Sex & Lovers is a great new guide for young people who are just starting out sexually, and essential reading for anyone who want to know more about sex but isn’t sure what questions to ask or where to find the answers. Sex can be amazing – and safe – but you need to know what you’re doing.
Everyone can become sexually aroused, but how much you enjoy sex depends on knowledge as well as experience. This book encourages you to get to know yourself and your body, and challenges common myths and expectations about what you should or should not do. The more you know, the better the sex, and the easier it is to talk about what does – or what definitely does not – appeal to you.
Written in a warm, utterly non-judgemental style, Sex & Lovers provides a wealth of facts, information and advice to help young people find what most of us are after – safe sex and good relationships.
Ann-Marlene Henning is a Danish neuro-psychologist, sexologist and TV personality who has her own sex therapy and couples counselling practice in Hamburg. In Sex & Lovers, she and her co-writer Tina Bremer-Olszewski cover everything a young person needs to know about sex and relationships from whether or not the G-spot exists to how to recognise and cope with sexually transmitted infections, from the size and appearance of genitals to how to manage (or decline to provide) oral sex.
The photographs, specially commissioned for this book, show genuine couples having real sex and convey a powerful sense of the closeness and tenderness of passionate sexual love: the complete opposite of the misleading impressions given by pornography.
In Germany, this book has so far sold over 200,000 copies, and was shortlisted in 2013 for a government non-fiction book prize for 14 years and over. It has also been published in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Spain.
Please visit www.sexandlovers.uk for more information about the book and to view interviews with Ann-Marlene Henning.
Please address all foreign rights inquiries to Rogner & Bernhard Verlag, Berlin www.rogner-bernhard.de
THE RETURN OF MOVIE
Conversation between Ian Cameron, V.F. Perkins, Michael Walker, Jim Hillier and Robin Wood examining recent changes in the American cinema and the functions and methods of criticism
APPROACHING TELEVISION Charles Barr
GENRE AND MOVIES Douglas Pye
CLAUDE CHABROL: INTO THE ’SEVENTIES Michael Walker
SMART-ASS & CUTIE-PIE
Notes towards an evaluation of Altman
AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE ’70s
Jennifer on my Mind Jim Hillier
Junior Bonner Douglas Pye
The Pursuit of Happiness Tom Ryan
The Towering Inferno Richard Dyer
Two-Lane Blacktop Terence Butler
MAKING DO – OR BETTER?
The American TV Film John Smith
THE MAKING OF A TELEVISION SERIES Charles Barr, Jim Hillier, V.F. Perkins
Upstairs, Downstairs
MANDINGO Andrew Britton
RICHARD FLEISCHER ON MANDINGO interview by Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye
AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE ’70s
The Way We Were Richard Dyer
Night Moves Michael Walker
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore Christine Geraghty
JOHN FORD AND THE CRITICS Douglas Pye
FEMINIST FILM CRITICISM Janey Place and Julianne Burton
COMMENT: TELEVISION & CRITICISM Joe Stefanos
GENRE AND HISTORY
Fort Apache and Liberty Valance Douglas Pye
AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE ’70s
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tony Williams
The Exorcist Andrew Britton
Carrie David Pirie
White Line Fever Aaron Lipstadt
FOUR FILMS OF LANA TURNER Richard Dyer
NOTES ON SIRK AND MELODRAMA Laura Mulvey
WRITING FOR TELEVISION
Interview with E.A. Whitehead V.F. Perkins and Douglas Pye
THE IDEOLOGY OF SCREEN Andrew Britton
Althusser
Lacan
Barthes
SCRIPTWRITER AND DIRECTOR
Interview with Walter Hill Alain J Silver and Elizabeth Ward
ARTHUR PENN
The Flight from Identity Terence Butler
AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE ’70s
Sideshows: Hollywood in Vietnam Andrew Britton
The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the ’70s Robin Wood
The Economic Background Chris Hugo
Sisters Robin Wood
Squirm Wayne Drew
Papillon Richard Dyer
The Great Waldo Pepper Andrew Britton
A Matter of Time Richard Lippe
The Other Side of Midnight Andrew Britton
Ulzana’s Raid Douglas Pye
Three Women’s Films Christine Geraghty
Mahogany Richard Dyer
Grease Deborah Thomas
Yanks Marion Jordan
10 Andrew Britton
Last Chants for a Slow Dance Jim Hillier
Family Horror Tony Williams
MELODRAMA AND THE AMERICAN CINEMA Michael Walker
OPHULS IN HOLLYWOOD Michael Walker
The Exile (1947)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
Caught (1949)
The Reckless Moment (1949)
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN V.F. Perkins
LA RONDE Deborah Thomas
LE PLAISIR Douglas Pye
METAPHOR AND MIMESIS: MADAME DE Andrew Britton
LOLA MONTES DISCUSSION Andrew Britton, Ian Cameron, V.F. Perkins, Douglas Pye and Michael Walker
MELODRAMA IN THE ’SEVENTIES Richard Lippe
CAGNEY AND LACEY Jim Hillier
INTERVIEW WITH MARK SHIVAS Charles Barr and Jim Hillier
INTERVIEW WITH TROY KENNEDY MARTIN Lez Cooke
EDGE OF DARKNESS Lez Cooke
BORDWELL & HOLLYWOOD Douglas Pye
IN DEFENCE OF FATAL ATTRACTION N.A. Morris
THREE FILMS OF BRIAN DE PALMA
Body Double, Blow Out and Scarface Chris Hugo
LETTER – PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CRITICISM Peter Benson
MUST WE SAY WHAT WE MEAN?
Film Criticism and Interpretation V.F. Perkins
BLONDE VENUS (1932) Deborah Thomas
SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (1947) Michael Walker
ALL I DESIRE (1953) Michael Walker
ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED
Another Look at Sirkian Irony Bruce Babington & Peter Evans
ALTAIR IV REVISITED – ‘FORBIDDEN PLANET’ (1956) Peter Boss
THE ADVENTURES OF RAFE HUNNICUT
The Bourgeois Family in ‘Home from the Hill’ (1960) Edward Gallfent
REFLECTIONS ON ‘PEEPING TOM’ (1960) N.A. Morris
(nostalgia) (1971) Jim Hillier
DEMON a.k.a. GOLD TOLD ME TO (1976) Elayne Chaplin
SEPARATIONS
Chantal Akerman’s ‘News from Home’ (1976) and ‘Toute une nuit’ (1982) Richard Kwietniowski
THE AMERICAN TRAUMA
‘Paris, Texas’ (1984) David Russell
LAWRENCE ALLOWAY Ian Cameron
MOVIES AND POINT OF VIEW Douglas Pye
‘Rio Bravo’
Some dimensions of point of view
The opening of ‘The Lusty Men’
A CINEMA OF REPRESSION
De Niro and Depardieu David Russell
THE GHOST AND THE MACHINE
Fantasies of Masculinity in some American Films of the 1980s and early 1990s Deborah Thomas
Meeting women half-way
Inhabiting the fringe
Bankrupt masculinities
‘Lethal Weapon’
‘The Abyss’
LA SIGNOR DI TUTTI Michael Walker
Flashback subjectivity
Family melodrama
OPHULS CONTRA WAGNER AND OTHERS V.F. Perkins
PLEASURE AND EXCESS
Vincent Price and the Horror Film Leon Hunt
This lavishly illustrated book surveys the development of animal illustration from its origins through the periods of its finest achievement.
No previous book has attempted to cover the history of animal illustration as comprehensively as this one. The animals illustrated come from every part of the planet and the artists represent every country that has contributed to this art. Included are strikingly coloured insect pictures from Holland, exquisite French bird and mammal engravings, and beautiful if anthropomorphic pictures from German popular natural history books.
Present here and distinguished for their charm, zoological accuracy, or both, are illustrations from the fine American natural history books of Audubon, Catesby, Abbot & Smith and Elliot. The great artists from other countries are here as well: Wolf’s birds, Chenu’s shells, Roesel van Rosenhof’s frogs, Harris’s insects, and Haeckel’s medusa.
The subjects are drawn from the various branches of the animal kingdom, from birds, mammals, reptiles and fish to molluscs, sea anemones, butterflies, and even microscopic animals.
Without sacrificing scientific accuracy, this book is written and published for a general readership which appreciates classic illustrative work. Celebrating the beauty of the animal kingdom as well as the glories of zoological literature, this volume is as irresistible for its visual attraction as it is invaluable for the information it presents.
S. Peter Dance is among the world’s leading writers on shells and shell collecting. Before becoming an antiquarian bookseller and dealer in watercolours, he worked for many years at the British Museum (Natural History) in London, the Manchester Museum, and the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. He has undertaken lecture tours in the United States and Australia and has appeared on television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic.
This marvellous colouring book, for children and adults alike, contains twenty-five magnificent illustrations selected from fine natural history books of the past. In the period from the mid-15th century, the finest natural history illustrations were printed in black and then coloured by hand. Now, for the first time, this handsome art is presented for colouring in its original form and not redrawn as in most colouring books.
These beautiful pictures are printed on one side of the sheet on special heavy paper for colouring in any medium. The pages are perforated so that the art can be removed and framed. To complete this stunning book, all twenty-five pictures are reproduced in their correct colouring, and an introduction gives their historical background and instructions for colouring.
Revealing the whole of the plant kingdom in its lavish selection of beautifully reproduced plates and offering an accessible account of the development of botany as a science in America and Europe. The Art of the Botanist is the definitive work on its subject. Exquisitely printed and bound, this distinguished volume has as its main theme the intimate relationship between exploration and illustration in botany.
Exploration speeded the development of systematic botany – and of horticulture because of the new plants that were brought back for cultivation. The voyages gave employment to the best botanical artists, either travelling with the expeditions or working at home from herbarium specimens. From the labours of these artists emerged a stream of great botanical books enriched with exquisite pictures of newly discovered exotic plants.
The Art of the Botanist follows the development of botanical knowledge as expressed in illustrations up to the present day. The first surviving illustrations of plants of plants appear in the Codex Vindobonensis, a manuscript copy made in AD512 of De Materia Medica, a herbal by Dioscorides, who lived 500 years earlier. The first movement towards naturalism in the representation of plants came in incidental details in illuminated manuscripts and in religious paintings such as the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent altarpiece. By the start of the sixteenth century, though, Albrecht Dürer was making paintings with meticulously observed plants as their subject. The first original botanical books since the classical period, the herbals of Leonhart Fuchs and Otto Brunfels, were published a few decades later.
The Art of the Botanist reproduces many of the finest of these pictures in colour and in monochrome. The major names in botanical illustration are represented by some of their most striking plates. Here are plants from the South depicted by Mark Catesby, from the Levant by Claude Aubriet and from Surinam by Maria Merian, as well as the contents of botanical gardens dazzlingly painted by Giacomo Ligozzi and Nicolas Robert. From the golden age of plant illustration, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, come pictures by Nikolaus von Jacquin, Georg Dionysius Ehret, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and the brothers Francis and Ferdinand Bauer.
The book takes the story of botanical illustration into the twentieth century and includes pictures by living artists that bear comparison with the best work from previous centuries. The Art of the Botanist will appeal equally to plant lovers, bibliophiles and all who appreciate gorgeous illustrations.
Martyn Rix took his undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Dublin, in Botany and Geology and completed work on his doctorate at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University. His plant collecting trips have taken him around the globe. After working as Botanist at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley for some years, he devoted himself full time to research and writing. He is the author of many books on plants and horticulture and has also co-authored numerous titles with Roger Philips.
Below the often grey waters around the coasts of northern Europe lies a rich world of astonishing colour and variety. The fascinating and spectacular marine life that we know from television documentaries, magazines and books is usually associated with the tropics. So it comes as a magnificent surprise that the marine flora and fauna found in the seemingly inhospitable waters of the northern hemisphere can be so extraordinarily beautiful.
Splendid dahlia anemones, as large and colourful as the most gorgeous of the flowers after which they are named, soft corals, some brilliant yellow, others pastel-coloured, and the tiny tompot blenny that peeps out of holes in rocks and wrecks with an air of inquisitive, wide-eyed surprise are among the inhabitants of northern seas.
