This handsome catalogue accompanies an exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the 60-year reign of King George III. It presents one mezzotint portrait for each year of his reign. Mad about Mezzotint traces the history of mezzotint in the reign of King George III by looking at three aspects of the art form: the astonishing method of mezzotint, the absorbing history of the form in the late eighteenth century and Regency period and the endless fascination with London as a subject. Although the mezzotint originated in Germany as early as 1642, its golden age came in England in the eighteenth century. Its beauty lay in its ability to create the subtlety of tone found in an oil painting. Crowds marvelled at the new technique and seized upon the opportunity to popularize their work and disseminate their images more widely. Conditions in eighteenth-century London were ripe for this revolution in printing. England had a new king and queen on the throne, an ever-expanding court and flourishing commercial interests overseas. The city of London was expanding at an astonishing rate and money was pouring into the capital. This fully illustrated publication includes an introduction on the history of mezzotint and full catalogue of the works, as well as indexes of artists and persons depicted. Artists featured include Valentine Green, John Hoppner, John Jones, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Charles Turner. People depicted include King George, George, Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Admiral Horatio Nelson and Earl and Lady Spencer.

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world’s greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch’s artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858–1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch’s work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development. Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch’s early ‘realist’ phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist’s move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch’s career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch’s famous ‘Frieze of Life’ series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his ‘Frieze of Life’ works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch’s powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century. This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

‘The conference volume Munch and his World offers an excellent overview of Munch's multifaceted print and photographic techniques within the context of his contemporaries, which makes it particular valuable. This extremely readable book is aimed both at a specialist audience and interested non-professionals and, through its selected image comparisons and high-quality illustrations, conveys a vivid impression of Munch's prints within avant-garde art in Berlin and Paris.’ – Print QuarterlyThe art of Edvard Munch is striking for the originality and universality of its themes, which cross moments in place and time. Yet he was very much an artist of the nineteenth century, and the focus of this publication is to show how especially in his prints and photographs Munch was enabled by technical advances developed by his contemporaries to create an entirely new visual language. Munch is probably best known for his desire to express emotions surrounding love, illness and death. However, the authors in this volume show that this preoccupation was not only based on biographical events but reflects wider contemporary debates on developments in medicine and science, including treatment of mental illness, as well as a proliferation of technical expertise in the production of prints.The arguments presented expand on subjects touched upon in the critically acclaimed British Museum exhibition Edvard Munch: love and angst (2019). Munch's remarkable prints were fundamental to establishing his international career, but there remains much to investigate in connection with the background to his innovatory techniques, his relationship with contemporary printmakers and his experiments with photography. The authors in this volume go some way to address these themes and outline future avenues of research.

This book reveals that Pablo Picasso wasn't simply a figurehead of the Modern Age. He grew up in the 19th century: the extraordinary mixture of values that was fin de siècle Europe penetrated deep into his personality, remaining with him through his life. While he was the quintessential Modern in so many ways, he was also a Victorian, and this duality explains the complexity of his genius. He was simultaneously looking forwards and backwards, and feeding off the efforts of others, before developing his own idioms for depicting the contemporary world. The young artist recognised that society was increasingly in a process of transformation, not in a transitory or temporary way, but permanently, under the inexorable pressures of modernisation. He realised that the emergence of Modern art through the last quarter of the century was a product of this transformation. Throughout his life, Picasso would feel the tension between modernity and the histories it replaced. He would also struggle with the role of the individual, and subjectivity, in this new environment. Each chapter shows how the young artist embraced successive styles at large in the art world of his time. By the age of 14 well capable of drawing in a highly competent Beaux Arts mode, he drew in a Classicist manner of redolent of Ingres, or early Degas. He then moved through various forms of Impressionism, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism, before arriving in his early twenties at his first wholly individual style, the Blue period, albeit that all these earlier sources were still evident. The Rose period followed, after which the artist began a truly seminal period of experimentation which culminated in the development of Cubism. By 1910, Cubism had become a fully mature vision, practiced by a wide range of artists. It was to provide the springboard for much Modern art across the disciplines, and it positioned Picasso as perhaps the single most important artist of the new century.

