A richly illustrated celebration of the paintings of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama From the moment of their unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2018, the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama have become two of the most beloved artworks of our time. Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald's portrait of the former first lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public, and attendance at the museum has more than doubled as visitors travel from near and far to view these larger-than-life paintings. After witnessing a woman drop to her knees in prayer before the portrait of Barack Obama, one guard said, "No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever." The Obama Portraits is the first book about the making, meaning, and significance of these remarkable artworks. Richly illustrated with images of the portraits, exclusive pictures of the Obamas with the artists during their sittings, and photos of the historic unveiling ceremony by former White House photographer Pete Souza, this book offers insight into what these paintings can tell us about the history of portraiture and American culture. The volume also features a transcript of the unveiling ceremony, which includes moving remarks by the Obamas and the artists. A reversible dust jacket allows readers to choose which portrait to display on the front cover. An inspiring history of the creation and impact of the Obama portraits, this fascinating book speaks to the power of art-especially portraiture-to bring people together and promote cultural change. Published in association with the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Hierdie publikasie gee ’n volledige beeld van die kunstenaar Frans David Oerder (1867–1944) se oeuvre – sy Anglo-Boereoorlogtekeninge, landskappe, genrestukke, portrette, blomstudies en stillewes, interieurs, dierestudies en grafiese werk. Geen moeite is ontsien om hierdie boek so volledig en betroubaar moontlik te maak nie. Argivale bronne in die Kunsargief van die Universiteit van Pretoria, die Argief van die Johannesburg Kunsmuseum en die Nasionale Argief van Suid-Afrika in Pretoria het grootliks bygedra tot die toevoeging van inligting oor hierdie kunstenaar wat nie voorheen bekend was nie. Dieplakboek van Gerda Oerder en ’n lang lesing met detailinligting oor Oerder se vroee lewe deur mev. Lorimer in die Kunsargief van die Universiteit van Pretoria het bygedra tot ’n nuwe vertolking van die lewe en werk van hierdie belangrike Suid-Afrikaanse kunstenaar. Tydens die Anglo-Boereoorlog was Oerder die enigste amptelike kunstenaar aan Boerekant, maar tot dusver is nog geen volledige geskiedenis van sy deelname aan die oorlog geskryf nie. In hierdie boek word Oerder se Anglo-Boereoorlogtekeninge nou vir die eerste keer so volledig moontlik afgedruk en beskryf.

What is a true 1950s look, as opposed to a 1930s or 1940s look? This book aims to address that question by thoroughly surveying the development of graphic design over the course of the 20th century. Timelines for each decade highlight key moments, styles and movements, while profiles of thirty influential graphic designers - three per decade - are interspersed throughout the book.

While the battles for modern art and society were being fought in France and Spain, it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea-shops. In this multi-awardwinning book - now available in paperback - Alexandra Harris tells a different story. In the 1930s and 1940s, artists and writers explored what it meant to be alive in England. Eclectically, passionately, wittily, they showed that `the modern' need not be at war with the past. Constructivists and conservatives could work together, and even the Bauhaus emigre, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjeman's nostalgic Oxford University Chest. This modern English renaissance was shared by writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics, tourists and composers. John Piper, Virginia Woolf, Florence White, Christopher Tunnard, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster and the Sitwells are part of the story, along with Bill Brandt, Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Cecil Beaton.

First World War Poets by Alan Judd and David Crane. This collection of short biographies of those remarkable men who sought to record and convey the horrors of the Great War in poetry draws on letters, memoirs and portraits in a variety of media. Key poems by each of the poets are reproduced in full, and familiar images of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are presented along with the haunting faces of lesser-known poets such as Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney to provide a new approach to one of the most devastating events of the last century. Published to coincide with the centenary of the start of the Great War.

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor. In this beautifully written, deeply researched book Jed Perl shows how Alexander Calder became an avant-garde artist with enduring appeal. One of our most beloved modern artists, Calder is celebrated above all as the inventor of the mobile. Only now is the full story of his life being told in a gloriously illustrated biography, which features unseen photographs and is based on scores of interviews and unprecedented access to Calder's papers. Born into a family of artists, Calder forged important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century masters, including Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. His early years studying engineering were followed by artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to Louisa James-- a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story. This transatlantic life carries readers from New York's Greenwich Village, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then to a refugee-filled London just before the War, where Calder's circle of friends included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Kenneth Clark.

Published to accompany the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this catalogue examines the impact of Futurism and Cubism on British modernist printmaking from the beginning of World War I to the beginning of World War II. Imagery ranges from powerful artistic impressions of the first fully mechanized war, to radical geometric abstractions, to the colourful, streamlined jazz age images of speed, sport and diversion which the Grosvenor School artists created in order to introduce a broader public to modern art and design. Interest in this era is peaking among collectors, curators and art historians and this is an ideal moment to introduce these innovative British printmakers to a wider public.