Even creatures whose names are familiar present an amazing sight alive in their natural habitat. Most beach strollers will at some time have found the remains of a cuttlefish – the inert, calcareous shell that bird fanciers buy for their budgerigars – but the shimmering animal itself is endlessly fascinating with its quicksilver appearance, complex set of responses to other animals and ability to use the rapid expulsion of waste in a jet-propelled backwards escape from danger. A jellyfish is not a pretty sight when it has been washed up, but very different in its live state: a diaphanous dome moving gracefully through the water like a fringed balloon. Even the fish we eat can be a considerable surprise in their natural surroundings: the sole lies almost entirely invisible against the sandy sea floor except for its iridescent protruding blue eyes; a monkfish tail on a fishmonger’s slab would hardly lead the buyer to imagine the huge jaws and seaweed-like protrusions of the whole anglerfish from which it comes.
Under Northern Seas presents the whole range of underwater marine life in northern coastal waters from sponges and worms up to fish and mammals. Linda Pitkin’s remarkable and beautifully composed pictures brilliant bring to life a mysterious and seductive world that is surprisingly close at hand. The conservation-slanted text covers the natural history of the animals and plants portrayed. This is a book that will attract everyone interested in nature and offers a benchmark of quality for anyone who has thought of taking pictures under water.
The Cook’s Encyclopedia is a rewarding and fascinating reference book for everyone whose ambitions in the kitchen go beyond slavishly following recipes. Its comprehensive coverage of the ingredients and processes of cookery gathers together a vast amount of valuable information that is available only in fragments scattered through a large range of work on cooking and food science. To this is added a liberal helping of culinary wisdom acquired by Tom Stobart – who was an intrepid explorer and film-maker – over a lifetime of interest in food and travel.
The Cook’s Encyclopedia recognises that in recent years very many unusual ingredients have become readily available; other traditional foodstuffs have gone out of fashion, though they are still obtainable; the increasing industrialisation of food production has introduced components which would have been beyond the imagination of Mrs Beaton. Exotic foods were once impossible to obtain but have now spread beyond shops serving particular ethnic groups; even the most modest health food store will stock a baffling range of alien pulses and cereals and many supermarkets now boast a section devoted to ‘foreign’ ingredients. This book covers the familiar as well as the exotic, the traditional as well as the modern: custard powder and abalone, caramel and balachan, margarine and caviar, prunes and ghee.
The Cook’s Encyclopedia is a fine reference book on the fundamentals of cooking. It deals with all the basic culinary processes, how to handle them, and how and why they work. The processes include those which are used every day as well as others, such as curing, pickling and smoking, which many cooks would like to try if they had reliable information. The book even provides instructions on making many ingredients. In this alphabetically arranged and fully cross-referenced volume, there is also useful coverage of religious laws and taboos, additives and adulteration, weights and measures, health risks and precautions.
The late Tom Stobart was a keen researcher who traced and checked his facts right back to their source rather than taking published information on trust. He is backed up by a team of researchers and food scientists to ensure that the book is factually impeccable and that its instructions are workable and safe. The Cook’s Encyclopedia belongs among the élite of truly original cookery books. ‘Any book by Tom Stobart is good news,’ remarked Elizabeth David, the doyenne of English cookery writing in the second half of the 20th century, ‘It is also vastly entertaining.’
Tom Stobart was also a traveller and explorer. Originally trained as a zoologist, he later became a documentary film-maker, working in the Antarctic, Africa and Australia as well as Europe. In 1953 he made the film of the conquest of Everest. For television he made a series of films on the Middle East, India and the Far East, as well as writing, producing and directing the TV series, Master Chef, which was shown all over Europe. He was also the author of the award-winning book Herbs, Spices and Flavourings.
Coral reefs are among the most extraordinary structures in nature, built, sometimes over hundreds or even thousands of years, by simple little animals that are relations of sea anemones. Their mysterious, dazzlingly beautiful world teems with a bewildering abundance of life in all its forms. But every reef creature has a specific place in this complex ecosystem, which is among the most diverse and biologically productive on our planet, a marine equivalent of tropical rainforest. Each animal, from the tiniest shrimp to the largest grouper, survives by working the reef to its advantage, exploiting the particular niche to which it is adapted.
Illustrated with around 200 spectacular pictures by some of the finest underwater photographers, The Greenpeace Book of Coral Reefs gives an insight into the workings of this amazing world, an ecosystem of almost unparalleled richness that manages to thrive in the nutrient-poor waters of the tropics. We are introduced to a wealth of fascinating creatures. Among them are the brilliantly coloured butterflyfish, which have dark, eye-like spots on their tails that confuse predators into attacking them at the wrong end, and the damselfish that ‘farm’ little patches of green seaweed lawn, aggressively picking off weed-eating sea urchins and small coral colonies which might grow over their territory.
Over the ages, reefs have proved extraordinarily resilient, surviving the ferocity of tropical storms and other natural disturbances and regenerating themselves afterwards. Sadly, it is human activities at sea and on land that threaten the health and in some cases the very survival of the reefs. Overfishing, pollution, coastal development and intensive agriculture can all take their toll, and global warming has been implicated in some of the most striking damage to coral reefs: bleaching, in which the once-jewel-like corals lose their colour.
Backed by the knowledge and experience of Greenpeace, this book investigates the problems facing coral reefs and assesses their seriousness. It recognises that any plan to save them must rely for its success on the people whose lives are bound up with the health of the reefs and who have always depended on the plentiful harvest that undamaged reefs can provide. Their insight into the life of the reefs, beside which scientific expertise can pale into insignificance, is crucial to the effort of saving this most precious global resource.
The book was highly commended for the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize in 1993.
Sue Wells has a degree in Zoology from Cambridge University and many years’ experience in marine conservation, working for international and national organisations, NGOs and governments. She has helped to develop policy on coastal management, marine protected areas and sustainable livelihoods. Co-compiler of the IUCN Red Data Book and author of Coral Reefs of the World. Vol.1: Atlantic and Eastern Pacific. Vol.2: Indian Ocean, Red Sea and Gulf. Vol.3: Central and Western Pacific (UNEP/IUCN, 1988) and Guidelines for applying the IUCN Protected Area Management Categories to Marine Protected Areas (IUCN 2012).
Nick Hanna has a degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex. His career in journalism began on the environmental magazine Undercurrents and, as a professional photographer and writer, he subsequently contributed to The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, as well as writing for numerous other publications.
Water is the very basis of life on earth: without it, fertile land becomes barren and sterile, and plants and animals cannot survive.
For thousands of years water has sustained the world’s human population in complex interaction with the rest of the natural environment. Yet today nowhere on the planet seems spared from one sort of water crisis or another. Looked at as unrelated events, floods, water shortages, famine and droughts may seem to fit our notion of ‘natural disasters’; the truth is, however, that many of them are the direct result of the way we have come to use or abuse water from day to day.
Bringing the issues vividly to life through striking colour photographs, The Greenpeace Book of Water provides an accessible and thorough overview of this important subject. While not skimping on the scientific grounding necessary to understand the intricacies of the global water cycle, the text is written with an emphasis on the unusual and the unexpected: memorable images, visual and verbal, leap from every page.
Attractively presented and beautifully illustrated with over 150 stunning colour photoraphs, this book is a must for anyone interested in how the natural world functions when it is allowed to thrive as well as providing a stern warning about what actually happens when human intervention causes things to go wrong.
In Germany, The Greenpeace Book of Water won the environmental book of the year award for 1995.
This book was the first comprehensive encyclopedia of the world’s rocks and minerals to be compiled specifically with the collector in mind. Covering well over 2000 types it is an invaluable work of reference both for buyers of mineral specimens and for those in the field who collect them.
One thousand specially taken colour photographs are closely integrated with the entries, which are alphabetically arranged for ease of reference. Each entry deals with a particular mineral and provides all the important information including composition, crystal formation, colour, streak, lustre, physical properties, distinguishing characteristics, methods of identification, environment, geographical occurrence, and variety.
In addition, every term used which is not standard English is clearly defined and explained. The beginner will have no difficulty in using the book, and its completeness and authority will make it essential for the student and the advanced collector.
Articles included cover crystal structures, the various families of rocks, and other general topics. The problems of identifying minerals are dealt with in a helpful tabulated form. The book is fully cross-referenced to cover alternative names.
The Encyclopedia of Shells combines comprehensive worldwide coverage of the seashells that are of interest to the collector with specially taken colour photographs closely integrated with the text. The illustrations are large enough to show not just the general appearance of the shell but to reveal details of surface pattern and texture.
The book covers well over 2000 species, arranged in systematic order according to an up-to-date classification of molluscs. Within genera, the species are dealt with in alphabetical order. The specially taken colour photographs, over 1500 in number, often include more than one specimen so that variation within the species or different aspects of its shell can be seen. A pictorial key is provided to assist the collector in identifying specimens.
Leaving aside shells too small to attract the amateur collector (less than 5mm long), the book gives a balanced coverage of the shells from warm and cold seas, with descriptions and illustrations for every commonly collected genus and some rarer ones. As gastropod species outnumber bivalve species five to one, this ratio is maintained in the book.
For each group, the reader can find a general description and information on habitat, distribution and approximate number of species. Within each genus, a comprehensive selection of species is listed, and for each of these the popular name (if any) is given, as are alternative scientific names, geographical distribution and a full description of the shell.
The editor’s introduction deals, among other things, with the biology, classification and identification of molluscs and outlines the history of shell collecting. A bibliography and a full index complete this indispensable work of reference for shell collectors.
The hills of Moffatdale, Ettrick and the Lowthers in southern Scotland offer some of Britain’s finest walking country. The rounded summits and high ridges reward the walker with spectacular views, and the deep valleys of Moffatdale and Upper Annandale are remarkable for their unspoilt beauty.
From the end of the 18th century and into the 1900s, Moffat’s reputation as a spa town attracted increasing numbers of visitors to the area. Travel books of the 19th century held the landscape in such esteem that the hills were even referred to as ‘the Southern Alps’. Latterly, however, relatively few people have walked the Moffat Hills.
Jim Manson, is a resident of Annandale and a retired member of the Moffat Mountain Rescue team. The author’s deep affection for the area and enthusiasm for hill-walking are palpable in a text enlivened by fascinating snippets of local history. The landscape around Moffat has seen a great deal of action over the centuries, not least when it was a focus for the activities of border reivers and dragoons hunting down Covenanters, and for the more mysterious appearances of the Brownie of Bodesbeck.
The 33 walks described in the book are all provided with distances and the lengths of time they take, together with specially drawn maps and precise Ordnance Survey grid references. The text, illustrated by photographs that capture some of the extraordinary qualities of the landscape, is arranged month by month: the pleasures to be gained from setting out for walks in the Moffat Hills and the Lowthers can be enjoyed all year round. Pick up this book and in no time you will be donning walking boots to explore one of the best-kept secrets for the discerning walker north of the border.
The paintings of Gordon Beningfield all have their inspiration in the beauty of the countryside. Butterflies, in particular, he shows as living creatures in their natural surroundings, seeing them not only with the vision of a painter but with the eye of a naturalist. His work is far removed from that of the illustrator whose pictures are intended as aids to identification and therefore display dead specimens in attitudes fixed on the setting board. Beningfield’s butterflies are shown as they can be observed at rest, poised on leaves or flowers. With meticulous detail and striking fidelity of colour, Beningfield captures the transient and vulnerable beauty of living butterflies, which are among the most exquisite elements in our natural heritage.
The text which accompanies Beningfield’s paintings is written by Robert Gooden, whose organisation in Dorset, Worldwide Butterflies, carried out important butterfly breeding and conservation work for many decades.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
In this book, Gordon Beningfield celebrates a classic countryside that was once typical of much of England, much of which has increasingly falling victim to modern intensive farming and the spread of urbanisation. Gordon Beningfield’s world is centred on the gentle, rural landscapes of Hertfordshire and the open downs and lush valleys of Dorset.