Despite his numerous hits and Grammy nominations - and his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - John Mellencamp remains one of America’s most underrated songwriters. In Mellencamp, David Masciotra explores the life and career of this important talent, persuasively arguing that he deserves to be celebrated alongside artists like Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. Starting with his modest beginnings in Seymour, Indiana, Masciotra details Mellencamp’s road to fame, examining his struggles with the music industry and his persistent dedication to his midwestern roots as he found success by remaining true to where he came from. Masciotra addresses the numerous themes Mellencamp introduces into his songs, which range from small town life, race, and Christianity to poverty and the struggles of adulthood, placing them within the social and historical context of contemporary America. From a cultural critic who has contributed to the Washington Post, Atlantic, and Los Angeles Review of Books, this thoughtful analysis highlights four decades of the artist’s music, which has consistently elevated the dignity of everyday people and honored the quiet heroism of raising families and working hard.

How best to tell the life story of a fashion photographer? What was the common thread composing his career? How does his body of work and progression tie into the history of fashion photography? Regards spans 4 decades of the extraordinary professional career of a photographer whose discretion and elegance are reflected in thisdedicated retrospective: a tribute to womanhood, to women in all their diversity, showcasing their timelessness, universality, sophistication, boldness, seductiveness, provocativeness and even at times their inaccessibility. A hymn exalting their beauty. This one-of-a-kind book, offering numerous iconic images, also delicately narrates how perception of this femininity has evolved over the years. But above all else, this book tells the story of a man’s love for women, who have always left him fascinated, amazed, overwhelmed and inspired.This work is a confession of love for what women represent to him, a testimonial to how they move the photographer, who has never ceased to admire them with passion.

This fascinating book tells the story of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Accompanying a multi-venue exhibition, it explores Hardy's life and work. Internationally-acclaimed writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is best known for his evocative depictions of the West Country landscape and its people, a region that he called 'Wessex'. What is less well-known is that this landscape also inspired him in many other aspects of his life, from campaigning for animal welfare to questioning the way society viewed women. This publication accompanies a blockbuster, multi-venue exhibition of the largest collection of Thomas Hardy memorabilia ever to be displayed at once.  Hardy was born in the West Country, a few years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, and spent most of the rest of his life among its landscapes and people. When he turned writer, these landscapes and people re-emerged as his 'partly-real, partlydream country' of Wessex, in novels like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure. Hardy's Wessex now conjures up a range of mental images: from raging seas on the coast to haunting ancient monuments, Victorian towns packed with life to peaceful hillsides grazed by sheep. However, through Hardy's 87-year life span, the West Country changed dramatically. Ideas of the role of women, humans' responsibility to animals, the realities of war, love and courtship, superstition, social structure, religion and how people related to the world around them altered fundamentally. Through his stories and campaigning, Hardy was keen to show not only the rural idyll, but also the tensions and difficulties that lay beneath these views.  These dramatic landscapes were the lens through which Hardy presented his worldview to his readership. From the tragedy of a woman saying farewell to her sailorlover on the end of Portland Bill, to a shepherd losing his flock and facing ultimate ruin on the chalky hills. The landscapes shape his characters, whose stories in turn convey his messages of social change to his readers. This publication will explore the impact that Wessex had on Hardy's works, and how living there shaped his views on the often divisive social issues of the period. Uniting beautiful landscape imagery with a selection of personal items from Hardy's life, this book will show you the man behind the literature.

This fascinating book provides a fresh perspective on the understanding of sacred imagery and its use through selected studies related to seventeenthcentury Roman visual culture. Painting, Patronage and Deovtion: A Focus on Seven Roman Baroque Masterpieces will accompany an exhibition of works by prominent Baroque artists, at the Villa Mondragone, a Renaissance Papal Villa in the countryside of Rome. The highlight of catalogue and exhibition is a group of masterpieces by seven prominent artists of the seventeenth century: six altarpieces by Carlo Saraceni, Valentin de Boulogne, Andrea Sacchi, Andrea Camassei, Pietro da Cortona, and Carlo Maratti, and one easel painting by Guido Reni commissioned for private devotion. Most of the paintings will be on public view for the first time. The publication offers new approaches to the study of the complex processes involved in the making of a work of art. By reconstructing the religious and social dynamics of artistic patronage and the context of worship and devotion in which these paintings - fully documented by primary sources - were executed, the volume explores the visual impact of these works on the viewers. This beautifully illustrated book will feature remarkable new photographs and details of diagnostic analysis of Pietro da Cortona’s and Carlo Maratti's altarpieces.

