This gem of a catalogue accompanies an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, on one of the great painters of 17th-century Italy, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591-1666). It brings together for the fi rst time Waddesdon’s King David with three paintings of sibyls (female prophets from classical antiquity) on loan from the National Gallery and the Royal Collection. Readers and viewers alike will be immersed in the poetry, colour and majesty of these four works, which were all painted in the year 1651 by the great Italian artist Guercino (‘The Squinter’). They have never before been seen together. The catalogue will investigate the relationship between David, Jewish patriarch, psalmist and prophet, whom Christians believed prefi gured Christ, and the four turbaned, pagan seers, who supposedly foretold Christ’s birth. Guercino’s brilliant depiction of fabrics and materials –silk, fl esh and ermine, paper, wood and stone – evokes ideas about inspiration and contemplation, sight and foresight, poetry and prophecy.

A vital moment in Kentucky's queer history captured in sumptuous visuals—half a century in the making.The conceptual lovechild of photographer John Denny Ashley and artist Robert Morgan, Pagan Babies has at long last emerged as a vibrant witness to a particular moment in American history, a time when sexual revolution and gay liberation manifested even in small Southern towns like Lexington, Kentucky.Pagan Babies, the name adopted by Morgan and his band of guerrilla-style street artists, was a natural moniker for this collection, which draws inspiration from art-house movies, Greek mythology, Ovid, Shakespeare, the decadence of Weimar Berlin, punk rock, the Pre-Raphaelites, David Bowie, and—above all—the expressive and ingenious realm of queer Kentucky. In Robert Morgan, John Denny Ashley found his archetypal sexual outlaw, and in Ashley, Morgan discovered an artistic collaborator worthy of documenting the emerging free-spirited, sexually adventurous rebels of the American South. Together, they brought forth a collective work that serves as a bracing testament to Morgan's baroque imagination and Ashley's talent for breathing life into his vision.The result is this book. At last.

This book aims to investigate Surrealism’s precedents in visual tradition and to explore its influence on contemporary art. Taking the ideational power of vision as their starting point, these thirteen essays apply different perspectives to themes essential to the Surrealist avant-garde — dreams, magic, madness — but also mystic visions, hybridity and the ongoing relevance of syncretic figures as protean germinations of the irrational. The collection opens with a reconsideration of André Breton’s late book, L’Art magique (1957). The other essays cover a wide array of themes, ranging from witches’ iconography in the early modern period to immersive contemporary video installations, while devoting particular attention to specific Surrealism-related topics. Following the fil rouge traced by Breton, the possibility of an alternative art-historical narrative clearly emerges.

The distinguished private collection, known as the Griffin Collection, comprises in its entirety examples of every category of ring – signet, devotional, memorial, decorative – dating from antiquity to modern times. This catalogue focuses on about one hundred special rings, chosen as highlights of this extensive collection with the aim to offer the reader a real history of the art of the ring across the ages.Covering as they do so many facets of civilization, rings tell us more about the hopes, aspirations, taste and sentiments of our ancestors than any other jewels surviving from the past. Moreover, the examples from the Griffin Collection, which have been assembled with taste and discernment over several decades, are not only rare but also of unusually high quality and intrinsic value. As well as being aesthetically attractive, these rings offer us a glimpse into the lives of their owners, as becomes evident in the vivid account offered by Diana Scarisbrick, one of the world’s leading jewellery historians.The collection illustrates the many uses of rings—as seals needed for business, in expressing religious belief, political loyalties and personal interests such as theatre going, hunting, classical art and astrology. Some demonstrate high rank and commemorate great historical occasions; others dating from the Middle Ages to Victorian England mark the major events of human existence – love, marriage and death – with rings bearing symbols and inscriptions. Often connected with historical figures, monarchs, notably Charles II and William IV or Isabella Zápolya, Queen of Hungary, but also with popes or artists, such as the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Each ring reveals personal information about the people who wore them and the societies in which they lived. An unusually high proportion of the rings have distinguished later provenance, coming from celebrated collectors: George Spencer 4th Duke of Marlborough, Constantine Ionides, Ernest Guilhou, Ralph Harari and Maurice de Rothschild.

