James Bawden: Seeing the way people behave when they're around you, is it still fun being Cary Grant?Cary Grant: I don't like to disappoint people. Because he's a completely made-up character and I'm playing a part. It's a part I've been playing a long time, but no way am I really Cary Grant. A friend told me once, "I always wanted to be Cary Grant." And I said, "So did I." -- from the bookIn Conversations with Classic Film Stars, retired journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller present an astonishing collection of rare interviews with the greatest celebrities of Hollywood's golden age. Conducted over the course of more than fifty years, they recount intimate conversations with some of the most famous leading men and women of the era, including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joseph Cotten, Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, Joan Fontaine, Loretta Young, Kirk Douglas, and many more.Each interview takes readers behind the scenes with some of cinema's most iconic stars. The actors convey unforgettable stories, from Maureen O'Hara discussing Charles Laughton's request that she change her last name, to Bob Hope candidly commenting on the presidential honors bestowed upon him. Humorous, enlightening, and poignant, Conversations with Classic Film Stars is essential reading for anyone who loves classic movies.

As the institutionalization of the avant-garde took place, postmoderntheory both reacted to and helped create the forces that erodedreason and even taste, labelled them quaint in the name of apostmodern theory, at the same time that mass commodity form wasinscribing exchange value on all work of the imagination. In fact, thereality is that the system, the society of domination has enclosed discoursein such a way that, coupled to new social media and electronicplatforms, all radical, all working class or under class voices are prevetted or erased, and only the most craven corporate financializedkitsch is validated. The collusion of galleries, collectors and curators,following the model of studio film and network TV, has equated popularitywith quality. The problem then is to recuperate something of thelost radical conscience of art and culture. There is now an amnesiaabout the prehistory of society, of our own psyches, and of the imagination.The colonizing of consciousness has rendered the imaginationof the west atrophied and almost inert. All art is a recreationof our own psychic formation (mimesis) as well as being shaped byits ‘otherness’, by a purposelessness. All stories are crime stories,all stories are about exile, and all stories are about homesickness.And all art contains a narrative. For only by having no purpose canthe artwork posit the direction to which society must look to createan ‘other’ or elsewhere. To retain something of that utopian promisethat is foundational in culture. The world is being dis-enchanted. TheUtopian promise is not kept.

Castles and the Anglo-Norman World draws together a series of 20 papers by 26 French and English specialists in the field of Anglo-Norman studies. It includes summaries of current knowledge and new research into important Norman castles in England and Normandy, drawing on information from recent excavations. Sections consider the evolution of Anglo-Norman castles, the architecture and archaeology of Norman monuments, Romanesque architecture and artefacts, the Bayeux Tapestry and the presentation of historic sites to the public. These studies are presented together with a consideration of the 12th century cross-Channel Norman Empire, which provides a broader context. This work is the result of a conference held at Norwich Castle in 2012, which was part of a collaboration between professionals in the fields of archaeology, architecture, museums and heritage, under the banner of the Norman Connections Project.

John Raimondi (b. 1948) is a contemporary American artist whose more than 100 monumental works of outdoor sculpture have earned him international distinction and acclaim. During his forty-five year career, he has experimented with a wide variety of styles, ranging from the simplicity of strong, angular lines and planes to the more graceful, curvilinear renditions of the natural world and human figure, to improvisational elements in his dignified series on American jazz greats and Indian chiefs. A constant in every style and approach in Raimondi's sculpture is his classical sense of design and craftsmanship along with his keen appreciation for scale and a subject's social meaning. His sculptural works are also distinctive in how they are made not cast in bronze but formed, rolled, welded, and fabricated into shape from large sheets of bronze or Cor-Ten steel. The results are unforgettable pieces that are monumental yet elegant, solid yet ethereal.Behind most of Raimondi's sculptural pieces are his conceptual drawings, which are works of art in their own right. These drawings—based on astute observations in the field and an immersion into scholarly readings—become fundamental, singular translations of the artist's feel for and understanding of a subject. The drawings are then rendered into cardboard models that become templates for larger-scale models for the eventual work of art. Raimondi then makes new drawings of the completed sculpture in order to provide a sense of closure and complete the artistic process.John Raimondi: Drawing to Sculpture is a seminal new book that presents not only an unprecedented number of Raimondi's sculptures and drawings, but also a sense of his ever-evolving career and creative approach to making unforgettable art. The book also complements a forty-five-year retrospective of Raimondi's work at the Boca Raton Museum of Art.