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.

For over half a century, Valencia-born, New York-based Manolo Valdés has been a prominent international figure in the arena of contemporary art, known for his work in the mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing and collage. In this striking and imposing publication, designed in close dialogue with the artist by Peter B. Willberg and produced in Italy, Valdés presents a body of thirty-five sculptures created in 2020 and 2021. Along with wood, alabaster, aluminium, steel and resin, the primary medium employed in this body of work is glass, following a significant and intense period of research and experimentation. The resulting works are engaging contemporary portrait busts that make reference to the history of modernist painting and sculpture, taking inspiration from imagery and objects by twentieth-century masters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Constantin Brancusi. Developing his ‘recipes’ for their fabrication – materials, processes, conditions and timings – with both care and flair, Valdés has created sculptural glass busts in a range of amber oranges, ruby reds, emerald greens, sapphire blues, and onyx blacks, all of which almost seem to glow with what Dr Kosme de Barañano, the book’s author, describes as ‘an inner light’. Barañano’s comprehensive and illuminating essay not only investigates aspects of the history of glass making and its use as a material by artists past and present, but also traces the evolution of the language and forms of Valdés’s glass and mixed-media works across a number of key exhibitions and bodies of work over the course of the past two decades. These include his monumental sculptures at the New York Botanical Garden in 2012 and his dramatic solo presentation in the Place Vendôme in Paris in 2016, both of which offered opportunities to see the artist’s large-scale sculptural works in outdoor settings. Discussing the significance of 'Cabezas' (heads) in his oeuvre, Barañano asserts: ‘These glass "Cabezas" are tremendously sombre and simple works from which emanates a profound silence.’This large-format publication, which is illustrated by specially commissioned photography by Tom Powel, documents many of the sculptures from different angles and by means of details, revealing not only the subtleties and qualities of the surfaces of the abstracted, humanlike glass heads, but also the curious and eclectic appendages that regularly appear to burst forth from them like unorthodox fascinators or eccentric jewellery, from nails and steel rods to glass or metal butterflies and wooden geometric forms. With a timelessness that speaks of civilisations long gone and a modernity that simultaneously seems to look to the future, Valdés has created a body of sculpture in glass that transcends time, touching on the metaphysical nature of the human mind and its outward manifestation in the physical world. Manolo Valdés (b.1942, Valencia) is one of the most significant post-war Spanish artists. A key member of the Equipo Crónica until 1981, in 1989 he moved to New York. Major solo exhibitions include the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Reina Sofía, Madrid, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Château Royale de Chambord, France.

This book is an ethnographic study of sound archives and the processes of creative decolonization that form alternative modes of archiving and curating in the 21st century. It explores the histories and afterlives of sound collections and practices at the International Library of African Music. Sound Fragments follows what happens when a colonial sound archive is repurposed and reimagined by local artists in post-apartheid South Africa. The narrative speaks to larger issues in sound studies, curatorial practices, and the reciprocity and ethics of listening to and reclaiming culture. Sound Fragments interrogates how Xhosa arts activism contributes to an expanding notion of what a sound or cultural archive could be, and where it may resonate now and in future.

"Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you? " These famous lines from The Graduate (1967) would forever link Anne Bancroft (1931–2005) to the groundbreaking film and confirm her status as a movie icon. Along with her portrayal of Annie Sullivan in the stage and film drama The Miracle Worker, this role was a highlight of a career that spanned a half-century and brought Bancroft an Oscar, two Tonys, and two Emmy awards. In the first biography to cover the entire scope of Bancroft's life and career, Douglass K. Daniel brings together interviews with dozens of her friends and colleagues, never-before-published family photos, and material from film and theater archives to present a portrait of an artist who raised the standards of acting for all those who followed. Daniel reveals how, from a young age, Bancroft was committed to challenging herself and strengthening her craft. Her talent (and good timing) led to a breakthrough role in Two for the Seesaw, which made her a Broadway star overnight. The role of Helen Keller's devoted teacher in the stage version of The Miracle Worker would follow, and Bancroft also starred in the movie adaption of the play, which earned her an Academy Award. She went on to appear in dozens of film, theater, and television productions, including several movies directed or produced by her husband, Mel Brooks. Anne Bancroft: A Life offers new insights into the life and career of a determined actress who left an indelible mark on the film industry while remaining true to her art.

