Books

Why do we not know more of Susie Barstow? A prolific artist, Susie M. Barstow (1836-1923) was committed to expressing the majesty she found in the national landscape. She captured on canvas and paper the larger American landscape experience as it evolved...

Art and photography have played a key role in capturing and reflecting on the conditions for the Brexit referendum. Illustrated by a range of work by artists including Cornelia Parker, Wolfgang Tillmans, David Shrigley, Tacita Dean and Jeremy Deller as...

More popular than ever, the work of Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is rooted in the landscape of pre-war and early wartime England. This best-selling book by Alan Powers, the established authority on Ravilious, provides the most comprehensive overview to date...

The most ambitious project of Henry Avray Tipping, the influential architectural editor of Country Life, Mounton was a new country house and garden, designed without limitations of expense to be the perfect expression of his immense knowledge of history,...

As the twenty-first century unfolds, notions of our cultural past and how our history has influenced our present shift almost daily. Within this, accepted artistic trajectories are being questioned and new connections made. In this wide-ranging and...

Henry Holiday (1839-1927) was a polymath who counted figures such as Lewis Carroll, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Emmeline Pankhurst as his friends. Most significantly, he was unquestionably one of the greatest stained-glass artists of the...

The book discusses the role of art in architecture with a particular focus on colour and the dynamic relationships between light, form, material surface, space and movement. Drawing on historical examples to establish recurring themes, it examines the...

Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their wispy veils and vapourous moods, and they are the stuff of dreams and visions. 'The mists of time' and 'in a fog' are common expressions that substantiate the long association of mist and...

Europe Views the World examines the wide diversity of images that Europeans produced to represent the wide variety of peoples and places around the globe during and after the so-called 'Age of Exploration'. Beginning with the medieval imagery of Europe's...

Catherine the Greats audacious power grab in 1762 marked a watershed in imperial Russian history. During a momentous 34-year reign, her rapacious vision and intellectual curiosity led to vast territorial expansion, cultural advancement, and civic,...

Book of Ruins offers a survey - not encyclopedic, but substantial - of leading moments when the fact and idea of ruins were taken up by writers, travellers and artists: painters, film makers, landscape architects, and architects. Gathering together short...

Debates about the restitution of cultural objects have been ongoing for many decades, but have acquired a new urgency recently with the intensification of scrutiny of European museum collections acquired in the colonial period. Alexander Herman's...

Offering a radical rewriting of the history of contemporary art from a feminist perspective, four distinguished authors explore the lineages of performance, abstraction, craft and ecofeminism in ways that reveal the debt these important genres owe to the...

As advancements in transportation and technology continue to close the gap between architect, client, builder and site, critique and place, this book considers how architects, designers, theorists, and critics design, describe and critique future and...

Rana Begum RA (b.1977) is an artist known for her wide ranging works, from the intimate to the monumental. Using a variety of materials and exploring the use of light, she blurs the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, design and painting to...

In just half a century of growth, the art fair industry has transformed the art market. Now, for the first time, art market journalist Melanie Gerlis tells the story of art fairs' rapid ascent and reflects on their uncertain future. From the first...

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Durer's intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other Northern European artists who captured 'the truth of vegetation'...

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...

Rudolph Ihlee (1883-1968) was a prize-winning student at the Slade where his contemporaries included Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Maxwell Gordon Lightfoot, C.R.W. Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. Turning his back on a flourishing career in London, he...

This book conveys the excitement, diversity and richness of London at a time when the city was arguably at the height of its power, uniqueness and attraction. Balancing the social, the topographical and the visible aspects of the great city, author...

In the late 1960s, IBM was one of the world's pre-eminent corporations, employing over 250,000 people in 100 countries and producing some of the most advanced products on earth. IBM President Thomas J. Watson Jnr. sought to elevate the company's image by...

Over the last three decades, Jacqueline Humphries (b.1960) has, through an innovative painterly process, challenged the limits of abstraction. She has produced a body of work that reaches beyond modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and abstraction as we...

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in learning embracing the science of his era. His texts also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven,...

Always recognised as a master print from the moment of its appearance around 1649, The Hundred Guilder Print is one of Rembrandt's most compositionally complex and visually beautiful works. This book gives a full overview of the fascinating story...