Here are the dense, leafy hedgerows with their rich variety of flowers, offering cover to a wealth of creatures but only a hindrance to the plough. The lush, sweet-scented water-meadows he portrays so evocatively are equally shrinking before the onslaught of mechanical diggers and drainage schemes promoted by those who see the balance sheet of the countryside as being purely a matter of finance. Even the broad-leaved woods, which provide tantalizing glimpses of deer and badgers, cannot compete as a cash crop with alien conifers.
Gordon Beningfield was almost unique among artists who have made a reputation painting wildlife since he was also a perceptive and gifted landscape painter. Beningfield’s Countryside combines intimate close-ups of animals and flowers with broad landscapes that provide a setting and at the same time convey a powerful feeling for the special qualities of English scenery. In these fine pictures, Beningfield’s talent as a painter of landscapes is displayed to the general public for the first time.
In his text, his sketches and his exquisitely detailed watercolours and oil paintings, Beningfield reveals himself to be a skilled and observant naturalist. Beningfield’s Countryside is irresistible in its evocation of the small-scale pleasures of the country –a pile of nuts neatly opened by a dormouse, a fox basking only half asleep in a shaft of sunlight, a yellowhammer singing boldly from the top of a hawthorn bush. Beningfield’s deep involvement in the rural life of England is unmistakeable in his portrait of the traditional countryside so shaped by man’s endeavour, it is fitting that he should also look at human artefacts, at the wooden gates and stiles and the stone bridges that blend with their surroundings in a way that barbed wire and tubular metal do not. In all, Beningfield’s Countryside is a moving visual tribute to a countryside that is universally loved.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
Hardy Country Gordon Beningfield has created beautiful evocation of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, not by painting an idealised picture of how the landscape used to be, but finding in present-day Dorset the atmosphere and feeling as well as the locales of Hardy’s novels. Beningfield shows us Dorchester, which is definitely Hardy’s Casterbridge, but also the tracts of heathland that Hardy cared a great deal about and fictionally amalgamated as Egdon Heath. He portrays such recognisable Hardy landmarks as Eversholt church from Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the earth castle of Eggardon, Hardy’s Eggar, but also a shepherd’s hut like Gabriel Oak’s on Norcombe Hill, which appears on the map as Toller Down. Here, too, are harvests and fairs, wild creatures and farm animals, hurdlemakers and gypsies, all contributing to a rich evocation of a present-day Dorset that would not have looked at all unfamiliar to Thomas Hardy.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
The English countryside is an irreplaceable part of the national heritage. England is characterised as much by its landscape as by its buildings. A thousand years of history are reflected in the pattern of fields and hedgerows, coppices and broad-leaved woodlands. But while the landscape has always been subject to change, the forces that have been brought to bear on it over the past seventy years or so have been leading quite simply to its destruction. The fragile balance built up between man, agriculture and nature cannot withstand the onslaught of the state- and European-subsidised storm troopers of agribusiness who are reshaping the land with their heavy equipment and waging chemical warfare against any plants and animals that might come between farming and profit.
Travelling around southern and eastern England, Gordon Beningfield looked for fragments of the traditional English landscape that have remained unspoilt. His subjects in Beningfield’s English Landscape range from the downland of Sussex to the hedgerow-lined lanes of Buckinghamshire and the wetlands of Halvergate in Norfolk. He found elm trees surviving in Cambridgeshire and a farm profitably operating with horse-drawn ploughs in Yorkshire. He is fascinated not just by the sweep of large-scale vistas but also by the tiny landscape inhabited by single butterflies. All this, and more, he lovingly records in over a hundred exquisite paintings and drawings, which are complemented by a text presenting an artist and naturalist’s view of a landscape under threat.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
Britain’s woodlands are cherished by everyone who loves the countryside and values its richness. Few people who have been lucky enough to see a bluebell wood in spring will forget this magical experience, and the splendour of an ancient oakwood is a truly impressive sight. Sadly, only a fraction of this country’s once extensive forests, woods and coppices remain, and all too few of them are properly managed. Almost nothing has survived of the variety of crafts and industries that they once supported. But the pockets of woodland that remain harbour some of our most attractive animals and plants, as this beautiful book shows.
Gordon Beningfield has sought out some of the quiet corners where English woodland continues to flourish in all its glory, and reminds us of the delights to be found in this most precious part of our natural heritage. Here are the pollarded beeches, the old oak trees with their enormous gnarled trunks, the primroses on mossy banks and the delicate wood anemones scattered across the woodland floor. Gordon Beningfield also celebrates the wildlife of the woods: tawny owls, woodpeckers, foxes and fallow deer, and – a Beningfield speciality, this – the woodland butterflies. There is room, too, for the creatures that are not wholly wood-dwelling but depend on woodland for sustenance, cover or a place to raise their young. In this glorious collection of watercolours and sketches, all produced specially for this book, Beningfield once again delights us both with his skill as an artist and with his countryman’s eye for detail.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
Gordon Beningfield’s reputation as Britain’s leading countryside artist was built up through his meticulous and affectionate paintings and drawings of the English countryside as it has been, should be, and sometimes still is. In Beningfield’s Farm, he has set out to celebrate that most characteristic feature of the countryside, the traditional farm and its animals.
The animals were not difficult to find, at least in ones and twos. Here are such magnificent creatures as the White Park bull and the Gloucester Old Spot pig, not to mention Lincoln Longwood sheep, Suffolk Punch horses, Light Sussex chickens, and Golden Guernsey goats. But because the numbers of these animals have so dwindled, many of them are now classified as rare breeds and are preserved in farm parks where they have become a major attraction.
The proper surroundings for the animals were much harder to find, as the traditional small mixed farm is now something of a rarity, and it is even more unusual to find unspoiled farm buildings. While the animals are painted from life, the fields and farmyards in which they are paced have often found their inspiration in Gordon Beningfield’s memories of the English countryside of forty years ago. At the very least, many of the settings have had to be restored in his pictures to their original state.
The product of this effort is a richly nostalgic portrait of all the inhabitants of the traditional farm: not just cattle, sheep and pigs, but working horses and donkeys, chickens pecking around in the barn yard, ducks by the pond, lop-eared rabbits, a shepherd’s dog that is very unlike the collies of today and, of course, a ginger tom on the prowl.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
In this book, Gordon Beningfield returns to a favourite theme with which he has already delighted his audience in the best-selling titles Hardy Country and The Darkling Thrush. Here is a portrait of the part of England where Thomas Hardy was born and where he set so many of his best-loved novels, short stories and poems. Published to coincide with celebrations commemorating the 150th anniversary of Hardy’s birth, this beautiful, lavishly reproduced book contains sumptuous reproductions of paintings which not only capture the spirit of the countryside that Hardy knew, loved and described so memorably, but also reflect the passion of lifetime on the part of the artist.
Gordon Beningfield searched long and hard to find corners of the countryside that have remained relatively unscathed by the ravages of modern farming, so evoking the beauty of the landscape as it must have appeared in Hardy’s day. The pictures, specially produced for this book, are an appealing blend of full-scale paintings of landscapes and sketches of details relating to scenes and events in Hardy’s life and work, forming a fine and enduring tribute to a great writer. There is a foreword by Gertrude Bugler who knew Hardy well and was chosen by him to play the title role in the stage version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
Gordon Beningfield’s beautifully worked books have delighted a huge audience of readers with their evocative portraits of England’s natural heritage from the smallest woodland flowers to full-scale landscapes. Here he offers his many admirers the opportunity to learn more about his life and how he works. In this book, Beningfield presents a wide range of subjects, showing not only his impressive skill as a painter of nature, but also fine examples of his sculpture, and of his work as an ecclesiastical artist, including stained glass and his elaborately engraved glass memorial windows in the Guards Chapel in London.
Some of the scenes he depicts in his paintings will strike a chord with those who, like Beningfield, retain powerful and nostalgic memories of life in England in the 1940s and 1950s: misty riverscapes of the Thames, where his father worked as a waterman and lighterman, the mighty steam locomotives that he remembers so clearly from his childhood, a Spitfire at a typical Battle of Britain airfield.
Here, too, are pictures echoing the enthusiasms at the heart of this artist’s passionate
GORDON BENINGFIELD (1936-98), son of a Thames lighterman, began his career as an ecclesiastical artist, with commissions that included a memorial window for the Household Cavalry in the Guards Chapel. From the early 1960s he built a reputation as a talented, versatile wildlife and countryside artist and became a passionate and influential advocate for the protection of the English countryside.
After the publication of Jude the Obscure in 1896, Thomas Hardy resolved to write no more novels. Between 1898 and his death in 1928, he published a number of books of poetry that together form one of the greatest poetic achievements of the 20th century in the English language.
This selection of Hardy’s poems is illustrated with many of the finest of Beningfield’s paintings from Hardy Country together with others created especially for this book. The Hardy poems included here, both familiar and unfamiliar, illuminated with Beningfield’s paintings and drawings, make a beautiful and evocative introduction to the poet’s work.
English poetry, and especially English lyric poetry, is one of the glories of world literature. From Shakespeare to the present day, an important element in the inspiration of lyric poetry has been the countryside in all its variety and beauty. Indeed, some parts of Britain are inextricably identified with a particular poet: Hardy’s Dorset, Wordsworth’s Lakes, Housman’s Shropshire . . .
In Poems of the Countryside, a wide selection of poems – some familiar, some much less so – is sensitively juxtaposed with Gordon Beningfield’s magnificent pictures, largely taken from his bestselling books, Beningfield’s Countryside and Beningfield’s English Landscape, to create a very special kind of anthology: one that will give poetic and visual pleasure for many years to come.
In Green & Pleasant Land, over a hundred poems drawn from the work of poets spanning four centuries are combined with Gordon Beningfield’s fine pictures (eleven of which have been produced especially for this book) to evoke the England of meandering rivers, lush watermeadows, thick hedgerows and burgeoning vegetation – an England that still exists here and there in places where the pursuit of intensive cultivation has not yet swept all before it. The array of poets whose work is included – from Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe to Ted Hughes and Roger McGough is matched by the rich variety of moods expressed by them. Here are joyful, patriotic, wistful, ecstatic and melancholic sentiments, all charmingly arranged with Gordon Beningfield’s paintings and drawings.
Poems of the Seasons is a delightful celebration of the glories of the changing year. For country people, the seasons have always had enormous significance, particularly where they are reflected in the traditional farming calendar, but even for those who have no direct contact with the countryside, the natural rhythms of the year touch a deep chord. Poets have for centuries been moved to evoke the new life of spring, the ripeness of summer, the rich melancholy of autumn and the chill of winter. Poems of the Seasons, drawn from writings covering four hundred years, offers a wealth of lyrical gems beautifully complemented by Gordon Beningfield’s sensitive watercolours, some of which have been painted especially for this anthology.
Gardens have long been recognised as havens of calm and natural beauty providing respite from the rigours and stresses of life, and the subject has attracted many of the finest lyrical writers in the English language. Gloriously illustrated with over sixty watercolours and oil paintings by Linda Benton, Come into the Garden celebrates the pleasures and satisfactions afforded by tending gardens as well as the splendour of the plants found in them. Ben Jonson muses on the ripening of garden fruits, John Evelyn points out how difficult it is to keep the grass out of paths, John Keats evokes the dainty sweet pea and Edward Thomas provides a description of an autumnal bonfire. This collection of verse, drawn from the work of eighty poets and spanning four hundred years, includes a selection of old favourites together with a wealth of less familiar poems that will delight lovers of poetry, gardeners and indeed anyone who appreciates what Rudyard Kipling called ‘the glory of the garden’.
The impact of World War II was no less dramatic in the countryside than it was in the cities. True, the blitz in its full ferocity was reserved for urban targets, but the other experiences of wartime – the blackout, rationing, shortages, the black market and conscription – were shared by rural Britain. And fundamental changes set in motion during the war have made today’s countryside very different from the way it was in 1939.
For years before the war, Britain had relied on cheap food from the Empire. Farming had gone into decline and those who worked the land had left in droves. Suddenly the countryside had to be mobilised for food production. The farmers’ every move was governed by the Ministry of Agriculture, which could, and did, evict those who persistently failed to meet its production quotas.
