Books

Art in Theory 1900-2000

Since it was first published in 1992, this book has become one of the leading anthologies of art theoretical texts in the English-speaking world. This expanded edition includes the fruits of recent research, involving a considerable amount of newly-translated material from the entire period, together with additional texts from the last decades of the twentieth century.The features that made the first edition so successful have been retained:The volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century.

An Introduction to Art

This original and inspiring book offers a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the arts of painting and sculpture, to the principal artistic print media and to the visual arts of modernism and postmodernism. Covering the entire history of art, from Paleolithic cave painting to contemporary art, it provides foundational guidance to the basic character and techniques of the different art forms, to the various genres of painting in the western tradition, and to the techniques of sculpture as they have been practiced over several millenia and across a wide range of cultures.

Appreciating Art

An authoritative, concise guide to the history, principles and theories behind Western paintings. Easy to dip into, easy to carry when you visit a gallery and refreshingly simple to navigate, this book provides the background and context for the most popular paintings and painters from 1400 to the present. It is divided thematically into genre chapters (still lifes, nudes etc.) and the paintings are arranged chronologically in each chapter. The book is also filled with cross references to help the reader make comparisons both as to genres and across centuries.

Art Deco 1910-1939

Art Deco was the style that swept across the globe during the 1920s and 1930s and created the defining look of the interwar years. Its influence was ubiquitous: it transformed the skylines of cities as diverse as New York and Shanghai; it touched the design of everything - from cinemas and Hollywood films to the packaging of cigarettes, from evening wear and accessories to luxury liners and locomotives. It was the style of hedonism, of indulgence, of mass consumption, though it originated before the First World War in the luxurious one-off masterwork or the limited edition piece.

Art History: The Basics

Art History: The Basics is a concise and accessible introduction for the general reader and the undergraduate approaching the history of art for the first time at college or university.

It will give you answers to questions like:

Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture

This collection, by an international list of contributors, takes an interdisciplinary approach to the task of reconstructing eighteenth-century architectural studies based on substantial new archival and bibliographic research. Drawing on current thinking about the eighteenth century it is one of the first books to utilise a range of methodologies in relation to British classicism. The book explores topics such as social and gender identities, colonization and commercialization as well as notions of the rural, urban and suburban.

Conceptual Art

A volume in the Movements in Modern Art Series (General Editor: Simon Wilson). This series introduces the major movements in late nineteenth and twentieth-century art. Each book is illustrated with works from the Tate and other major collections around the world. 'Perceptive, portable and very good value'- The Art Newspaper

Contemporary Cultures of Display

This book examines trends in the display of art since the mid-twentieth century, focusing particularly on institutional issues. The contributors present a series of case studies that illuminate the practices of museums, galleries, and exhibitions in Western Europe and the United States and that encourage reflection on the experience of the spectator.

Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art

The collection was the result of a research project initiated by Gill Perry and first featured as a Special Issue of the journal Art History. It was reprinted as: Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice, Blackwells, 2004, (with an additional essay). The collection explores ideas of ‘visibility’ and ‘difference’ in contemporary practice, locating women’s art within a matrix of overlapping historical, cultural and post-colonial frameworks.

Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350-1527

Winner of the Society of Architectural Historians 2012 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. The award recognizes annually the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design. This lucid and coherent account provides a new overview of the collecting of antiquities in early renaissance Rome, from the time of Petrarch to the Sack of Rome in 1527. In the early 15th century, when Romans discovered ancient marble sculptures and inscriptions in the ruins, they often melted them into mortar.

Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment

This book provides a reassessment of the work of the eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and reconstructs the wider movement in French painting of which he was the leading figure. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, from literature and philosophy to political economy and medical discourse, it offers new interpretations of Greuze’s work that help to account for the extraordinary popularity and high reputation that he enjoyed in his own lifetime.

Imported Images

The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a time of greeat prosperity for the Low Countries, and the religious art produced there at this time was of correspondingly high quality. This volume, the result of many years of research, covers late medieval sculpture from this region now to be found in English Churches or collections. The pieces have arrived in England as a result of two distinct processes. Some were exported to England at the time of production (although the religious upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries leaves this group disappointingly small).

Landscapes of London: the City, the Country and the Suburbs, 1660-1840

This book is the first major study of the rural-urban interface in the London area in the long eighteenth century. It proposes that a conception of a ‘Greater London’ existed in the long eighteenth century which constituted a significant trope in metropolitan life and culture. It is the first major study to emphatically shift scholarly attention from the polite culture of the fashionable West End, where most recent studies have been concentrated, to the city’s hinterland where urban and rural met forming a new suburban environment.