Emotionally intelligent design is an overlooked area in contemporary architecture, and memorial, by default, are designed to evoke emotional responses from the public. This book provides an overview of the architect-led memorial design from the 21st...

Surveying for the first time the Century Guild of Artists and its influential periodical, the Century Guild Hobby Horse, this original publication asserts the significance of the Guild in the development of the Arts and Crafts movement and its modernist...

Rural Scotland is a charged landscape, alive with history, soaked in myth and often rather sublime. For those of us living an urban existence, the countryside is a retreat for refuge and decompression, but it is also a place where infrastructures strain...

The behemothic global art market is one which few aspiring artists manage to penetrate. How then would a creative person with virtually no arts engagement, maybe with mental or other significant health issues, disability, or difficult social...

Through historical coincidence that almost takes on a mythical character, 'Michelangelo' was the given name not only of the Florentine sculptor, but also of the painter who grew up in Caravaggio, a provincial town in Lombardy, about 25 miles east of...

In tracing the evolution of British drawing over nearly four centuries, Excursions of Imagination highlights objects of innovation and historical importance while underscoring a sense of continuity within the history of the medium.

Into the Light: Lauretta Vinciarelli centres on the interdisciplinary work of Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), a key yet relatively unknown figure who inhabited a world of “firsts : she was the first woman to have drawings acquired by the Department of...

Since the global financial crash of 2008, artists have become increasingly engaged in a wide range of cultural activism targeted against capitalism, political authoritarianism, colonial legacies, gentrification, but also in opposition to their own...

Since launching his practice in 2001 with The Lawns, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, Nick Eldridge has become renowned for his beautiful bespoke houses. This book provides a wide-ranging survey of his key projects up to the present day...

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...

Why should the public participate in planning? And who are the stakeholders who are required to participate in the planning process? This guide assesses public and stakeholder participation in the planning process, which is a statutory requirement across...

This book is the first detailed study of the Commonwealth Institute's architecture and its exhibition galleries. It shows how the strikingly modern building and its dynamic displays inside worked together to create an immersive 'experience' of the...

During the 1970s, London-based photographers joined together to form collectives which engaged with local and international political protest in cities across the UK. This book is a survey of the radical community photography that these collectives...

In the period following the Second World War, the Architectural Association (AA) became the only British school of architecture of truly global renown. It was one of only two schools in the world which fully embraced and promoted the pedagogical ideals...

The Contemporary Art Museum explores the key battlegrounds in the design of the contemporary-art museum, describing the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics at the highest levels, and the commitment of states, cities and wealthy individuals to...

Between the Stock Market Crash and the Vietnam War, American corporations were responsible for the construction of thousands of headquarters across the United States. Over this time, the design of corporate headquarters evolved from Beaux-Arts facades to...

Amongst the pioneering exponents of Californian Abstract Expressionism was Frank Lobdell (1921-2013) - peer of painters such as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn and a significant artist in his own right, who takes centre-stage in this...

Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) is one of the most celebrated painters of her generation, coming to prominence in the mid-1990s in the wake of the so-called 'culture wars' and the art world's controversial embrace of identity-politics and multiculturalism. In...

Architecture through Drawing examines how drawing - as both action and object - encapsulates complex ideas relating to culture, technology, space and the built environment. Bringing together an array of beautiful and rarely seen drawings dating from the...

One of the most innovative artists and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) emigrated to Britain after the forced closure of the Bauhaus, following his colleague Walter Gropius. This book examines the two years...

Encountering the work of Alan Davie (1920-2014) at Wakefield Art Gallery in 1958, a young David Hockney (b.1937) was struck by Davie's landmark Abstract Expressionist paintings, which mirrored and stimulated his own fledgling experimentation with...

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...

From Aesthete to Ziffern, Baby-Language to Verbosity, Badgers to Railway Stations: this gloriously serendipitous dictionary presents the life, times and strong opinions of John Ruskin (1819-1900) - art critic, patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, social...

This book presents a detailed account of Guillermo Kuitca's major bodies of work, analysing his diverse range of imagery and reflecting on his engagement with the spaces in which we live.   Following Kuitca's development from the 1980s to his...