For artists, creativity plays a powerful role in understanding, confronting, and negotiating the crises of the present. Seeding the Tradition explores conflicting creativities in traditional music in Hõ Chí Minh City, the Mekong Delta, and the Vietnamese diaspora, and how they influence contemporary southern Vietnamese culture. The book centers on the ways in which musicians of đón ca tài tù, a "music for diversion," practice creativity or sáng tạo in early 21st-century southern Vietnam. These musicians draw from long-standing theories of primarily Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused primarily - although not exclusively - on the individual genius. They play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to not only maintain their tradition but keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam. With ethnographic descriptions of zither lessons in Hõ Chi Minh City, outdoor music cafes in Cãn Thơ, and television programs in Đõng Tháp, Seeding the Tradition offers a rich description of southern Vietnamese sáng tạo and suggests revised approaches to studying creativity in contemporary ethnomusicology.

This fascinating and richly illustrated book accompanies The Medieval Body, the third in a series of vanguard exhibitions that places medieval masterpieces within a contemporary context.The title of the exhibition refers to both a literal thread of figuration that runs throughout the works in the presentation, as well as the complex and often shifting symbolism of the human body in the medieval period. For thinkers and artists of that time, the human body served as a rich source of religious and philosophical significance, one that was in a constant state of flux between idealism anddisfigurement. While the early Middle Ages reserved representations of suffering bodies to the margins of their world, the later Middle Ages displayed wounded bodies in the most central spaces of public life. The crucified body of Christ and the wounded bodies of saints assumed important positions as they were displayed on altars, in processions, and on the exteriors of churches.The Medieval Body tells a unique story about the human form as both a physical entity and a recognizable metaphor. Presenting works spanning the course of a thousand years, this exhibition offers insight into the body as an essential imagemaking tool with far-reaching implications for the development of art in the European Middle Ages.

Hal Wallis might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced—Casablanca, Jezebel, Now Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies)—have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America's film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked and no full-length study has yet assessed his incredible career. A former office boy and salesman, Wallis first engaged with the film business as the manager of a Los Angeles movie theater in 1922. He attracted the notice of the Warner brothers, who hired him as a publicity assistant. Within three months he was director of the department, and appointments to studio manager and production executive quickly followed. Wallis went on to oversee dozens of productions and formed his own production company in 1944.Bernard F. Dick draws on numerous sources such as Wallis's personal production files and exclusive interviews with many of his contemporaries to finally tell the full story of his illustrious career. Dick combines his knowledge of behind-the-scenes Hollywood with fascinating anecdotes to create a portrait of one of Hollywood's early power players.

This beautiful publication presents a facsimile of a sketchbook by the Dutch artist and illustrator Peter Vos (1935-2010), along with a volume of introductory essays. The title derives from the sketchbook's detailed drawings of 333 birds. From time immemorial people have been fascinated by birds and have created images of their winged companions. The artist Peter Vos was one of them. He kept bird diaries in which he noted down the birds he came across and captured them in pen and ink and watercolour. He took pleasure in entrusting all elements of a bird to paper - their characteristics, but mostly their characters. Hunched down or in full stretch, in the water and on land, on their behinds, their necks turned ninety or a hundred and eighty degrees, foreshortened or in three-quarter view, preening their plumage and their wings poised for flight: Peter Vos often depicted his birds several times on one sheet so that you really get to know them. 333 birds was a project, a task Vos set himself: fill an empty book with 333 birds drawn as beautifully as possible. He completed it over a period of eighteen months - from June 1980 to December 1981. He began by going to zoos to sketch the birds. Days later the sketches were worked out in the book. With the meticulous layout and the Latin names, Vos was referencing the field guides and the nineteenth-century books of plates. But he, unlike the creators of those books, was trying to draw the individual bird not the species. Crooked feathers are not straightened, an odd pose uncorrected and the blind eye simply drawn. Peter Vos's drawings are records of his encounters with individual birds. We should see 333 birds as an expression of curiosity for his companions. He loved those winged friends he presents to us in a long line in all their glory and individualities - true to nature and with an understanding of their characters, honestly, as befits friends.