Accompanying an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads presents a remarkable series of hauntingly beautiful largescale drawings by the artist. The catalogue includes a new piece of writing on one of the drawings from critically acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín. This catalogue explores one of Frank Auerbach’s most remarkable bodies of work – a series of large-scale portrait heads made in charcoal, produced during his early years as a young artist in postwar London. Auerbach (b. 1931) spent months on each drawing, working and reworking them during numerous sessions with his sitters. This prolonged and vigorous process of creation is evident in the finished drawings, which are richly textured and layered. Auerbach would sometimes even break through the paper and patch it up before carrying on. His heads thus emerge from the darkness of the charcoal with burning vitality, born of an artistic as well as a physical struggle with the medium. The process of repeated creation and destruction, of which these images bear the visible scars, speaks profoundly of their times, as people rebuilt their lives after the ruination and upending of the war. The exhibition will be the first time Auerbach’s extraordinary drawings, made in the 1950s and early 1960s, have been brought together as a comprehensive group. They will be shown together with a selection of paintings he made of the same sitters; for the artist, painting and drawing have always been deeply entwined. The accompanying catalogue – by Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery, Barnaby Wright, and with an essay by one of the greatest contemporary voices in the English language, Colm Tóibín – is the first publication to explore in depth this magnificent series. Tóibín spent several hours one afternoon in front of Auerbach’s Self-Portrait (1958), which features on the front cover of the book, looking closely and taking notes. His essay is an account of his experience and offers new insights into the work and the nature of self-portaiture.

Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 offers a fresh perspective on the art of Venice and the Veneto. The volume brings together the contributions of scholars and curators specialist on a wide variety of artists and art forms including drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and architecture.Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 takes disegno as its central theme, that in its plurality of meaning allows for a consideration of the conceptual role of design and the act of drawing. The relationship between disegno and RenaissanceVenetian art has historically been a problematic one, with emphasis instead being placed on the Venetian predilection for colore. This volume is reflective of an ongoing challenge to this perspective and draws attention to the importance of Venetian disegno and the study of drawings for understanding various art forms.The book commences with a critical study of what constitutes disegno in Venetian art. It does so through questioning the historiography of Venetian artistic scholarship and the restrictive framework and preconceptions that have emerged before setting out the merits of a broader, more inclusive approach. Disegno is applied in its multifaceted nature to address the physical act of drawing, the tangible drawn object and the role of design in artistic practice. The term ‘Venetian’ is taken to encompass both Venice and its mainland territories not least because of the mobility of artists across and beyond the region.Contributions are divided into five thematic sections. The first, entitled ‘Peripheries’, frames the art of Venice within a wider discourse on the movement of ideas across and beyond the Veneto in locations including Padua, Verona and Rome. A section on Media considers the origins and innovations that took place in the use of materials such as blue paper, oil and coloured chalks. In another, the theories that have developed on Venetian notions of disegno are brought under scrutiny, addressing topics such as the long upheld perspective that Venetian artists did not draw, the role of sculpture in Tintoretto’s drawing practice and the interrelation between the written and drawn line in Palma Giovane’s draftsmanship. The section on Invention reflects on the technical innovations that were facilitated through theuptake of printmaking and the intellectual freedom granted by humanist patrons. Finally, Function gets to the heart of the practical purpose of disegno. Contributions focus on the workshops of the Bellini family and Titian to consider the diverse ways they used drawing within their artistic practices with an emphasis on technical analysis. These sections are all preceded by introductions that provide an overviewon each theme while the volume is bookended by two reflections on the state of research into Venetian disegno and the potential for further progress.Sumptuously illustrated with over 100 images with a comprehensive bibliography, Venetian Disegno: New Frontiers circa 1420 to 1620 represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the art of Venice, Renaissance workshops and drawing studies.

A cultural imaginary is a structuring space through which collective understandings of cultural and society phenomena are formed, reproduced, and accepted as the norm. Reading the Walls of Bogotá uses graffiti and street art to explore the urban imaginaries of violence in Bogotá, Colombia. These artistic forms are produced and received in different ways in different areas of the city and offer an insight into citizens’ everyday experiences and perceptions of violence from the political, to the personal, to that of structural inequality. Through graffiti, in which critiques of memory, space, politics, and aesthetics are embedded, artists and their viewers form vernacular theories through which they interpret the world and the spaces they inhabit. By focusing on creative expression, Alba Griffin shows how Bogotá’s residents respond to imaginaries of violence, how they critique the norms, how they appropriate space to challenge or negotiate violence, and how they push back against inequality.