Sensory Systems documents an engaging group exhibition presented at the Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, in autumn 2015. The exhibition is the first in a new annual programme by the gallery each autumn that will revolve around the theme of light, and timed to coincide with the famous Blackpool Illuminations – a six-mile-long outdoor display of lights that has drawn many visitors to the town each year since it was first switched on in 1912. The exhibition and publication feature works by internationally acclaimed artists interested in the technology and science of light, and how this can be used to affect our perceptual experiences of space. Whether through sculpture, projection or immersive architecture, eachartwork presented in the exhibition invited a dialogue with the viewer, utilising colour, pattern, movement and other factors to evoke a variety of spatial and sensory experiences. The selection of prominent figures working internationally today who feature in the exhibition and publication are: Angela Bulloch, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anthony McCall and Conrad Shawcross. Among these, Anthony McCall was one ofthe early pioneers in the field, alongside figures such as James Turrell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Dan Flavin. McCall, who moved to New York from England in the early 1970s, was highly influential with his ‘solid light’ installations. In this exhibition and publication, McCall presents You and I, Horizontal (2005), a slowly evolving, curving sculpture made of light. The publication includes a foreword by Richard Parry, Curator at the Grundy Art Gallery, an essay by Dr. Luke Skrebowski, Director of Studies in History of Art at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge, and has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik. The project has been supported by Blackpool Council, Coastal Communities Fund, Arts Council England, and is co-published by the Grundy Art Gallery and Anomie Publishing. The publication is distributed internationally by Casemate Art.

Now in its fifteenth year of publication, Ceramics in America is considered the journal of record for historical ceramics scholarship in the American context and is intended for collectors, historical archaeologists, curators, decorative arts students, social historians, and contemporary potters.

Nominated for the 2016 IPPY Award in both the Photography and Current Events categories.Memento Mori: Testament to Life is a poignant tribute to the victims of Colombia’s armed conflict that has claimed more than 250,000 people during the last fifty years. The book is presented as four bodies of photographic work in a two-volume, bi-lingual edition: English and Spanish. The first volume includes hauntingly beautiful images of Diettes’s photographic work on display at museums and at memorials in areas where the victims “disappeared,” a moving statement by the artist herself, an essay by Mexican scholar Ileana Diéguez, and an extensive conversation with the artist by Anne Wilkes Tucker, former Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.The second volume showcases the plates from three photographic series: Sudarios (Shrouds), photographs printed on linen of women who have witnessed atrocities committed against their loved ones, Río Abajo (Drifting Away), images of articles of clothing of “the disappeared,” photographed in water and embedded in glass, and Relicarios (Reliquaries), three-dimensional works of polymer containing mementos and personal effects of the victims. At once majestic, accessible, and deeply moving, this book makes a significant contribution not only to documentary art, contemporary Latin American studies, and social anthropology but also to those wanting to understand, at a very basic level, the human cost of terrorism. As Anne Wilkes Tucker writes, Erika Diettes’s unforgettable book speaks “of universal loss from violent death.” And it is through her art that we learn how to grieve from such loss.

Rare Light is a collection of essays exploring little known facets of the life and career of a major American Impressionist painter. J. Alden Weir (1852–1919) painted some of his finest canvases while living in Windham in eastern Connecticut’s picturesque “Quiet Corner,” and this rural location played a crucial role in Weir’s artistic development. The four essays that comprise this book offer in-depth contextual information about the architecture, culture, environment, and history of the region, allowing us to see Connecticut as it appeared in Weir’s lifetime. Interweaving photos, paintings, and letters—some never before published—Rare Light documents the artist’s sense of Windham as a place for social gatherings, physical and psychic rest, and art making. Taken together, the essays celebrate the interconnectedness of art, architecture, family, history, and place. Includes essays by Charles Burlingham Jr., Rachel Carley, Anne E. Dawson, and Jamie Eves.