It was the era of the Home Guard. Signposts were taken down in case they might help invaders or spies, and church bells became calls to arms for the rural population (and the source of many a false alarm). Spies and saboteurs joined crops and the weather as topics of conversation in the pubs.
The countryside acquired a new population, some working – like the Land Girls and servicemen and even prisoners of war, some escaping from the bombing of the cities. Many people who were school children during the war have vivid recollections of their lives as evacuees in the countryside, just as country people have of them.
Large areas became airfields and army camps. The landscape was punctuated with pill-boxes (sometimes disguised as haystacks) and, near the coast, festooned with barbed wire and striated with tank traps. Some of the concrete detritus of war still remains. So, too, do the memories, whether of seeing nearby cities burning night after night or, more happily, of American servicemen dispensing silk stockings and Hershey bars to deserving members of the population.
This well-illustrated portrait of the countryside at war will conjure up an era for those who are too young to remember it and bring back a flood of memories for anyone who lived through this heroic period.
Sadie Ward spent her childhood in Devon and Somerset before taking a first-class honours degree in history at the University of Reading, where she subsequently gained her doctorate with a thesis on Land Reform in England 1880-1914. For many years she lectured in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Management at Reading; she was also Research Officer at the Institute of Agricultural History and Museum of English Rural Life. Other books by Sadie Ward include: Seasons of Change: Rural Life in Victorian and Edwardian England (1982), The Countryside between the Wars (with John Creasey, 1984) and Village Life in Englands 1860-1940 (with Jonathan Brown, 1985).
The British countryside has changed so fundamentally over the last eighty to ninety years that many people have forgotten, or have never known, what it used to look like. But memories of the variety and richness it once possess are close to the surface. Many aspects of traditional farming and village life survived well into the 1950s, and the current enthusiasm for preserving those corners of unspoilt countryside that remain reflects a deep nostalgia for a heritage that has all but disappeared.
The Countryside Remembered celebrates a world of leafy hedgerows, quiet country lanes and small, lush meadows, of small-scale mixed farms with chickens scratching in the farmyard, of tranquil villages where the cottages were inhabited by country people rather than being the largely deserted second homes of city dwellers, and of harvest scenes in which the fruits of a year’s labour were gathered in by whole families helped by heavy horses and not by a single contractor driving a large, noisy machine. Here, too, are the craftsmen who served their local communities, producing everything from cartwheels to clothes pegs, from bee skeps to farm ladders.
The highly evocative pictures of the British countryside, dating from around 1930 to the early 1960s, have been carefully selected from a variety of contemporary sources, principally local newspapers, and are accompanied by an informative commentary by Sadie Ward that reveals a deep knowledge of the nation’s rural past. The foreword was contributed by Gordon Beningfield, well-known for his fine paintings of the English countryside. This collection of superb period photographs drawn from the archives of the Institute of Agricultural History at the University of Reading paints a beautiful and poignant portrait of a way of life that has vanished for ever.
Between the middle of the nineteenth century and World War I, life in the English countryside increasingly felt the impact of the industrial revolution. Rural industries gave way to mass production of consumer goods; improvements in transport led to a wider spread of influence from the towns and to depopulation of the countryside; wholesale distribution replaced the village economy; early farming machinery, quaint though it seems today, profoundly changed the centuries-old, labour-intensive peasant economy.
This attractive and highly readable book shows the effects of these changes on the face of the countryside and on the lives of country dwellers: the intriguing patchwork of old and new in the domestic life, agriculture, industries, shops and markets, transport, community services, recreation and social events of rural England.
The text is accompanied by contemporary photographs which graphically reveal this vanished age to the modern reader and by illustrations of useful artefacts from the period, many of which are now avidly collected as ‘bygones’. A large number of the illustrations are drawn from the unique collection at the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.
What is camp? The word is used to describe people, clothes, lifestyles, paintings, literature, music, architecture and interior design. It may be used to express stern disapproval or utter delight. But ask anyone who uses the word to define it and the answer will not stand up to examination.
Camp is not kitsch, which is bad art, miscalculated with the best of intentions; camp art can be good art created with the worst of intentions. In this book, Mark Booth identifies and defines the phenomenon and plots its history and characteristics. He unearths the roots of camp in Roman decadence, in Mannerism and in the conspicuous consumption of Versailles in the reign of Louis XIV. And he examines and recounts the behaviour of Regency dandies, fin-de-siècle aesthetes, bright young things in the ’twenties, literary cliques in the ’thirties, yesterday’s pop art and today’s pop music. The gallery of camp personalities runs from Beau Brummell and Disraeli through Sarah Bernhardt and Robert de Montequiou-Fezensac (the model for Marcel Proust’s Baron de Charlus) to Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger.
Celebrating as it analyses, Camp is a unique contribution to cultural and social history. With almost 200 pictures covering the whole gamut of camp, it is also a delight to look at.
The conventional picture of the nineteenth-century garden is one of dank shrubberies and unrelieved formality. The accomplishments of the Victorian gardener, unlike those of his contemporaries in architecture and the arts, are too often overlooked. The mechanics, the craftsmen and decorators of the time have been given the recognition they deserve, but not so the gardeners.
Tom Carter uses the books and periodicals of the time to show how horticulture reflected the vigour and resourcefulness of Britain’s great era of expansion. The consolidation of empire brought an ever-increasing range of new plant species, while advancing technology and freedom from economic restraint (symbolised by the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its Crystal palace), allowed the building of splendid glasshouses and conservatories. Above all, the spread of scientific knowledge was united with the traditional skills of the past to enable the gardener to satisfy the demands of an affluent nation.
The Victorian Garden describes the varied aspects of practical horticulture and ornamental gardening: the efficiency of the kitchen garden, the splendours of the grand pleasure grounds, the single-minded dedication of those who grew flowers for exhibition and the relaxed atmosphere of the indoor garden. Extracts from the writings of the time as well as many contemporary illustrations reproduced in colour and monochrome bring to life the inventiveness and charm of a neglected era in gardening.
As the first and arguably the greatest war correspondent, William Howard Russell reported first hand on the Crimean Wwar, the Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War. His life spanned the whole of Queen Victoria’s reign and his writings offer vivid insights into many of the great international events of the nineteenth century.
As well as Russell’s dispatches to The Times, this book includes selections from his extensive diaries and his letters. Put into context by Caroline Chapman’s narration, the extracts combine to form a fascinating panorama both of his life and of the society to which he belonged. They are complemented throughout with an exceptionally rich collection of illustrations, including many fine photographs.
Russell’s honourable and likable personality and his sense of humour come through clearly, as do his magnificent powers of description, his gift for conveying drama and, of course, the perceptive commentary on British foreign and military policy for which he is justly famed.
This is a unique piece of social history: an eye-witness account of working class life in an industrial town during the years after World War I. Charles Forman has gathered a remarkable amount of first-hand material to build up a comprehensive picture of an industrial community at a crucial moment in its history. His main source has been the recollections, often amazingly clear and detailed of St Helens people about their lives and work in the early part of the twentieth century.
Industrial Town, then, documents an era as it lived on in people’s minds. The St Helens of the period, which culminated in the General Strike and the Miners’ Lockout, is a particularly rewarding subject for study. It was not just a mining community: among its other industries were iron foundries, glass works, brick kilns, a brewery and Beecham’s pill factory. A sufficiently large centre to have a vigorous life of its own, it was also perhaps the most impoverished town in Lancashire – the pits were gradually closing, the foundry was going out of business, and it lacked the cotton industry which provided employment for women elsewhere in the county.
After covering every aspect of life and work in St Helens, Industrial Town concludes with a section on the events of 1926. Memories here form part of a narrative mosaic with such contemporary documents as newspaper reports, union minutes, public notices and parliamentary speeches. When the nine-day General Strike ended in may, the miners were left to fight grimly on until they were gradually driven back to work – the Lockout did not officially end until 1st December. The feelings of the beleaguered miners, vividly captured in this book, were to leave a legacy of bitterness in the industry.
Industrial Town is a valuable complement to historians’ accounts of the period. Rather than treating working class life in terms of the statistics of deprivation and industrial action, it captures the elusive dimension of grass roots experience before this was beyond direct recall.
Thirty years after the first publication of Roger Billcliffe’s ground-breaking catalogue raisonné of the furniture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the new and completely revised fourth edition appeared. The text has been updated throughout to take account of all the discoveries and developments in Mackintosh scholarship. Newly discovered pieces are described and illustrated, and many items that were previously shown in black and white appear in colour, so that there are now over 900 illustrations including over 250 in colour.
For Mackintosh, who saw architecture as the art that encompassed all the other visual arts, the design of furniture and interiors formed a vital part of his architecture. The exhibition rooms, interiors and even single pieces of furniture, which were eagerly sought after by his European clients and colleagues, were designed with the same care as his major architectural commissions.
In a working life of only twenty-five years, Mackintosh designed over 300 pieces of furniture, a number that seems all the more impressive as the majority were produced in the periods 1897-1905 and 1916-1918.
After an introduction in which Billcliffe perceptively analyses Mackintosh’s career and scholarly interpretations of it, the book is arranged as a complete chronological catalogue of Mackintosh’s work as a furniture designer. As well as the entries on individual designs and pieces, the catalogue includes essays on Mackintosh’s major commissions and on his designs in general at specific periods of his career. Contemporary photographs are used extensively to show interiors (many of them now destroyed) as they were at the time of their completion. Pieces of furniture that cannot be traced are listed by reference to the work books which record the details of designs by Mackintosh or the firms of which he was a member.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was the most important and original British designer since Robert Adam, a century earlier. In a relatively short working life, he designed well over 300 pieces of furniture, the majority in just eleven years from 1897 to 1905 and 1916 to 1919.
This book looks at Mackintosh’s career as a furniture designer and illustrates with over 400 photographs all his major pieces, as well as the interiors for which they were produced. The range illustrated is quite remarkable, not only the elongated chairs for which Mackintosh is most remembered, but tables, wardrobes, bookcases, beds, bathroom fittings, and even a pulpit and an organ. The styles range from the rather routine late-Victorian pieces designed from 1893 onwards, through the white-painted ‘Spook School’ furniture of 1901-03, to the geometrical severity of Mackintosh’s work for W.J. Bassett-Lowke in 1916-19.
The acknowledged authority on Mackintosh, Roger Billcliffe is the author of the massive Charles Rennie Mackintosh: the Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings and Interior Design, a detailed catalogue raisonné which set new standards of scholarship for works on furniture and design and has now appeared in its fourth revised edition. Within the more modest compass of this book, Billcliffe presents to a wider public the full range of Mackintosh’s achievements as a designer.
As the Modern Movement comes under increasing critical scrutiny and many architects design in an idiom that has come to be known as Postmodern, the architecture of the wonderfully incandescent period before World War I is increasingly seen as rich in artistic and technical significance, and important as one of several sources for the architecture of today. The work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928), with its highly original treatment of space and its decorative character, has come to be recognised as fundamentally symptomatic of the period. Throughout Europe, in the Americas and in Japan, Mackintosh is now celebrated as one of the major artistic figures of his time.
The wide-ranging studies in this book are by recognised scholars of the architecture of that period. Included are an investigation of what was loosely termed the English House, the most famous architectural type of the period, and of the theories of the movement that produced it. Then studies of Frank Lloyd Wright and of Greene & Greene in California. Then on to Vienna, Hungary, France and Catalonia with contributions on Joseph Olbrich, Ödön Lechner, Hector Guimard and Antoni Gaudí, and the furniture and decorative work that formed the essential component to their buildings.
The late Patrick Nuttgens, erstwhile Director of Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) was the book’s editor, and it has an introduction by Roger Billcliffe, author of the definitive studies of Mackintosh’s furniture and watercolours; Sir Denys Lasdun provided an epilogue. Other chapters are by Filippo Alison, John Archer, Robert Judson-Clark, Claude Frontisi, Thomas Howarth, Don Kalec, Robert Macleod, Andrew Macmillan, Randell Makinson, Juan Bassegoda Nonell, Dennis Sharp, Janos Szirmai, David Walker and Christian Witt-Döring.
