arkansas art and American folk art as a whole. Dorris Curtis began painting at the age of sixty-five. Since her start in 1973, Curtis’s work has been exhibited in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and she has appeared as a guest on the PBS series American Art Forum. Curtis recently donated her entire collection to the University of Central Arkansas.
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Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
Art, Weaving, Vision
Laura E. Pérez and Ann Marie Leimer, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s artwork is marked by her compassionate and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues, from immigration and environmental precarity to the resilience of Indigenous ancestral values and the necessity of decolonial aesthetics in art making. Drawing on the fiber arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminist art, and Indigenous fiber- and loom-based traditions, Jimenez Underwood’s art encompasses needlework, weaving, painted and silkscreened pieces, installations, sculptures, and performance. This volume’s contributors write about her place in feminist textile art history, situate her work among that of other Indigenous-identified feminist artists, and explore her signature works, series, techniques, images, and materials. Redefining the practice of weaving, Jimenez Underwood works with repurposed barbed wire, yellow caution tape, safety pins, and plastic bags and crosses Indigenous, Chicana, European, and Euro-American art practices, pushing the arts of the Americas beyond Eurocentric aesthetics toward culturally hybrid and Indigenous understandings of art making. Jimenez Underwood’s redefinition of weaving and painting alongside the socially and environmentally engaged dimensions of her work position her as one of the most vital artists of our time.

Contributors. Constance Cortez, Karen Mary Davalos, Carmen Febles, M. Esther Fernández, Christine Laffer, Ann Marie Leimer, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Robert Milnes, Jenell Navarro, Laura E. Pérez, Marcos Pizarro, Verónica Reyes, Clara Román-Odio, Carol Sauvion, Cristina Serna, Emily Zaiden
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Correspondence Course
An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle
Kristine Stiles, ed.
Duke University Press, 2010
Creator of such acclaimed works as the performance Meat Joy and the film Fuses, for decades the artist Carolee Schneemann has saved the letters she has written and received. Much of this correspondence is published here for the first time, providing an epistolary history of Schneemann and other figures central to the international avant-garde of happenings, Fluxus, performance, and conceptual art. Schneemann corresponded for more than forty years with such figures as the composer James Tenney, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, the artist Dick Higgins, the dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, the poet Clayton Eshleman, and the psychiatrist Joseph Berke. Her “tribe,” as she called it, altered the conditions under which art is made and the form in which it is presented, shifting emphasis from the private creation of unique objects to direct engagement with the public in ephemeral performances and in expanded, nontraditional forms of music, film, dance, theater, and literature.

Kristine Stiles selected, edited, annotated, and wrote the introduction to the letters, assembling them so that readers can follow the development of Schneemann’s art, thought, and private and public relationships. The correspondence chronicles a history of energy and invention, joy and sorrow, and charged personal and artistic struggles. It sheds light on the internecine aesthetic politics and mundane activities that constitute the exasperating vicissitudes of making art, building an artistic reputation, and negotiating an industry as unpredictable and demanding as the art world in the mid- to late twentieth century.

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The Creative Circuit
K. G. Subramanyan
Seagull Books, 2024
An exploration of the weight of history and the demand for originality on the contemporary artist, written by one of India’s best-known artists.
 
What conception does a modern artist or critic have of contemporary art activity? How do modern artists react to their environment and cultural inheritance? And what general norms of achievement can we think of in the highly heterogeneous art scene of today? In Creative Circuit, K. G. Subramanyan, one of India's most celebrated artists, draws upon his considerable experience as a practicing artist and theoretician to engage with these concerns from a modern Indian perspective.
 
Through a series of five lectures, Subramanyan critically examines key concepts such as modernity, eclecticism, and nostalgia, which have become integral to contemporary art discourse. He provocatively questions the perceptions, illusions, and emotional motivations driving artistic expression in today's heterogeneous art scene, prompting readers to reconsider established norms of achievement in the context of evolving artistic practices. With over one hundred color illustrations complementing Subramanyan's insightful discourse, Creative Circuit offers a visually engaging exploration of the interplay between tradition and innovation in contemporary art.
 
Subramanyan played a pivotal role in shaping India’s artistic identity after Independence. Mani-da, as he was fondly called, seamlessly blended elements of modernism with folk expression in his works, spanning paintings, murals, sculptures, prints, set designs, and toys. Beyond his visual artistry, his writings have laid a solid foundation for understanding the demands of art on the individual. In the year of his centenary, Seagull is proud to publish his writings in special new editions.
 
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front cover of Creator of Nightmares
Creator of Nightmares
Henry Fuseli’s Art and Life
Christopher Baker
Reaktion Books, 2024
A critical biography of the eighteenth-century painter.
 
Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) was one of the eighteenth century’s most provocative and inventive artists. He is best known for his painting The Nightmare, which channeled a new form of gothic imagery for the Romantic age. This engaging study of the artist’s career unveils Fuseli’s complexities, navigating contradictions between literary and painted works, sacred and secular themes, and traditional patronage versus competitive exhibitions. Plotting Fuseli’s trajectory from Zurich to Paris, Rome, and ultimately London, Creator of Nightmares paints an image of Fuseli as an astute marketer and self-proclaimed genius who transformed himself from a priest to an Enlightenment writer, a mercurial force in the art world, and finally a revered teacher.
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front cover of The Cube and the Face
The Cube and the Face
Around a Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti
Georges Didi-Huberman. Edited by Mira Fliescher and Elena Vogman
Diaphanes, 2015
Alberto Giacometti’s 1934 Cube stands apart for many as atypical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality.
           
With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist’s sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional—a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist’s surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti’s aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait—or what Didi-Huberman terms “abstract anthropomorphism.” Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others Giacometti counted as influence, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti’s art with a new approach to transitional work.
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