LC FOTO: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer

In Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer Tim Benton reflects on the famous architect’s use of photography, starting with the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s attempts to take professional photographs during his travels in central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. While Le Corbusier always claimed that he saw no virtue in taking photographs, he actually bought three cameras and took several hundred photographs between 1907 and 1917, many of them of publishable quality.

Le Corbusier Conférencier

Archival research on the development of Le Corbusier's highly effective lectures between 1923 and 1929. This is completely new research on the origins of the lectures which Le Corbusier delivered all over the world until his death in 1965. The book analyses the nature of Le Corbusier's logic and rhetoric, his use of images and drawings executed during the lectures.

Le Corbusier's Pavilion for Zurich: Model and Prototype of an Ideal Exhibition Space

Le Corbusier’s Pavilion for Zurich uses numerous handwritten documents, drawings, and papers to trace the history of Le Corbusier’s last built work. This dwelling, which is also a museum, was initiated by Zürich gallery owner Heidi Weber. With its abstract forms and colors, it represents an intellectual legacy of the famous architect in which the further development of architecture as envisaged by Le Corbusier is clearly legible.

Making Renaissance Art

This book explores key themes in the making of Renaissance painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints: the use of specific techniques and materials, theory and practice, change and continuity in artistic procedures, conventions and values. It also reconsiders the importance of mathematical perspective, the assimilation of the antique revival, and the illusion of life.

Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems

In The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974–75), Martha Rosler bridged the concerns of art with those of political documentary. The artwork, a series of twenty-one black-and-white photographs, twenty-four text panels and three blank panels, embraces the codes of the photo-text experiments of the period and applies them to the social reality of New York’s Lower East Side. This artwork has played a key role in debates on contemporary art and aesthetics, but it has not been the object of careful scrutiny or analysis.

Oxford Art Journal, Jeff Wall Special Issue, 30:1, 2007

This special issue of the Oxford Art Journal is dedicated to examining the work of the artist Jeff Wall. Born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1946, Wall continues to live and work in the city. Wall commenced his career as a Conceptual artist at the end of the 1960s, producing among other works Landscape Manual in 1969–70. In the 1970s he briefly ceased making art and studied for a PhD in art history at the Courtauld Institute, London. From 1977 he began producing the works for which he is best known in his chosen medium of photography.

Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (1260-1555)

The city of Siena, one of Italy’s major artistic centers, was home to many celebrated painters, among them Duccio, Simone Martini, Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, Sassetta and Beccafumi. This generously illustrated book provides a survey of Sienese painting from 1260 to 1555, an era of extraordinary artistic creativity in the Tuscan city. Art historian Diana Norman addresses the style and artistic technique of Sienese painters throughout the three centuries and explores why paintings were made, where they were originally seen, and how they were used and enjoyed by their audiences.

Painting the Difference

The picture plane of a painting creates boundaries and perspectives. It governs the relationship of daubs of pigment on a canvas to reality, allowing the viewer to connect with the imagined world of a work of art. Charles Harrison's latest endeavor, Painting the Difference, explores the role of the picture plane in modern painting and the relationships it creates among the artist, the subject, and the spectator.

Photography: A Very Short Introduction

Photographs are an integral part of our daily lives from sensationalist images in tabloid papers and snapshots, to art photography displayed in galleries and sold through international art markets. In this thought-provoking exploration of the subject, Edwards combines a sense of the historical development of photography with an analysis of its purpose and meaning within a wider cultural context. He interrogates the way we look and think about photographs, and considers such issues as truth and recording, objectivity and fine art, identity and memory.

Placing faces: The portrait and the English country house in the long eighteenth century

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures.

Playing at Home: The House in Contemporary Art

Playing at Home explores the different ways in which artists have engaged with this popular everyday theme – from ‘broken homes’ to haunted houses, doll’s houses, mobile homes and greenhouses. The book considers how issues of gender, identity, class and place can overlap and interact in our relationships with ‘home’, and how certain artworks disturb our comfortable ideas of what it means to be ‘at home’.

Prudhoe Castle Guidebook

At the center of a landed estate, Prudhoe Castle has been occupied continuously for more than nine centuries. This guidebook includes a tour of the medieval castle and 19th-century gentleman's house, and a history of the site and surrounding area from the Norman Conquest to the present day. It contains full-colour maps, plans and photographs, and an eyewitness account of the castle's recent history.

Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c 1300-1550

This study examined, for the first time, the powers of a wide variety of lay women who were able to commission art in Italy. Women of quite lowly status could contribute to a parish project, whilst the wives of lawyers, doctors and bankers emerged as able on occasion to act as patrons. The legal status of the wife as opposed to the widow, depending on whether women were under Lombard or Roman law, was examined, as it related to the relative agency of female patrons.

Representing Renaissance Art c 1500-c 1600

The book is a pioneering study which considers the expanding iconographies of art and artists during the sixteenth century. Well established traditions, such as the depiction of artist-saints are examined, as well as the many new ways of celebrating individual artists and representing the scope of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Design invented during this period. The study highlights the places where such visual images were to be seen, whether in artists’ own houses, or their guild chapels and processions or in the new illustrated books about art.

Siena and the Virgin: Art and Politics in a Late-Medieval City State

Celebrating the Virgin Mary as both an object of religious devotion and a focus of civic pride, fourteenth-century artists established within their city a vibrant pictorial tradition that continued into the early decades of the next century. Such celebratory images of the Virgin were also common in Siena’s extensive subject territories, the contado . This richly illustrated book explores late medieval Marian art – how it was commissioned, created and understood by the Sienese.

Spectacular Flirtations

During the Georgian period there was a remarkable proliferation of seductive visual imagery and written accounts of female performers. Focusing on the close relationship between the dramatic and visual arts at this time, this beautiful and stimulating book explores popular ideas of the actress as coquette, 'whore', celebrity, muse and creative agent, charting her important symbolic role in contemporary attempts to professionalise both the theater and the practice of fine art.Gill Perry analyses the complex ways in which these identities were both constructed and challenged through portraits

The Birth of Modern London: the development and design of the city, 1660-1720

The period 1660-1720 saw the foundation of modern London. This work examines in detail the building boom and the speculative developers who created the new regularised landscape of brick houses laid out in spacious squares and streets. It offers a wealth of new information on their working practices, the role of craftsmen and the design thinking which led to the creation of a new prototype for English housing. The book concentrates on the mass-produced house of ‘the middling sort' which saw the adoption of classicism on a large scale in this country for the first time.

The Church of the Archangel Michael at Kavalariana

This study examines a church dedicated to the Archangel Michael, built by and for the Cretan Orthodox congregation on the south-western part of the island during the period when it was under Venetian domination (1211-1669). Its surviving inscription dates the church 1327/28.

The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons

This book was written to accompany the exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2011-12, curated by Gill Perry. The exhibition included 54 portraits and objects and involved extensive research in British archives, and some collaborative explorations with colleagues in theatre studies, music history and literature. Perry edited the book and wrote 70% (20,000 words), including three chapters and a section on biography. The book explores the role of feminine portraiture in the history and visibility of the first British actresses.

Themes in Contemporary Art

In this fourth volume of the Art of the Twentieth Century series, the contributors address a fascinating variety of themes relating to art from the 1960s to the end of the century—the period of “postmodernism.”

Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean

'Timed out' is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current ‘global turn’ in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of the Atlantic world in relation to the mainstream history of art. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora have been placed not only ‘outside’ but ‘behind’ the dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be used to rethink the global geography of art.

Understanding Heritage in Practice

"An up-to-date introduction to new worldwide approaches to understanding and interpreting heritage" Mike Heyworth MBE, Director, Council for British Archaeology "A key text for the university classroom and will be on the shelves of serious students as well as professionals in cultural heritage management" John H. Jameson Jr, Acting Director, Southeast Archeological Centre, National Park Service, USA "The complex field of heritage practice is clearly delineated in this volume, which describes its historical emergence and contemporary manifestations, both tangible and intangible."

Viewing Renaissance Art

This book forms the third of a series of three volumes produced by The Open University and together entitled 'Renaissance Art Reconsidered'. The other two volumes are "Making Renaissance Art" and "Locating Renaissance Art". While the first two volumes focus on different issues surrounding the production of works of art, this book explores patterns of viewing and consuming art in the period leading up to the Reformation.

Views of Difference: Different Views of Art

In a fascinating series of case studies, this book looks at the ways in which European colonizers interpreted the arts of the people they colonized, as well the ways in which they have tended to view art produced by the colonized and their descendants in post-colonial times.