Artists Bookworks

Artists Bookworks specialises in artists' books and writings of the early 20th century and titles on Russian avant-garde modernism. In 2017, they launched a series on historical pigments, 1st century B.C. to the 19th century based on contemporary treatises, complemented by the first documentary dictionary of pigments.

12th Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 132
ISBN: 9780946311231
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2024
Description:
Treatises on painting between the 1st and the 12th centuries A.D. may have been many but those preserved are found in two manuscripts from the 10th and 12th centuries: the Mappae Clavicula and Eraclius, On the Arts and Colours of the Romans – both of which probably date from c.
13th Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780946311255
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2024
Description:
A French collection of recipes for painting on parchment, On Making Colours, by a painter, Peter of St. Audemar, possibly of the Benedictine Abbey of St Bertin at St. Omer in northern France.
19th Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9780946311279
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2024
Illustrations: approx. 12 col plates
Description:
The 19th century was a century of new pigments. They were derived from recently recognised metals –cadmium, chrome, zinc and others – as well as from the discovery of the chemical colouring substances of plants. From indigo the aniline dyes were manufactured, and from madder came the alizarin red pigments – there were hundreds of these coal tar pigments.
1st-19th Century Pigments Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780946311262
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2024
Description:
A collection of all the historical pigments mentioned in the treatises included in the series Colour Palettes, by century, complemented by recipes from other contemporary sources. The entries define the pigment – colour, its source (animal, plant, mineral) and its name – and describe its method of preparation, with historical remarks tracing the pigment through the centuries. Recipes provide the documentary history of the pigment beginning with the earliest known through to 1837, the date of George Field's, Chromatography, to make up a history of each pigment.
15th Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780946311224
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2020
Illustrations: 164 pp 16 col plates, 13 mono illus
Description:
15th century Italian painting mastered the art of painting light in the world. As Leon Battista Alberti wrote in On Painting (1435), "light has the power to vary colour", hence a rich palette of pigments and how to mix colours was necessary to capture every nuance. Countless recipes are provided by the anonymous author of "Secrets for Colours" (c.
14th Century Colour Palettes - Volume 2 Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 130
ISBN: 9780946311248
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2020
Illustrations: 12 col plates 8 mono illus
Description:
From Italy to France to Flanders, the arts of painting in the 14th century were practised in manuscript illumination, on panel, and in fresco. Recipes for pigments appropriate to all these arts are included in this collection. "Experiments upon Colours" were dictated by painters to a Frenchman, Jehan Alcherius, while the Italian artist, Cennino Cennini, was especially attentive to the practice and the pigments to be used in fresco painting in The Book of Art / Il Libro dell' Arte, of c.
14th Century Colour Palettes - Volume 1 Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780946311286
Pub Date: 15 Apr 2020
Illustrations: 16 col plates, 6 mono illus
Description:
A companion volume to 14th Century Colour Palettes -Volume 2, this book covers painting on the wall and onwood panel from Cennino Cennini, The Book of Art, of the late 1390s (extracts). The pigmentsand methods are drawn from the practice of Giotto, as Cennino writes.
14th Century Colour Palettes - Volume 1 and 2 Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 234
ISBN: 9780946311293
Pub Date: 15 Apr 2020
Illustrations: 28 col plates, 14 mono illus
Description:
From Italy to France to Flanders, the arts of painting in the 14th century were practised in manuscript illumination, on panel, and in fresco. Recipes for pigments appropriate to all these arts are included in this collection. "Experiments upon Colours" were dictated by painters to a Frenchman, Jehan Alcherius, while the Italian artist, Cennino Cennini, was especially attentive to the practice and the pigments to be used in fresco painting in The Book of Art / Il Libro dell' Arte, of c.
18th Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 132
ISBN: 9780946311019
Pub Date: 30 Apr 2018
Description:
Pigments described by the English chemist, Robert Dossie, the French artists' colourman, Jean Félix Watin, and the London-based pigment maker, Constant de Massoul. 18th century European painting saw the introduction of new pigments to the painters’ palettes, from Prussian Blue to the early synthetics such as Patent Yellow. It was a century rich in pigments, the authors of the treatises listing over 150 pigments that could be bought in the shops in London and Paris.