The first book to appear on the 20th century British artist Charles Cundall, this publication examines aspects of Cundall work done at home in England, abroad - Cundall made numerous painting trips to the continent, but also to the United States - and during the war. Well illustrated, the book also includes a chronology and a reproduction of a text by William Gaunt dating from the 1960s and commissioned for a book on Cundall that never came to be.

David Sylvian may be seen as a philosopher, accordingly to the postmodern spirit, who invalidates identity, while preserving it at the level of “non-sound”, in a troubled relationship between the ego and the others. His most recent songs have been analysed, as well as the lyrics and Sylvian’s way of life. Music is the goal of a path of self-realization, which brought Sylvian to conceive a new view of arrangement, increasingly deprived of its frills and capable of magnifying his voice, which that it is uncontainable. Sylvian shows everybody that silence may become an integral part of music towards nonsense, or the recovery of existential nudity.

This book, which is an excerpt of the author’s Ph.D. dissertation, deals with the popular reception of early Italian television, during the years of the so-called “lungo miracolo” (1954-1969). To do so, the author focuses on the Catholic and Communist audiences’ perception of the first TV programs. The investigation into these two main groups’ reception is conducted through analysis of all TV references, tracked in the reader’s columns of the two most popular magazines of those years: the Catholic “Famiglia Cristiana” and the Communist “Vie Nuove”. The text ise introduced by a preface written by professor Stephen Gundle, one of the major experts on the circulation and reception of mass culture in modern Italy.

This is the first major monograph on the work of one of Britain’s most dynamic artists, Wolfe von Lenkiewicz. His striking paintings and drawings mine the hallowed halls of art history and popular culture in search of visual languages, imagery, themes and motifs that he can appropriate, adapt, use and abuse, bringing together different movements, genres, periods and styles in dialogues that are surprising, innovative and sometimes provocative. Lenkiewicz’s imagination and energy seem to be inexhaustible, concocting endless amazing hybrids such as iconic Renaissance paintings invaded by characters from nineteenth-century Japanese woodblocks, French Revolutionary masterpieces spliced with German Romanticism, or Cubism infiltrated by Victorian children’s illustration. The result is a peculiar and fantastical cast of characters and scenarios, whether Nazi soldiers trampling through the snow towards a crashed UFO in the middle of a village scene by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Snow White making an uncomfortable guest appearance in an already troubling Balthus interior, or a guillotined head assuming a cameo role in an otherwise serene still life. These painterly chimera are cultural mash-ups. Sometimes irreverent, sometimes witty, other times simply beautiful, odd and arresting amalgams, they are always poignant, pertinent and decidedly thought-provoking, inviting the viewer to think across time, cultures, countries and ideologies about the many languages of art. In the process, Lenkiewicz has established his own distinctive oeuvre, one that perhaps perfectly illustrates the notion of post-modernity within painting – an oeuvre of juxtapositions and non-sequiturs, binary oppositions and the uncanny, ruptures and elisions, the real and the irrational. As well as often encouraging us to look at the history of art with fresh eyes, Lenkiewicz’s practice asks about visual culture today, about how our understanding of the past rests on shifting sands. With an introduction by distinguished art critic Edward Lucie-Smith and a major new essay by writer and editor Richard Dyer, this beautifully designed and produced hardback book presents an impressive selection of works produced by the artist between 2009 and 2015. Born in 1966 and based in London, Lenkiewicz is of German and Polish descent; he studied philosophy at York University, graduating in 1990. He is the son of the late painter Robert Lenkiewicz and great grandson of Baron von Schlossberg, court painter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Swan King.