This seminal publication on industrial design, now a standard text for students of design, has been continuously in print for over 30 years.
Whether at home, in the street, or at work, we are surrounded by objects that we take for granted, yet which are more significant in our daily lives than perhaps we realise. When we shop, how do we choose between items with different appearances but with the same function – and why? Do we decide on purely aesthetic grounds, or because one offers a feature that another doesn’t, or because our choice has been influenced by a successful marketing campaign?
In this radical and highly original examination of design and its place in society, Adrian Forty challenges premises that have usually passed unquestioned. He argues that design is used by societies to express their values. Its norms are shaped by economic and social conditions; it can confirm a role or status or be manipulated to overcome resistance to innovations that seem threatening.
Objects of Desire looks at the appearance of consumer goods in the 200 years since the introduction of mechanised production, whether in Josiah Wedgwood’s use of neo-classicism for his industrially manufactured pottery or the development of appropriate forms for wirelesses. The argument is illustrated with examples ranging from penknives to computers and from sewing machines to railway carriages.
In opening up new ways of appraising the man-made world around us, Objects of Desire is more than just required reading for anyone who has involvement with design: it is a revealing document about our society.
Adrian Forty is a lecturer in the History of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College, London. He studied at the universities of Oxford and London, and has published widely on the history of architecture and design, including his recent, highly acclaimed book Words and Buildings.
The Dictionary of Ornament describes in a single volume the entire range of decorative styles and motifs used by designers, architects craftsmen from the Middle Ages to the present. Copiously illustrated and thoroughly cross-referenced, it provides comprehensive coverage of both architecture and the applied arts, including furniture, silver, jewellery, metalwork, ceramics and textiles. Special attention is devoted to the contents and compilers of pattern books – publications which, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century transmitted the influence of major events and discoveries to European and American designers (as well as the general public) in the form of new fashions and patterns for fabrics and furnishings.
This encyclopedic reference work contains 1020 alphabetical entries and about 1150 illustrations (photographs, engravings, and line drawings) with detailed captions, many of them grouped to show how a single motif or form has been treated in different media. Among the many subjects covered are:
- definitions of ornaments, motifs and patterns, e.g. the ball-and-claw furniture leg, the cornucopia, the repeating egg-and-dart pattern
- themes of decoration, such as death and mourning, or the commemoration of great events
- origins and historical associations of different motifs, e.g. the tulip in the Netherlands, the eagle in America, the Scottish thistle
- specific uses of certain kinds of ornament: what was and is favoured by the designers of Turkish baths, theatres or government buildings
- techniques of ornamentation, such as rustication and ormolu
- publications, such as pattern books, which invented and propagated new styles and motifs
The Dictionary also features a visual key that identifies selected patterns at a glance, helpful to anyone who has ever seen an unfamiliar bit of moulding or other ornamentation and wondered about its name and origin.
The product of over six years’ research, during which the authors sought out and photographed decorative features and details in Britain, Europe and North America, the Dictionary of Ornament is a truly comprehensive work of reference, essential for art students and historians, architects, designers, antique dealers and collectors – indeed for all who are interested in the vast subject of decoration.
Although pottery and porcelain have been infinitely more diverse and more prolifically produced in the 19th and 20th centuries than ever before, the one general encyclopedia of unquestioned authority on ceramics, Honey’s European Ceramic Art, stops at 1815.
Elisabeth Cameron’s new Encyclopedia of Pottery & Porcelain takes up where Honey left off and covers the ceramics of the world for the period from 1800 to 1960. It has been compiled for collectors, dealers, museums, students of ceramics and others with an interest in the subject who need a concise, comprehensive, authoritative and accessible work of reference of international scope. It contains about 2500 fully cross-referenced entries on factories, potters, decorators and designers, with bibliographical details and the relevant makers where necessary, 500 or so integrated black and white illustrations and 32 in colour. Glossary entries define the various materials, techniques and styles.
The growth of mass production and the later reactions against it on the part of artist and studio potters, the experiments and excesses of the decades after 1850, the perpetually shifting movements and groupings of the period – the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, Art Nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte, Art Deco and so on – all these topics and innumerable others are encompassed in this richly researched and uniquely informative volume. The text has been checked by leading experts on the subject.
Elisabeth Cameron was responsible for the ceramics sections of the Collins Encyclopedia of Antiques and The Collector’s Encyclopedia, Victoriana to Art Deco, and was co-author with Philippa Lewis of Potters on Pottery, an account by some British potters of their work in the 1970s.
This survey of the post-war output of W.R. Midwinter Ltd, arguably the most innovative of Brtitish tableware manufacturers in the 1950s, is the only book on Midwinter ceramics written with the cooperation of Roy Midwinter, who was responsible for transforming this Staffordshire pottery that had hitherto operated in the conventional mainstream of tableware production. Midwinter oversaw the production of innovative, modern tableware for over 30 years. He had the foresight and perspicacity to engage the services of designers such as Hugh Casson, Terence Conran and Jessie Tait who created for the Stylecraft and Fashion ranges perhaps the most iconic 1950s and 1960s designs in British tableware. Peter Scott produced designs in connection with the Wildfowl Trust at Slimbridge. Heavily influenced by American design, in particular the work of Eva Zeisel, Midwinter was responsible for introducing a genuinely rimless plate, dubbed ‘Quartic’ at the time, which in 1954 seemed breathtakingly modern and still impresses with its clean lines and often light-hearted surface patterns. Here were affordable, earthenware ranges that at last offered the buyer something fresh and new and were not so expensive that they were stored away in a sideboard to be brought out only on highdays and holidays. Colin Melbourne was commissioned to design a range of 22 strikingly modern-looking, stylised animal sculptures finished with black, white or fawn-coloured matt glazes, and in 1958, Midwinter became the first British company to launch patterned, break-resistant tableware – Melmex. The shapes of two ranges, Portobello and MQ2, were designed by David Queensberry in the 1960s, and in the 1970s Roy Midwinter’s daughter Eve contributed bold designs for stoneware ranges that remain in use and are collectable today. The final range for which Roy Midwinter was responsible was developed in collaboration with Robin Welch in the early 1980s, just before Midwinter retired.
Alan Peat’s meticulously researched account draws on interviews and meetings with many of those who made Midwinter a beacon of modern design, including Roy Midwinter himself before his death in 1990. A mine of information for the collector, this book is written with the enthusiasm of an avid collector whose interest led him to uncover an exciting story of a bold, design-led enterprise catering to the tastes of young, modern buyers at a time when the tableware industry in Britain was almost uniformly conservative and traditional.
A collector’s guide to this quintessentially 1950s range of tableware designed by Enid Seeney with whose collaboration the book was written. All known shapes are described and guidance is provided as to rarity. The second edition includes details and illustrations of additional recently discovered items in the Homemaker range, backstamps and intriguing information about the sources of various motifs.
During World War II, and for some years after it, British ceramics manufacturers were restricted to producing tableware destined for the home market in white only. After the end of hostilities, simple banding was allowed, but it was not until 1952 that the last of the restrictions was lifted, and decorated pottery began to be available again in Britain. The 1951 Festival of Britain in London had allowed the public to savour a range of new, stylish products and set design trends which were to flourish for a decade. Homemaker, which came to epitomise modern affordable style in tableware, was, from its introduction in 1958, stocked exclusively by Woolworths. As David Battie remarks in his foreword to the book, ‘Enid Seeney captured in one brilliant, apparently haphazard scattering of semi-realistic everyday objects the mood of the moment and the aspirations towards higher living standards cherished by millions of Britons.’
Simon Moss first started collecting Homemaker ware having become disillusioned with the soaring prices and vanishing stocks of Art Deco ceramics. This book is the result of painstaking gathering of information primarily from interviews with people who had worked at Ridgway (manufacturer of Homemaker) including Enid Seeney, the designer behind this iconic ware.
Included in the book are illustrations and descriptions of all known parts of the range, together with backstamps and an account of the contemporary designs and objects that served as inspiration for the motifs in the Homemaker design, as well as fascinating information about the production process.
This book is a must for anyone interested in postwar design and social history and an invaluable source for collectors on 1950s and 1960s design.
Marks & Monograms is unique among marks books for the breadth and period of its coverage. Dealers and collectors are no longer restricted by the old idea of antiques being over a hundred years old, and the period 1880-1960 illustrates the marks of around 2000 designers and makers in the decorative arts in Britain, Europe and North America. It takes in the main artistic movements of the time – the Aesthetic Movement, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession, Art Deco, De Stijl and the Bauhaus.
Covering ceramics, metalwork, jewellery, glass, furniture, graphics and textiles, Malcolm Haslam’s book includes illustrations of many marks and monograms not represented in other reference works. The marks are classified by both medium and country, and they are accompanied by brief information about each designer or manufacturer, making the book an invaluable aid to the collector.
Malcolm Haslam studied history of art at the Courtauld Institute, London. For several years he was a dealer in works of decorative art, co-founding the firm of Haslam & Whiteway in 1972. Since then he has written books on many aspects of the decorative arts, including monographs on The Martin Brothers, Potters (1978), William Staite Murray (1984), Elton Ware (1989) and Arts and Crafts Carpets (1991). He also wrote the very successful survey of twentieth century design, In the Nouveau Style (1989) and contributed to its companion volume, In the Deco Style (1987). He has contributed to the Sotheby’s Concise Encyclopedias of Furniture and Glass, and he has written many book and exhibition reviews for the magazine Crafts. He is a keen collector, specialising in studio pottery and decorative books, but he admits that he will buy anything as long as he likes it and the price is right!
Revised and much enlarged edition of Malcolm Haslam’s Marks & Monograms of the Modern Movement (1977).
No record of Regency society is more vivid than Rudolf Ackermann’s celebrated journal, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics. Published from 1809 to 1828, it devoted space to all things fashionable and every month for almost twenty years included hand-coloured plates of furniture, drapery and interiors, providing an unrivalled visual record of Regency taste and design. In Ackermann’s Regency Furniture & Interiors, nearly two hundred of these plates have been assembled for the first time in a single volume, together with their accompanying descriptions.
Ackermann was an astute populariser, identifying what was fashionable at the time and presenting it to the public. It is therefore possible to follow the decorative ideas of the Regency period from year to year. Early issues of The Repository enthusiastically promoted the Grecian style, which has come from France and was introduced to London particularly by Henry Hollands and Thomas Hope; later issues reflect the arrival of the French Empire style, with its Roman allusions, developed by the designers Percier and Fontaine. Sometimes Ackermann’s plates represent the particularly English taste for the picturesque. The revived Gothic style is depicted most notably in the remarkable series of plates by the elder Pugin, and the Egyptian style also figures prominently.
Furniture for dining rooms, drawing rooms, studios and boudoirs, cabinets, bookcases, bureaux, plant stands, chaises longues – indeed, every facet of Regency furniture from window drapes to mechanical chairs is accurately portrayed and described.
Ackermann’s descriptions provide a wealth of detail about materials, finishes and colour schemes. Stephen Jones’s introduction sets The Repository in the context of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century design, and Pauline Agius traces and explains the developments represented in Ackermann’s illustrations and descriptions.
Since complete sets of The Repository are now extremely rare and many of the plates have not been reproduced since their original publication, the appearance of this book is an event of major importance for anyone interested in the Regency period, including collectors, furniture historians, antique dealers, interior decorators and television, film and stage designers, as well as those involved with restoring and recreating Regency houses and everyone who derives a special pleasure from the elegance and richness of the period.
Stephen Jones read English and History of Art at Magdalene College, Cambridge, specialising in neo-classical architecture and design. He was curator of Gainsborough’s House at Sudbury in Suffolk, and subsequently of Leighton House in London. He lectured on 18th- and 19th-century art at the Victoria & Albert Museum and wrote the volume on the eighteenth century for the Cambridge Introduction to the History of Art series.
Pauline Agius read history at University College, London, after her studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture were interrupted by the war and service in the WRNS. She is the author of the pioneering study British Furniture 1880-1915 (1978) and a collector’s handbook China Teapots (1982), and was an active member of the Furniture History Society for more than twenty-five years.