The Graphic Century reveals the symbiotic relationship that exists between graphic design and art. Structured chronologically, the publication presents a survey of posters dating back to 1903. Although they are brought together from the archives of just one institution - the Whitechapel Gallery - they are emblematic of wider ideological, technical and aesthetic tendencies. Edited and introduced by Hannah Vaughan, The Graphic Century surveys the developments in visual communication since the Gallery's launch.

The story of one of the world's greatest cover artists told through his iconic 1960s and 1970s Agatha Christie paperback designs, which influenced a generation of readers and artists. Includes a variety of other art and illustration from his 50 year career. The Agatha Christie covers painted by Tom Adams constitutes probably the most famous body of paperback art ever produced by a single artist. Between A Murder Is Announced in 1962 and Miss Marple's Final Cases in 1979, Tom was commissioned by Fontana in the UK and Pocket Books in the USA to paint covers for almost every Agatha Christie book, most of them more than once, totalling around 150 different paintings over two decades. They have been reproduced in many languages all over the world, defining the style of paperback artwork throughout the sixties and seventies and influencing a generation of artists and designers ever since. Tom's unique interpretations of the themes and stories in the books, often hiding clues about the plots within his paintings, have left an indelible mark on those who read those editions, and they are now highly sought after by fans of both Agatha Christie and Tom Adams. And Agatha Christie is only half the story. Concurrent with this extraordinary achievement, Tom was also producing art for other publishers, including an iconic series of Raymond Chandler covers and some brilliant jackets for books by John Fowles (The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman), Patrick White (The Vivisector), David Storey (Saville), Peter Straub (Ghost Story), and Kingsley Amis (his James Bond pastiche, Colonel Sun). Tom Adams Uncovered is a showcase of the artist's best work from a career spanning more than 50 years. In addition to his many cover paintings, it features examples of Tom's broader work, including award-winning advertising, portraits, album covers, poster prints, and his work on the films 2001, Flash Gordon and Lifeforce. With captions by Tom and a commentary by the Agatha Christie historian John Curran, and concluding with previously unpublished Agatha Christie paintings, this book is a treasure trove for both crime fans and art lovers, and a fitting celebration of one of the world's finest cover artists.

Brett Whiteley was one of the most dynamic and talented artists in the history of Australian art, an artist whose recognition had spread worldwide before his untimely death in 1992. Early in his career he established a name for himself in London, exhibiting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and coming into contact with many British painters - Francis Bacon and David Hockney among others. His early paintings startled critics and fellow artists, but even at that point, two basic subjects were evident: the landscape and the nude, elements which became the mainstay of his oeuvre. At the root of all Whiteley's work was a draughtsmanship of stunning virtuosity, capable of capturing all the poetic arabesque of a river in a single sweeping line of brush and ink, or the erotic curves of the human body in a few searching strokes of charcoal. This volume presents an illuminating evaluation of Whiteley's achievement. Works dating from the 1950s to the last years of his life, illustrated in over 180 colour plates, allow Whiteley's career to be surveyed in its entirety. Barry Pearce, Head Curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, provides a comprehensive overview of Whiteley's life and art; Bryan Robertson offers an impression of the artist's years in London; and Wendy Whiteley, the artist's wife and companion for over three decades, contributes an intimate portrait of the man behind the work. Superbly illustrated and produced, Brett Whiteley: Art & Life is a fitting tribute to one of Australia's most significant artists, a man whose outstanding work excites, amazes and impresses us no less now than it did when first created.

'Inside Photography', a collaboration between the writer/editor, David Brittain and graphic artist, Clinton Cahill, is a book of interviews that sheds light on the art photography magazine. Inciteful and often irreverent, the book demonstrates how this critically overlooked type of publication can be an invaluable resource for creative and historical investigations.

When Picasso became Picasso: the story of how an obscure young painter from Barcelona came to Paris and made himself into the most influential artist of the twentieth century. In 1900, an eighteen-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso made his first trip to Paris. It was in this glittering capital of the international art world that, after suffering years of poverty and neglect, he emerged as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Fueled by opium and alcohol, inspired by raucous late-night conversations at the Lapin Agile cabaret, Picasso and his friends resolved to shake up the world. For most of these years Picasso lived and worked in a squalid tenement known as the Bateau Lavoir, in the heart of picturesque Montmartre. Here he met his first true love, Fernande Olivier, a muse whom he would transform in his art from Symbolist goddess to Cubist monster. These were years of struggle, often of desperation, but Picasso later looked back on them as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came slowly: first in the avant-garde circles in which he traveled, and later among a small group of daring collectors, including the Americans Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1906, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Inspired by the groundbreaking painting of Paul Cezanne and the startling inventiveness of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured and defined the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he'd gone mad. Only his colleague George Braque understood what Picasso was trying to do. Over the next few years they teamed up to create Cubism, the most revolutionary and influential movement in twentieth-century art. This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is filled with heartbreak and triumph, despair and delirium, all of it played out against the backdrop of the world's most captivating city.