Prompted by the recent discovery of an impressive three-metre tall late Gothic drawing of a soaring tower and spire, this book offers a rare insight into the processes of designing and building a major gothic project. The drawing’s place and date of creation are unknown, and it corresponds to no surviving Gothic tower. Equally mysterious is the three-quarter, top-down perspective from which the tower is represented, without parallel in any other medieval drawings. Who drew this? When? And what did he hope to convey with his choice of a top-down representation of the tower? Building a Crossing Tower explores these questions, and uncovers the dramatic circumstances in which this drawing was created. The first part of the book links the drawing to an early 16th-century building project in the city of Rouen in Normandy, France. Rouen was then a thriving port, one of the most populous cities in France, and a vibrant construction site, where dazzling, flamboyant creations were erected side by side with Renaissance buildings. At the centre of this intense building activity was Roulland le Roux, the city’s leading master mason, most likely the author of the newly discovered drawing. Given the scarcity of French gothic drawing, the discovery of this impressive piece and its attribution to a known artist are significant events in themselves. Moreover, in this exceptional case it is also possible to recreate the social context of the drawing’s production, explored in the second part of the book. Previously unpublished minutes of the cathedral chapter reveal that the drawing was realised following the dramatic fire which destroyed the cathedral’s crossing tower in 1514. The fire sparked fierce disputes among the cathedral’s canons, who divided into two factions: one hoping to see the crossing tower reconstructed in stone, the other lobbying for a safer and cheaper wooden spire. The differences between the two parties and the changing fortunes of artists employed in the reconstruction project are documented in gripping detail in the chapter’s minutes, which reveal how the new drawing was commissioned and realised. But the minutes also reveal that this drawing ultimately failed to convince the chapter to support and authorise the project, despite its impressive size, perspective and skilful representation of virtuoso carving. The flamboyant gothic tower never was erected, and the worksite came to a standstill until 1542, when a Renaissance tower was eventually built by Robert Becquet. This drawing then represents a failed design proposal. Yet, for this very reason, it offers a unique insight into the politics of building a great late gothic project, shedding light on an ever-changing landscape of contrasts and collaborations. If drawings are often interpreted as a direct window into a master’s mind, graced by the touch of his hand, this drawing is unexpectedly revealed as a mirror of the social life of a key late Gothic building site.

The images of atrocity, either analog or digital, are always the trace of an encounter between the gaze of a photographer or a cameraman and a human being suffering from the painful effects of man-made violence. The archive images resulting from such an encounter raise some inevitable questions: who took them and for what purpose? Is it possible to retrace the process that led to these shots? What do they hide behind what the eye can see? This special issue of Cinéma & Cie will not only focus on the production of such images, but also on their persistence on the synchronic level (in the media: newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, the Internet, museums…) as well as on the diachronic level (across time: mutation, re-editing, inversion…). From propaganda to counter-propaganda, from purposes of memory to artistic aims, the circulation of these images proves that repetition always implies difference.

A hypertextual guide to an uncharted Milan, the liveliest, expressed through features far from the media’s limelight. The Milan of places where independent and underground culture is produced, where new ways of life and socializing are experimented on a daily basis, with participation and dissemination of knowledge.A guide capable of, firstly, disassembling the numerous components of the urban framework to then give useful tips for an upstream, erratic journey full of surprise and emotion. 
 A topography of author itineraries between psyche and territory, narrative itineraries written by the best pens of Milan in a fun game of clues, links and chance, but also of new correlations in which the readers can become protagonists.The project, to which a multitude of researchers, artists, academics and professionals will take part, wants to contribute to the growth and enrichment of a different Milan, different from the one portrayed by the official signage.
 In addition, the Guide – with its website of interactive maps – allows all the realities involved to “trespass” their reference fields and interact with the other reported experiences.

First published to accompany Piano Nobile's exhibiton at Piano Nobile Kings Place, Thomas Newbolt: Drama Paintings - A Modern Baroque, this fully colour illustrated book presents a substantial publication on contemporary artist Thomas Newbolt. Newbolt's dedication to the figure in art, and the vitality of his work have gained him international recognition.An artist of talent and intellectual integrity, he was Harkness Fellow at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin, and a Fellow-Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a respected teacher at Camberwell, Anglia Ruskin and The Royal Drawing School, London. Recent exhibitions include Ely Cathedral, the Estorick Collection, and a group show, Vital Signs, at Clifford Chance in 2015. His work is held in major international public collections.With essays by Mark Hudson, arts critic at the Telegraph, Professor Maurice Biriotti, and Martin Gayford, critic at the Spectator, this catalogue provides fresh insight into the work of this most enigmati and powerful of artists. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed as a work of art in its own right, Thomas Newbolt: Paintings is a reflection on Newbolt's career thus far, and a testament to the significance of his work. The publication includes three essays, a catalogue of works selected by Thomas Newbolt, a chronologyof the artist's career and an index.