George Bullock was a brilliantly original and stylish furniture maker and sculptor who died, probably aged 35, in 1818. Virtually forgotten from that moment, his work has more recently aroused great interest among historians and collectors, even being described as a rival to Chippendale.
Bullock’s highly original designs and deliberate use of indigenous British woods, combined with marbles and decorative motifs attracted a distinguished clientele, including Sir Walter Scott, James Watt Junior, Matthew R Boulton, the Duke of Atholl and the Portuguese Ambassador to London. This is the first book to be published on Bullock and was produced to accompany a major exhibition mounted by Blairman’s of London and the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside (Sudley Art Gallery). It includes a full survey of Bullock’s varied and sometimes surprising career as well as more than 120 illustrations of his work. It was compiled by Martin Levy, Clive Wainwright and Lucy Wood, together with Timothy Stevens who also contributed a detailed analysis of Bullock’s career as a sculptor.
Essential reading for anyone interested in this ‘eminent artist of peculiar genius’ who transformed the character of early 19th-century British furniture design.
Detailed catalogue produced for an exhibition of 126 fine Renaissance jewels at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, with detailed scholarly descriptions of each item together with provenance and related literature. As well as showing the items in the exhibition, the illustrations include jewellery designs and contemporary portraits of sitters wearing jewels.
The book also contains essays:
- The Status and Making of Jewellery, 1500-1630 A.G. Somers Cocks
- Renaissance Jewels in their Social Setting Dr Peter Burke
- Sources of Gemstones in the Renaissance E.A. Jobbins
- The Cutting and Setting of Gems in the 15th and 16th Centuries Dr Fritz Falk
- Dress in Western Europe 1500-1630 John Nevinson
- Sweet England’s Jewels Janet Arnold
- The Renaissance in the 19th Century Shirley Bury
Charles Ricketts was a man of remarkable versatility. In the 1890s he ranked with Aubrey Beardsley as a powerful influence on book illustrators, and in his work for the theatre he rivalled Edward Gordon Craig. As an art critic he was compared with his exact contemporary Roger Fry; as a connoisseur he could contest the view of Bernard Berenson.
In The World of Charles Ricketts Joseph Darracott explores and illustrates Ricketts’s major areas of artistic commitment and considers his significance in relation both to his contemporaries and to later generations. Although Ricketts and his close friend Charles Channon are mentioned in many memoirs of London in the 1890s, they have remained little known. Yet Ricketts’s achievements are striking. His illustrations for The Vale Press and for other publishers are remarkable for their directness. His book on Titian was unequalled in its understanding of the Italian master. His stage work included the set and costume designs for the first production of George Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and for a new production in the 1920s of The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan. Ricketts and Shannon were in their time among the most knowledgeable connoisseurs of Oriental, particularly Japanese, art. The majority of items in their Oriental collection was left to the British Museum, while their Old Master drawings and many other elements of their collection were bequeathed to Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Such was Ricketts’s reputation that, in 1915, he was offered, and turned down, the position of Director of the National Gallery in London. But later he became the advisor to the National Gallery of Canada in its formative years.
Ricketts was a key figure in the London art world from the 1890s to 1930 as an illustrator and painter, jewellery and theatre designer, art critic and collector. His circle of friends included Oscar Wilde, Walter Sickert, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and William Rothenstein who remembered Ricketts as ‘the artistic Warwick of the age’.
Joseph Darracott (1934-1998) was a writer, art historian, editor, and museum man. Over his working lifetime he spent fourteen years as Keeper of Art at the Imperial War Museum, helped to found National Heritage, the organization for support and promotion of museums in Britaine, and edited some 50 issues of the quarterly journal Museum News, 20 scholarly monographs, catalogues and six books.
herman de vries is one of the greatest living artists working with nature. His statement, ‘my poetry is the world’, aptly sums up his extraordinary work. de vries offers no representation of landscape or of nature, of light, of air or of perspective. His aim is quite simply to present nature as itself. The intelligence that lies behind his work is subtle, ingenious, reflective and steeped in knowledge of both eastern and western philosophies. de vries’s early training as a botanist broadens his frame of reference still further and underpins his artistic method.
de vries’s art springs from his conviction that a proper contemplation and experience of nature is essential to living in any meaningful sense, from a profound awareness of the present disjunction between people and their natural environment, and an intuitive certainty that the careful persuasion and prompts embodied in his work will nudge us in the right direction. This sense of social responsibility combines with a personal joy in what he finds around him. He lives in northern Bavaria on the edge of the Steigerwald, one of the few remaining large-scale areas of forest in western Europe. One of his most important works is the meadow, 4000 square metres of land tended by de vries and his wife Susanne, to which the plant and animal species that traditionally frequented more gently farmed meadows are returning.
Like nature itself (or as de vries would probably say, because it is nature itself), his work bears limitless viewing. His smaller scale works often involve sampling and collecting: an array of leaves taken from one willow branch; earth rubbings in widely varying colours; cherry leaves fixed where they fell on a piece of paper beneath their tree; a pressed sample of vegetation explicitly recalling Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated Das Grosse Rasenstück. Often, a purposeful symbolism or association is involved: samples of earth and a list of place names from an area of Poland that in living memory was part of Germany, handwritten lists of the largely forgotten common names in Provençal of the medicinal plants of Haute-Provence.
Here the distinguished writer on art, Mel Gooding, contributes a critical overview of de vries’s work, setting it in an historical context and appraising it as an important reflection of the cultural consciousness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
www.hermandevries.org
Chris Drury walks – and works – in the wild landscapes of the world. This book illustrates and describes work spanning over twenty years in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, during which Drury developed an impressive and strikingly personal repertoire of sculptural responses to the natural environment.
In this magnificent record of the work of a highly inventive artist, Drury’s experiences of places visited or journeys made are expressed in two kinds of sculpture: cairns or shelters, sometimes filled with fire, which are built in remote and often beautiful locations, and meticulously worked baskets and exquisitely formed ‘bundles’ – of bone, wood, leaf, grass, feather, stone – which are created later from materials picked up along the way. Thus, a basket made of heather, wool and stone recalls a shelter made of heather ‘for the mist’, and is, in its turn, echoed ten years later by a dewpond in Sussex cut into a maze of intersecting channels; a cairn built in a canyon in New Mexico is followed by etched and bound elk bones from a lion kill there.
Elsewhere in the book, the spray from a spectacular waterfall in Norway mixes with the smoke of a fire cairn; a delicately balanced cairn on rocks perched high above the sea in western Ireland is topped by the bone of a pilot whale found on the beach; a 70-foot high vortex made of interlaced struts of hazel and willow sits delicately within the confines of a medieval castle in southern England.
The second edition of the book contains an extra chapter that reflects the further development of Drury’s work and in particular his fascination with water and movement. He has become increasingly interested in the connection of water and land to rhythms within the human body, which has involved work in hospitals as well as in the landscape. Fingerprints, echocardiograms and sections through heart muscle recall and are combined with contour maps of mountains, river vortices and ocean tides, resulting in a series of startlingly unusual works.
Kay Syrad’s introduction offers a useful and informative analysis of Chris Drury’s sculpture against the background of environmental art, providing valuable insights into the motivations of the artist. Drury’s own commentaries, together with the highly evocative illustrations of his work, convey his passionate exploration of humanity’s relationship to nature, as well as his appreciation of the natural world as one in which people have their place and make their mark.
www.chrisdrury.co.uk
A many-pointed star formed from large icicles balances on a rock in a quiet Dumfriesshire valley; a delicate bamboo screen stands on a Japanese beach against a backdrop of mountains; a great serpentine ridge of earth extends along a disused railway cutting on Tyneside; our massive snow rings mark the position of the North Pole.
Much of Andy Goldsworthy’s work is ephemeral, and he records his creations in fine colour photographs, many of which are accompanied by texts that form an integral part of the work. The artist’s intention is not to make his mark on the landscape, but to work with it instinctively, so that his creations manifest, however fleetingly, a sympathetic contact with the natural world.
Andy Goldsworthy’s work is included in public and private collections all over the world. This early survey of his work coincided with a retrospective exhibition that toured the UK, Europe, America and the Far East in 1990-91.
Poetic rather than literal in its approach to stone, this book includes works that involve not only stone of various kinds – slate, limestone, sandstone, river boulders – but also leaves, flowers, sand, clay and scrap steel.
Goldsworthy has constructed a book as he would a sculpture, drawing together different ideas as he might different stones into a single work. His text explores the ideas that lie behind his art; his captions reveal the specific details of the materials, processes, and events of each creation.
Working with the concept of stone led Goldsworthy to question his own perceptions of time, stability, change and impermanence. The sculptures seen here are not static or immune from the elements; on the contrary, each explores the changes that characterise the natural world – they may collapse, melt, or be washed away. The same materials may be used repeatedly, often in strikingly different forms; some daytime works have counterparts made at night.
This spectacular book brings together work made in Britain, France, the United States, Australia and Japan, mainly between 1990 and 1993.
In Wood, Andy Goldsworthy offers a compelling exploration of the nature of wood as he has come to know it.
The book’s sections, entitled Earth, Seed, Root, Branch, Leaf and Tree and prefaced by extracts from the artist’s working diaries, point to its organic structure. Luminous throws of dust in a wheat field convey Goldsworthy’s sense of the earth breathing; a snowball poised near the base of a huge, protective tree in a snow-bound field suggests the seed; a serpentine line of bracken leaves pinned with thorns and a snaking sand sculpture in a museum of Egyptian antiquities jubilantly echo the root undulating through the ground; two reconstructions of branches in Alaska – one smoothly looping, the other jagged and angular – reflect the contrasting qualities of wood; a delicate chain of yellow leaves droops into a dark, quiet pool and meanders through fallen, floating leaves before climbing effortlessly back into the boughs of the tree from which it came.
Woven through the book are intriguing glimpses of a ballet, Végétal, in which dancers build, dismantle and rebuild versions of Goldsworthy’s sculptures on stage – a collaboration with Ballet Atlantique-Régine Chopinot – which draws fascinating parallels between dance and the process of making sculptures, evoking a sense of the strengths and delicacies to be found both in nature and in the human body, and the randomness but also the patterns and flows to be found in the organic world.
Wood culminates with a striking and peculiarly intimate revelation of the artist’s relationship with a particular corner of landscape in his home territory. A vast, ancient oak tree provokes a rich succession of responses as the seasons ebb and flow, some clearly drawing on ideas first tried out in other places, others arising from the moment. The extraordinarily low temperatures and heavy snowfalls in south-west Scotland in January and early February 1996 have their own witness here. The Capenoch Tree is a triumphant expression of the strong impulse evident in Goldsworthy’s work to allow one work to lead quite directly to the next, for the dismantling of one sculpture to be the first stage in creating a new one.
The introduction was written by the late Dr Terry Friedman, an architectural historian who curated the first major retrospective in 1980 of Goldsworthy’s work at the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Leeds City Art Gallery.
In Arch, Andy Goldsworthy is working in his home territory, as he traces the route along which sheep were once driven from Scotland over the border to markets in England. A red sandstone arch, made of blocks hewn from a Scottish quarry, begins its journey in a dilapidated stone sheepfold deep in the hills of southwest Scotland. From there it progresses south, often constructed in the evening and dismantled early in the morning, in a rich variety of locations: on the site of a vanished stone sheep pen in a town centre, on land high above a six-lane motorway, half-in and half-out of a stream running through lush pastureland.
Some of the drove roads, which fell out of use with the arrival of the railway, have survived as tracks across isolated areas of Cumbrian hillside; others have developed into modern roads. Sheepfolds, simple dry-stone enclosures, dot the countryside. A few are still maintained, many exist in various state of ruination, some have disappeared altogether. Working from maps that identify the ancient sites of sheepfolds, Goldsworthy has used this rich seam of rural history to select stances for the arch on nits journey south.
While Andy Goldsworthy lives close to the start of the arch’s route, the writer with whom he has collaborated lives near its end. David Craig shares with Goldsworthy a deep concern with the history of the land, touching in his writing both on its ancient physical origins and on the lives of the people who have lived and worked on it over the centuries. His evocative account charts the travels of the arch and its reception in the various communities through which it passes.