In "Paint Made Flesh," expressive figuration is considered as a reflection of artists' responses to such topics as identity, sexuality, and mortality, and as a symptom of a broader spectrum of social and political attitudes shaping Western culture since World War II. It features art from the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, countries that have since the 1950s produced many artists who use paint as a metaphor for flesh in all its aspects. It will also consider contemporary artists whose works move from a national to a global stage in terms of meaning and style.

The book has been developed to accompany an early 2009 exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which will include paintings by artists like Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, Pablo Picasso, and Julian Schnabel from private collections and museums around the world. "Paint Made Flesh" will feature approximately forty color plates and approximately fifty other illustrations, and four essays by major art historians.

Susan Edwards's essay "The Influence of Anxiety" considers works by American artists active from the 1950 to the 1970s, including Willem de Kooning, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel, as responses to social conditions and the expressive limitations of late Modernism. Emily Braun's "Skinning the Paint" looks at the work of British painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, and its legacy in the painting of Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown. The title refers to the way these artists use a knife both to strip the skin or surface of the figure and to build up new layers of epidermis, comprising a metaphor for the dialectic between psychological and physical aspects of being.

Richard Shiff's "Drawn on the Body" discusses German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Markus Lupertz, and Albert Oehlen, whose gestural paint application is seen as both an extension and critique of the notion of a national heritage distinctly tied to Expressionism. The final essay, Mark Scala's "Fragmentation and Reconstitution: Painterly Figuration Since 1980," examines ways that artists like Wangechi Mutu, Daniel Richter, and John Currin posit a transmutation of identity-personal, cultural, and sexual-that is today mirrored in images of the body. Instead of asking the question of the traditional figure painter: "Who are we?" these artists are more concerned with the question "Who will we become?"

Beauty has emerged as one of the most hotly contested subjects in current discussions on art and culture. After more than half a century of suspicion and interrogation, beauty's resurgence in visual practice and discourse since the late 1980s has engaged some of the most influential artists and writers on art. From the avant-garde to the conceptual era, anti-aesthetic strategies have resisted beauty because of its perceived complicity with dominant systems and ideologies. Thus politicized and opened to critique, beauty, invoked in relation to contemporary art, no longer sustains a singular or universal meaning but is always contentious. Spanning a range of positions on beauty--both for and against--this anthology assembles the key texts on the controversy and situates the debate over the revival of beauty in the broader context of the history of ideas and artistic practice. Artists surveyed: Vito Acconci, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Gary Hume, Asger Jorn, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Paul McCarthy, edouard Manet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, Andy Warhol Writers: Theodor Adorno, Alexander Alberro, Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, T. J. Clark, Mark Cousins, Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Derrida, Thierry de Duve, Fredric Jameson, Christoph Grunenberg, Dave Hickey, Suzanne Perling Hudson, Caroline A. Jones, John Roberts, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, Paul Wood "Documents of Contemporary Art series Copublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London"

How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects-radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism-abstract, non-objective art-to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.

This volume presents over 200 'secret masterpieces' of classic modernism held in the R&H Batliner Art Foundation's archives. Embracing paintings, drawings, sculpture and ceramics, it features reproductions of rarely seen works by Monet, Matisse, Bacon, Lichtenstein, Kokoschka, Picasso, Klee, Chagall and Giacometti, among others.

Tran Trung Tin painted in Hanoi during the 1960s and 70s, conveying the experience of the Vietnamese at war and the essence of human emotion in his images When he was 12, he joined the Resistance against the French who occupied Vietnam, devoting his youth to freeing his country only to be disappointed by the repression and misery that followed. Living in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, forbidden to express himself in words, he turned to painting to communicate the contradictions of his time.

This centennial catalogue celebrates the remarkable achievements of the Whitechapel Gallery between 1901-2001. Featuring essays by Jonathan Jones, Jeremy Millar, Guy Brett, Mark Francis, Catherine Lampert, Jon Newman, Juliet Styen, Marco Livingstone, Felicity Lunn, Paul Bonaventura, Rachel Lichtenstein and Alan Dein, Janeen Haythornthwaite and Brandon Taylor. Artists surveyed include Ian McKeever, Tim Head, Alfredo Jaar, Ian Breakwell, Susana Solano, Cathy de Monchaux, Tunga, Boyd Webb, Matthew Higgs and Paul Noble, Zarina Bhimji, Hamish Fulton and John Murphy

Enrico Donati first found acclaim when the master of Surrealism, Andre Breton, lauded him the savior of the movement in 1942. Donati went on to exhibit with major figures of the New York School, such as Rothko, de Kooning, and Pollock. Spanning well over half a century, his artistic career was extraordinarily rich, and he was associated with many of the most influential movements and groups of artists of the time, but fundamentally he remained independent and enigmatic. Dawn Ades acquaints the reader with Donati's formative relationship to the Surrealists and then moves through his postwar painting up to his death in 2008.