This volume brings together over 25 scholarly essays, reviews and shorter contributions by Peter Hecht, preceded by an introduction on what he thinks his life in art history has taught him. The title indicates what his collected papers have in common: together they represent an attitude of listening to what you see. Hecht is very suspicious of applying a method and believes that looking at an image until it speaks is essential to understanding it. Also, he has done much to prove that it not only pays to study the subject of a picture as part of an iconographical tradition, but that one should study it within the oeuvre of the artist who made it as well.

John Carr of York (1723 – 1807) was one of the most prolific and significant architects of the eighteenth century, with an output of over 400 designs, most of which were executed. His designs vary from simple gateways through to the grandest schemes, such as that for the palatial hospital at Oporto in Portugal, Harewood House and village in Yorkshire, and Basildon Park in Berkshire.

A fully illustrated biography of London artist;Francophile and Western Australia colonial settler John de Mansfield Absolon painted superb ship-board scenes in an impressionistic style reminiscent of Edouard Manet's.

This beautifully illustrated and scholarly book presents the Frelinghuysen collection of Chinese and Japanese export porcelain. It is the first major publication to consider Chinese and Japanese blue and white together. This extraordinary collection, assembled carefully over fifty years, features an exceptionally wide array of Asian blue and white porcelain – that most ubiquitous and influential of all ceramics. Ranging from Chinese pieces specially made for Portuguese traders in the 16th century to late 19th century commissions for the Thai royal court, the collection also includes numerous Chinese classics from theera of the European trading companies and a notable selection of Japanese export porcelain. In its vast scope it speaks of the diverse impulses and historical forces that propelled the trade in Asian porcelain and provides a lens through which to view the interaction of East and West from the early modern age to the dawn of the 20th century. More than 300 pieces from the collection are illustrated and discussed in full and another 250 are illustrated in a compendium, all divided into thematic chapters that reflect the many ways Chinese and Japanese porcelain has been traded, collected and lived with around the world. Essays by William R. Sargent, former Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and noted armorial porcelain authorityAngela Howard, precede the thirteen chapters, which include Faith, Identity, For the Table, To European Design and Made in Japan. Great rarities are featured alongside small, amusing pieces and the many export porcelains made to elevate the practices of daily life. With its strict adherence to blue and white porcelain, the collection intensifies our focus on forms, patterns and designs, gathering together wares that are often considered only separately for study while also covering areas of little recent scholarship, such as the Thai market material. The specialized reader will find references to the latest research while the more general reader will appreciate a comprehensive overview of Asian export porcelain. There has not been a significant survey of either Chinese or Japanese blue and white since the 1990s, and they have never been considered together in a major publication.

R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles explores the relationship between Kitaj’s art and the places where he lived. This is the first significant publication about the artist in over a decade and provides a chronological overview of Kitaj’s career. Published to accompany Piano Nobile’s exhibition of the same title, it includes 43 paintings and drawings with catalogue entries containing original research, in many cases presenting new information about Kitaj's sources and sitters for the first time.The book contains three essays, which describe the artist's lives in London and Los Angeles. Andrew Dempsey recounts Kitaj’s relationship with artists, institutions and art critics during his thirty-eight-year period in London. Colin Wiggins, who worked with Kitaj on his National Gallery exhibition in 2001, writes about the artist’s last decade in Los Angeles. Marco Livingstone in his essay remembers the long correspondence he shared with Kitaj. A further section includes extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, which are now held by the Tate Archive and are published here for the first time.

This publication has been developed from ideas first presented at the international symposium Late Hokusai: thought, technique, society, held at the British Museum in May 2017. The symposium was organised to enable specialists in a range of disciplines relating to early modern Japan to view and consider the critically acclaimed exhibition Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave, then being presented at the British Museum. The exhibition brought together representative works by the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760−1849) in the various media in which he worked – colour woodblock printed, woodblock-printed illustrated books, brush paintings on paper or silk, and brush drawings − that were produced between the age of 61 and his death aged 90. Building on the themes of the exhibition, authors from the UK, Europe, Japan and USA have engaged with late Hokusai from a variety of perspectives, both intrinsic and extrinsic to his life and works. Essays have been grouped within the broad categories of ‘thought’ -- Hokusai’s intellectual concerns and the ways his art brought these to life; ‘technique’ – how the artist pursued excellence in a wide range of media, within a commercialised art market; and ‘society’ – dimensions of cultural interaction and patronage. A fourth section on ‘legacy’ looks at how stories of Hokusai have been as much generated by 130 years of scholarship, as they have by his works themselves. Challengingly, faked paintings and printed works have both contaminated and supported those stories. This innovative approach provides new insights into the work of one of the world’s most celebrated artists and suggests many new avenues for Hokusai research.