Time celebrates, with a wealth of work made predominantly in the 1990s, the many ways in which Goldsworthy’s art is informed by or evokes the passage of time.
Goldsworthy is concerned above all with time as it is made manifest in the processes of nature – ‘Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.’ Early on, his predominantly ephemeral works spoke principally of a particular place at a particular time. Gradually, the emphasis broadened to encompass references to the history of a place or landscape, and an acknowledgement that a work would change as it disintegrated. This book demonstrates an increasing interest in the future of a work, a sense that its completion marks the start of its life, the beginning of a journey.
Sometimes the outcome of a work is actively anticipated, made possible by extensive knowledge of natural processes: a snow-covered Scottish hillside yields a huge, rectangular line of compacted snow that becomes ever starker as the surrounding snow melts, until it fades away itself; clay walls or floors are intended to dry out and crack, on occasion revealing previously invisible forms embedded within them. Other sculptures are completed with no other certainty than that the elements, the growth of plants and trees, or the intervention of people or animals, will determine their future – an unpredictability anticipated by Goldsworthy for whom revisiting a piece to discover its progress or fate is as important as making the work in the first place. Some pieces are intended for a certain time of day or night: a structure of re-formed icicles is made for a shaft of early morning sunshine, an enveloping structure of branches around a rock is left half open for the day and closed for the night, and there are works that are made possible only by specific conditions of temperature, humidity or wind.
The book is structured around six locations where Goldsworthy has worked over recent years – the semi-desert of Sante Fe, the verdant landscape of New York State in which Cornell University is set, Nova Scotia, forest and coastal areas in Holland, a geological reserve in the south of France and, of course, the area around his home in south-west Scotland. Rich insights into his working methods are provided by the artist’s diaries which deliberately document the failures as well as the successes and vividly evoke the ways in which Goldsworthy familiarises himself with a new locale and begins to ‘touch’ it.
An erudite and fully illustrated chronology compiled by the late Dr Terry Friedman provides a account of Goldsworthy’s career from 1975 to 2000, showing, among other things, how particular forms often take many years to become fully developed.
With a rich selection of over 500 photographs, Time is an invaluable reference source on Goldsworthy’s sculpture.
Photography by Andy Goldsworthy and Jerry L. Thompson
Introduction by Kenneth Baker
In 1989, Andy Goldsworthy constructed his Wall that Went for a Walk in Grizedale Forest, Cumbria, which drew on the walling traditions of that area. Ten years later, aided by a team of wallers from Scotland and the north of England, he made its successor at the Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park in New York State, in another farming landscape rich in stone walls.
Goldsworthy’s wall takes its lead from an old dilapidated wall which he found there. At first following the original foundations closely, his wall then describes a series of increasingly voluptuous arabesques before plunging down into a lake. Rising again on the other side, it heads straight up a grassy slope to stop dead when it reaches a major highway. As the seasons change, so does the wall. Heavily shaded in summer, smothered in a sea of yellow and brown leaves in the autumn, it has an almost calligraphic beauty in winter as it snakes through the bare trees at the edge of a wood.
This sculpture marks a continuation of the dialogue between wood and stone which Goldsworthy has been exploring for some years. The original wall at Storm King was built after the forest had been cleared, yet he discovered its course in the line of trees that had grown through and around it. Goldsworthy traces a new path with his wall, this time in sympathy with the trees, but in the knowledge that it may well one day be destroyed by them.
Kenneth Baker’s introduction considers the Storm King wall against the background of Goldsworthy’s previous work as well as placing it in the context of other walls he has made in Britain, France and the United States.
Andy Goldsworthy enjoys an international reputation as one of the most remarkable sculptors working in the landscape today. This beautifully produced, highly praised and readable retrospective survey of his early work covers the fourteen years between 1976 and 1990. It embraces not only his ephemeral works – represented by photographs, including those made in France and at the North Pole – but also his earliest permanent sculptures constructed of stone and earth, as well as drawings for monumental sculpture projects in the landscape.
Terry Friedman has assembled Goldsworthy’s lyrical photographs of his own works plus interviews and essays by ten contributors, among them an ecologist, an art historian, several curators and the novelist John Fowles. The combination of superlative illustrations and incisive texts makes it an authoritative and comprehensive publication on Andy Goldsworthy’s early work.
Just after midnight on 21st June 2000, Midsummer Day, artist Andy Goldsworthy supervised the unloading of thirteen huge snowballs from refrigerated trucks onto the streets of the City of London, the capital’s financial district. What took place as an astonished public came upon these snowballs – each several feet in diameter and weighing about a ton – is captured here in spontaneous and evocative pictures taken by photographers working around the clock over the several days it took the snowballs to melt.
The idea for this, Goldsworthy’s largest ephemeral work to date, came out of his longtime preoccupation with cold in general and snow and ice in particular. In earlier works, Goldsworthy has carved or shaped snow into monumental but transient sculptures, used its virgin surface to draw on, placed snowballs as punctuation marks in the landscape, and, mixing snow with other materials, produced striking works on paper by allowing the mixtures to melt. Another of Goldsworthy’s recurrent themes, time, also plays an important role in Midsummer Snowballs: made high in the Scottish Highlands in the last two winters of the twentieth century, the snowballs were stored and then unwrapped to melt slowly in London in the first summer of the twenty-first. This is four-dimensional sculpture in which the life span and history of the snowballs are as important as their appearance at any moment.
The snowballs present a unique and unexpected confrontation between the landscape of wilderness and agriculture and that of the city. Concealed within them, and revealed little by little as they began to melt, was an assortment of materials gathered mainly from the land around Goldsworthy’s home in Scotland: elderberries, ears of barley, wool, crow feathers, sinuous beech branches, chalk, river pebbles, and even rusting barbed wire and discarded chunks of agricultural machinery. Some of these items contain allusions to London’s past, when it had a relationship to the land that has been almost totally lost under the streets, shops, and office towers of the modern city. Occasionally the reference is more direct: placed beside the great meat market of Smithfield was a snowball containing the hair of Highland cattle. A fourteenth snowball, brought into the Curve Gallery of London’s Barbican Centre, made a brilliantly coloured drawing on the floor as its contents, ground Scottish red sandstone, were left behind as the snowball melted.
The huge snowballs amazed, delighted, and sometimes affronted the passers-by on that Midsummer Day, and the wonderful photographs show people gazing, touching, smiling, laughing or walking by and pretending to ignore the enormous mass of snow on the pavement. Particularly entranced by the snowballs were children, many of whom had never seen snow except on television, and even those who had were astonished by the pure brilliant whiteness of the mountain snow, something never seen in the grey city.
The introduction by art historian Judith Collins places the snowballs in the context both of Goldsworthy’s own work and that of earlier painters and sculptors. The story of the snowballs is told by Goldsworthy himself.
The journeys that people, rivers, landscapes and even stone take through space and time are central to this book. An account of a cairn built on the crest of a small hill in south-west Scotland not far from where Andy Goldsworthy lives reveals the importance of his work close to home, which is the inspiration for so much that he then creates elsewhere. Three cairns similar to the one in Scotland now span the United States, marking the artist’s own journey across the States as well as the culmination of a form that has played a significant part in his work.
A series of works involving elm trees made near Goldsworthy’s home – ranging from glowing yellow leaves, through the rich brown of long-fallen leaves to dead branches – exemplifies his work’s vigorous beauty as well as its association with death and decay, here made more poignant by the knowledge that so few elms survive since disease wiped out hundreds of thousands of trees.
Goldsworthy’s works on the beach and in rivers, which change and eventually disappear in response to the ebb and flow of water, continue his exploration of the flow and passage of time, while a white chalk path in Sussex, intended to be walked by moonlight, investigates the impact of light upon the sculpture and place, and the passing from day into night.
Passage also includes Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Here eighteen oak trees were planted through small holes in hollowed-out, earth-filled boulders. Growing in almost impossible circumstances, the trees carry powerful symbolic meaning.
Documenting these and other recent works, Passage is an eloquent testament to Goldsworthy’s determination to both deepen and extend his understanding of the world around him and his relationship with it through his art.
In the early 1990s Andy Goldsworthy was invited to propose a project for Cumbria, a region of outstanding natural beauty in northern England where the landscape has been moulded for centuries by agriculture and in particular by sheep-farming. His response was to repair or rebuild a swathe of Cumbrian sheepfolds, stone enclosures used for gathering, sheltering and washing sheep, reconstructing them to incorporate or contain artworks with the intention that, wherever possible, the folds would still be accessible to sheep.
Among the sculptures are slate works and balanced stones embedded in walls, and a series of sixteen holding folds along a drove road, each containing a massive glacial boulder rolled down from the nearby hillside. Work began in January 1996, and, despite a hiatus in 2001 when the devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease effectively closed off the land, by 2006 more than forty structures had been completed. It is this extraordinary project that forms the core of Enclosure.
The book also includes a rich collection of ephemeral work related in various ways to sheep. Graceful serpentines of frozen wool reach up from a rock in a gorge, or hang down from its craggy sides; lengths of wall are painstakingly edged with bright white lines of wool or frozen snow. There is also a spectacular series of large, sheep paintings, paintings made by the hoofprints of sheep, produced by laying a large canvas on the ground in winter, with a block of sheep feed in the middle to attract the animals.
Finally, an intriguing section demonstrates how work in a burn close to Goldsworthy’s home in Dumfriesshire informed some of his most impressive work to date installed recently at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in a major retrospective exhibition of his work.
This impressive volume is a rich testament to Goldsworthy’s lifelong interest in the land, its history and its inhabitants.
For over 40 years, David Nash has made sculpture almost exclusively in wood. At the core of his work is a profound and ever-growing knowledge of trees, enabling Nash to engage closely and intuitively with the varying characteristics of each species of wood that he uses. The extensive statements by him in this book provide a unique insight into both his working methods and the thought processes provoked by this extraordinary collaboration with trees. Early on, Nash rejected the hitherto unchallenged notion that only unseasoned timber could be used by artists or craftsmen. The direct result of this is that in much of his work, the moment when he has finished carving a piece is only the beginning of the development of the sculpture as it reacts to heat, light, moisture or drying.
In the late 1960s, he moved to the Welsh slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he bought a redundant chapel to use as both living space and studio; the crucial role of the chapel as a home for a developing and shifting population of sculptures is chronicled here for the first time. From this base, he has produced a stream of works, sometimes closely related to the landscape in which he lives, sometimes made abroad. Often when he works away from home, he has been invited to a place where an abundance of fallen wood provides the opportunity to make a whole family of sculptures hailing from the same source. This books focuses particularly on three of these worksites, referred to by Nash as ‘wood quarries’, in France, Spain and Japan.
On a piece of land not far from his home, Nash has for over 30 years been planting and then coaxing groups of trees to take on forms such as domes and bowl shapes. These subtle, beautiful sculptures are, in Nash’s words, ‘coming’ or growing works. Others, which he sees as ‘going’ works have been made with the intention that over time they will merge again with nature. Perhaps the most impressive of these is a roughly spherical oak boulder a metre in diameter, which he made in 1978, and then launched into a nearby stream. Over the next 25 years, and with only minimal intervention, he recorded its progress towards the sea, until it finally disappeared.
Also presented here are numerous examples of sculptures dealing with a favourite theme – the universal forms of the cube, the sphere and the pyramid, as well as Nash’s highly innovative black sculptures, produced by a controlled charring of the forms which are very different in impact from those left with their natural wood colour.
This lavishly illustrated book has a substantial introduction, tracing the career of David Nash and evaluating his sculpture, by the distinguished art historian and critic, the late Norbert Lynton, who knew and followed the sculptor’s work from the late 1960s.