16th Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 132
ISBN: 9780946311132
Pub Date: 27 Jan 2018
Description:
Three texts by two Italian Renaissance painters – Leonardo da Vinci and Gian Paolo Lomazzo – and a compendium of the 53 standard pigments commonly found on artists' palettes for painting in oil on panel and on canvas as outlined by the writer, Raffaello Borghini, make up this 16th century collection of pigments. Leonardo's studio advice on the use of colours for capturing light and dark picks up this theme from Italian 15th century and classical painting and lays the foundation for this practice as it would develop in European painting. The plates are of works by Titian found in the National Gallery in London, whose pigments have been identified and matched to the paintings.
1st Century Colour Palettes Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 88
ISBN: 9780946311149
Pub Date: 27 Jan 2018
Illustrations: 12 colour plates, 6 mono illus.
Description:
The sources of pigments used in European painting are found in classical antiquity, 1st. century B.C.
Impressionists' Palettes of Light Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 68
ISBN: 9780946311002
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2015
Illustrations: 12 colour plates
Description:
The French Impressionist painters discovered new means for painting light – they used a “solar palette”, the pigments matched to the colours the eyes see. They are the colours of a ray of light. This little book reproduces palettes by 8 of the plein-air painters – Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Seurat, Signac, and Van Gogh.
Malevich Writes Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 704
ISBN: 9780946311088
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2014
Illustrations: 115 mono illus.
Description:
Collection of 30 texts, 1915-1928, & 3 facsimiles, some in first English translation, plus Nina Kogan on Cubism and Ilya Chashnik on Suprematism. Chronological sections trace Malevich’s analyses of Cubism and Futurism, the Supremus Society of Artists, Suprematism Triumphant, UNOVIS, Theory of Creativity as Artistic Culture, and the Non-Objective World of Sensations. A presentation of sensations from Cézanne to Suprematism is followed by a discussion of how consciousness and the environment influence artistic creativity in P.
RRP: £40.00
Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 64
ISBN: 9780946311033
Pub Date: 01 Jul 2014
Illustrations: 2 illus. 34 plates
Description:
A facsimile edition of Kazimir Malevich, SUPREMATISM 34 Drawings, was published in 1990 by Artists Bookworks accompanied by an introduction to the drawings by Patricia Railing; it is now out-of-print. This 2014 reprint of Malevich’s little book contains a new translation from the Russian and a new introductory text by Patricia Railing, “Reading the 34 Drawings”. The Russian text and plates were scanned from an original copy and the size of this little book conforms to the lithographed Russian edition of 1920.
RRP: £17.50
Malevich Paints Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780946311217
Pub Date: 01 Sep 2013
Illustrations: 138 colour, 80 mono illus.
Description:
This is the first study to investigate the sources of the creative processes in the painting of Kazimir Malevich, from Neo-Primitivism to Suprematism, 1911-1920. These sources are found in 19th century scientific investigations into optics, especially those of Hermann von Helmholtz, the artist adapting the laws of optical light and colour and the laws of optical structures of seeing in space and in depth to his painting. Malevich’s creative processes culminated in his non-objective canvases, Suprematism, between 1915 and 1920, the painting of pure seeing.
RRP: £35.00
Alexandra Exter Paints Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780946311200
Pub Date: 01 Dec 2011
Illustrations: Over 400 colour illus.
Description:
A collection of 16 essays on the artist’s painting and works for the theatre between 1910 and 1924. The essays explore the colour theories that gave rise to her abstract painting and the basic laws of structure that gave order to her Cubist, Simultaneist, Non-Objective painting and her stage and costume design. Contemporary accounts of her three plays, Famira Kifared, Salome, and Romeo and Juliet are included together with extracts from Alexander Tairov’s, Notes of a Director (1921).
RRP: £35.00