Artists and travel have for centuries been intertwined where the desire to explore beyond the confines of one’s home has provoked a truly astonishing outpouring of creativity, much of which was captured through drawings and prints. Comprising over 100 such works, Connecting Worlds: Artists& Travel will be the first exhibition to approach the subject through the lens of artists’ experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, before the establishment of the railroad and use of photography as a means of recording changed these experiences deeply. A collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, the exhibition will include works by major artists, lesser known professionals as well as amateurs, mostly from Northern Europe, amongst them Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wenceslaus Hollar, Zacharias Wagner, Valentin Klotz, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelika Kauffmann, Franz Pforr, Augusta von Buttlar, Julie von Egloffstein,Ludwig Richter, and Friedrich Preller the Elder. Divided into three sections, “On the road”, “Destination Rome”, and “Dresden”, the exhibition begins by exploring artists on the road and what they regarded as important to record in sketchbooks and individual sheets. The second section looks at Rome as one of the most important destinations for Northern travellers, with its incomparable remains of antiquity and as the seat of the Catholic Church that celebrated its religious and administrative life through processions and public spectacle. The journey ends in Dresden, as a centre for collecting, cultural exchange and glamorous festivities, ambitiously competing with other international courts since the time of Augustus the Strong. A different kind of travel, made possible by collecting images and stories of landscapes, flora, fauna, and cultures previously unknown in Europe, is explored. This section closes with the story of the IndonesianRomantic artist Raden Saleh, who first visited Dresden in 1839, and was warmly welcomed by the Saxon court. The richly illustrated catalogue will feature essays by an international panel of experts addressing such topics as the uses of artist sketchbooks across time, written and visual accounts of travel in books and prints, encounters with the Ottoman world, travel and collecting at the Saxon court.

Brittle Beauty presents a superlative private collection of European porcelain – radical, rare and in many cases unique pieces assembled over thirty years. Lavishly illustrated and insightfully researched, the book showcases eighty vessels and sculptures, and includes accounts of their patrons and former owners, many as eccentric as the works themselves. One striking attribute of porcelain is its reflective glaze. Mirror-like in a wider sense, Brittle Beauty: Reflections on 18th Century European Porcelain examines the context in which this porcelain was created – including cultural, political, topographical and ceremonial aspects. It also looks at related materials such as silver, textiles and glass. The 18th century was the golden age of porcelain in Europe, which had previously been dependent on precious imports from the Far East. The discovery of the formula for hard-paste porcelain in Dresden in 1709 inspired the establishment of manufactories throughout the Continent. However, its popularity was not purely commercial: porcelain – with its meld of art and science, beauty and intellect, East and West – became a symbol of Enlightenment culture for every princely court. Oriental motifs and European forms were synthesised with deceptive subtlety; later, creations of pure fantasy emerged, often based on travellers’ accounts of exotic lands. Familiar Occidental themes such as nature, hunting or archaeology were paralleled by ironic narratives of love and vanity. Porcelain, with its fragile allure, is uniquely expressive of the human comedy, yet its destiny has often been brutal and tragic. This book features essays from several eminent scholars. It also showcases a wealth of stunning imagery from Sylvain Deleu, who expertly photographed the pieces, many for the first time.

Jean Cooke: Seascapes & Chalk Caves is the first publication about the artist in over ten years. It provides an original account of Jean Cooke and her connection with East Sussex, including a wide selection of paintings, pastels and watercolours made by the sea over a period stretching from 1963 to 2007. The book includes the first comprehensive chronology of the artist and an essay by Jane Alison, former Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, which considers Cooke's work in the context of eco-feminism. Rarely seen photographs of Cooke and the artist's own photographs of Sussex are also published here for the first time.