For over 40 years, a quiet but remarkably resilient strand of activity in contemporary art has been evident – that of artists who have largely turned their backs on the city to embrace the context and inspiration offered by the natural environment, though in a spirit quite distinct from the tradition of landscape painting. Song of the Earth showcases the work of six important contemporary artists who work in the landscape and make use of the materials and processes of nature. Their methods favour observation, collecting and forms of manipulation that are more reflective than intrusive, setting them firmly apart from artists of the American Land Art movement working over the same period.
herman de vries, Chris Drury, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Nikolaus Lang, Richard Long and Guiseppe Penone do not belong to a particular school, but they are united by their empathy for nature and their decision to work outside the urban contexts of much modernist art. Interviews with the artists, conducted by William Furlong, reveal both widely differing motivation in their approaches to their work and striking similarities in their underlying concerns and, sometimes, methods of working. The introductory essay by Mel Gooding places these artists in both historical and contemporary contexts, as well as discussing other artists including Josef Beuys, Sjoerd Buisman, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash.
Song of the Earth fills a significant need for information about a field of contemporary art which enjoys an impressively warm response when it is seen, but whose character and sometimes remote location can make it inaccessible to the public gaze. This richly illustrated book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary European art and will delight all those who are drawn to the natural environment.
This is the first full-scale monograph on the life and work of the remarkable British artist Merlyn Evans (1910-73). Evans was born in Cardiff, and when he was three his family moved to Glasgow. Precociously gifted, he studied at Glasgow School of Art (exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1930 and 1931) and at the Royal College of Art in London.
Deeply affected by the poverty and violence that he saw in Glasgow during the depressed years of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Evans very soon committed himself to an art that engaged with real life. Cubism, abstraction, Surrealism and his studies of ethnographic art contributed to a distinctive visual language, reflecting his psychological, ethical and political concerns.
Surrealism was a major influence, and in 1936 Evans exhibited several works in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Although he associated with the Surrealist Group, he was to remain characteristically independent of any single tendency in Modernism. His growing concern at the disastrous political events unfolding in Europe and economic distress at home were increasingly reflected in the overtly social and political nature of his subject matter.
Although after 1938 he lived in South Africa, these matters continued to preoccupy him, and paintings made explicit reference to economic depression, atrocity and war. His style, with its interlock of the organic and the mechanical, and its grotesque morphologies, proved highly effective as an artistic response to the anguish of the time.
After distinguished wartime service, Evans returned to London, where he took up etching and aquatint, becoming, within a few years, a master of intaglio print-making. Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, his paintings continued to tackle political and philosophical themes, featuring highly stylised but recognisably human forms in theatrical space. In the mid’50s, Evans’s work became more abstract, and by the early ’60s his paintings were dominated by starkly angular architectural and geometric forms. At the same time, Vertical Suite in Black (1958), and the dramatic beauty of his later aquatints and mezzotints, including the magisterial series Pentaptych, established Evans as one of the greatest print-makers of the post-war era.
Evans’s temperament combined passion and intellectuality; he loved philosophical speculation and argument, and was deeply read in psychology, philosophy, politics, mechanics, optics and the history and techniques of art. Above all, he was profoundly affected by Modernist literature, especially poetry. These diverse aspects of his imaginative thought found wild expression in his work as an artist. In this book, Mel Gooding traces the course of Evans’s career to create a compelling portrait of an exciting (and hitherto unjustly neglected) artist of great distinction.
This is the first full-length study of one of the most original and individual British artists of the second half of the last century. Poetic, witty and poignant, his work drew upon a vast range of personal and cultural sources. Subjects from history, myth, religion and literature, and from the experience of everyday life, were drawn into and transformed by the idiosyncratic world of his imagination. He touched nothing that did not undergo ‘a sea-change into something rich and strange’. Hayman’s distinctive imagery was utterly his own and yet it seemed to touch upon something deep in the spirit of those who encountered it. He was much admired as an artist by many of his most distinguished creative and critical contemporaries, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Pater Lanyon, Alan Bowness and J.P. Hodin among them.
Born in London in 1915, Hayman spent his formative years in New Zealand, where he was closely involved with several of the most important young artists of the brilliant group associated with Colin McCahon. He returned to England in 1947, and before long became part of the burgeoning post-war art scene in Cornwall. At first as a resident and thereafter as an annual visitor he exhibited regularly in St Ives, as well as many leading London galleries. From 1958 to 1963 he edited The Painter and Sculptor, a quarterly magazine of the arts that fervently promoted humanistic figurative art. In later years, Hayman led a more reclusive life, his free and melancholy spirit finding expression in an outpouring of visionary drawings, paintings and constructions, as well as a number of beautiful painted poems. He died in 1988.
The inspiration for Perle Hessing’s boldly conceived pictures came from all the influences and experiences of an eventful life. She was born in Galicia, a region that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, a craftsman printer and bookbinder, told her stories from the Bible and recounted old Hasidic tales which, with scenes from family life in Central Europe, form the main strand in her painting. Included here are strikingly personal interpretations of biblical subjects such as Adam and Eve Mourning Abel, David and Bathsheba, the Vision of Ezekiel and the Flight into Egypt.
Literature and music provided other sources of inspiration: Goethe, Gogol and Mussorgsky are all represented. Perle Hessing’s painting provides a wonderful panorama of a cultural heritage shared by millions of people throughout the world.
The events of Perle Hessing’s adult life also influenced her work, giving rise to poignant images stemming from the Holocaust, and scenes of life in Israel, Australia and England. There can be few painters whose subject matter stretches from the ghetto of 16th-century Prague to the Great Barrier Reef and from the life of Spinoza in 17th-century Amsterdam to the hubbub of Speakers’ Corner in present-day London.
The paintings themselves combine a kind of innocence and an exuberant use of colour with a highly personal and often sophisticated vision. Her talent for compressing many parts of a story or aspects of a scene into a single composition produces an extraordinary richness and emotional complexity, often simultaneously touching and humorous.
In this book, the summation of her oeuvre as a painter, Perle Hessing provides her own commentary to a selection of her finest work in colour. The overall effect is as much spiritual autobiography as art book.
Perle Hessing was born in 1908 in the small town of Zaleszczyki in Galicia, which subsequently became part of the Soviet Union and is now in western Ukraine. From the age of six, she was brought up in Czernowitz, the capital of the Bukovina, where she married her philosopher husband and where their son was born. An entirely self-taught artist, she began to paint when she was in her fifties and living in Australia, where the family had settled after World War II. Perle Hessing’s paintings have been reproduced in many anthologies of naïve art and have been widely exhibited in museums and galleries in Australia, the United States, France, Switzerland, Germany, Venezuela, Israel, the Czech Republic and in Britain, to which she moved in the 1970s.
At first, the exuberance of John Hoyland’s painting – it superabundance of effects and its technical extremism – is almost overwhelming. And then the eye, exhilarated by the works’ diversities of colour, form and texture, frees the imagination and releases the impulses to fantasy. The work coheres into an order of disparate elements, a dynamic of contraries. Hoyland is a maker of evocative images: his paintings, having the quality of dreams, are invitations to reverie. His disposition to the visionary-poetic is rare in English painting, as is the heroic scope of an ambition that takes him again and again to the very extreme of what painting might achieve. Having anticipated much that has happened in contemporary painting, Hoyland remains at the forefront of international abstraction.
The roots of Hoyland’s art lie in northern European expressionist colourism, and from the mid-1970s he followed his own predilections with absolute concentration. His work has moved through many phases, but at each point he has maintained an unmistakable identity; however surprising a body of new work may look at first sight, it can be seen in retrospect as a necessary, even inevitable, development. The central motif in each new series has its beginnings in a subsidiary formal element in the preceding one, which, like a minor character in a play or novel, is taken up in the sequel as a central protagonist in the abstract drama.
John Hoyland (1934-2011) emerged as Britain’s leading abstract painter in the 1960s, exhibiting with both the Situation group in 1960 and 1961 and the young New Generation artists in 1965. In 1967, he was the subject of a major solo show at the Whitechapel Gallery, and two years later represented the UK, with Anthony Caro, at the 1969 São Paulo Biennale. Following successful commercial exhibitions in London, New York, Munich, Milan and Montreal, he worked in New York in the 1970s, counting Noland, Poons and Olitski among his equals.
www.johnhoyland.com
Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) was described by Reyner Banham as ‘the last British architect of undoubted genius’. As a result of exhibitions before the First World War in Vienna, Turin and Moscow, Mackintosh became the most celebrated British architect in Europe since Robert Adam and attracted international recognition.
His earliest and last works were watercolours, and he would have considered himself as much a painter as an architect and designer. The extraordinary development of his style as a painter is comprehensively illustrated here and admirably described in Roger Billcliffe’s introduction and catalogue raisonné.
Mackintosh’s early watercolour were intended primarily as aides-mémoires, but from the start display the strong, vibrant colours which were to reappear in the series of pictures painted between 1893 and 1900 in the style which became known loosely as the ‘Spook School’. Carefully drawn, with subtle colour-washes, these works are often allegories, usually mystical and inspired by organic forms such as bulbs and trees.
For the next fifteen years, Mackintosh was involved largely in architecture and furniture design, but the few finished watercolours of this period show a conscious development away from the near-abstraction of the 1890s towards a greater emphasis on texture and pattern. Throughout this period, he continued to make exquisite studies of flowers: swift pencil sketches with delicate washes of colour which describe the flowers in superb detail.
In 1914, Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret, left Glasgow and moved first to Walberswick in Suffolk where he began to paint seriously. Starting with pictures of the villages and countryside of East Anglia, he evolved a style heavily dependent on his architectural training, by concentrating on the patterns of houses and streets, the reflection of buildings in water, the contours and contrasts of landscape.
Confined to London during the First World War, in 1923 the Mackintoshes escaped to the south of France where he produced a magnificent series of about forty paintings of the villages, harbours and hill forts around Port Vendres and the Franco-Spanish border.
This book, originally published in 1978 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Mackintosh’s death, was the first in-depth study of one aspect of the Scottish pioneer of total environments and will be widely enjoyed by all admirers of Mackintosh’s works and by students of European painting before and after the First World War.
This is the first major publication on the life and work of one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. Ceri Richards, born in Wales in 1903, was a draughtsman of genius and a painter of rare energy and imagination. It was while he was at the Royal College of Art in London in the mid-1920s that his fiercely intelligent, lifelong engagement with modern European painting began. He read and was deeply affected by Kandinsky and responded at the most profound level to Picasso, Matisse and Ernst.
In the 1930s, Richards made a number of relief constructions and paintings that constitute a major contribution to Surrealism and rank with the best European art of the period. A great deal of his work in the 1940s gives a Surrealist inflection to an apocalyptic imagery which identified the cataclysm of the war with the cyclic drama of nature. In the late 1940s, Richards developed an intensely lyrical vision of the everyday world in which brilliant colour, refracted light and an exuberant visual music express a keen appreciation of the joy to be found in domestic and urban life. A gifted musician, Richards was an artist unusually receptive to poetry and music. He made many powerful works no themes from the poetry of Dylan Thomas and in the 1950s and 1960s a series of great, semi-abstract seascapes inspired by La Cathédrale engloutie, which match the lyricism and sombre sonorities of Debussy’s prelude.
Few artists of his time have encompassed such oppositions of subject, theme and mood. Richards’s extraordinary versatility enabled him to shift styles and to treat his subjects with a dazzling virtuosity. His work is characterised by the recurrence of themes and ideas constantly associated with related visual motifs and symbols: the female form, the arabesque, rock and plant formations, seed-pod and flower, sun and moon.
In 1962, Ceri Richards represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, and in 1981, ten years after his death in London, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery. His work can be found in many public collections in Britain.
Mel Gooding has written a remarkable account of Ceri Richards’s art, tracing its sources of inspiration and placing it in its historical context. In a comprehensive and penetrating text, Gooding weaves together a rigorous analysis of Richards’s complex and brilliant work and a fascinating account of his life integrated with over 200 illustrations in colour and quadratone, including many documentary photographs. This handsome book is essential to anyone interested in 20th-century European Art and will win a new generation of admirers for a great artist.
MEL GOODING’S books include Bruce McLean (1990), John Hoyland (1990), William Alsop: Buildings and Projects (1992), Patrick Heron (1994), Terry Frost: Drawings (2000), Gillian Ayres (2001), Abstract Art (2001). He has curated many exhibitions and has written extensively on contemporary art and artists.
Tony Scherman’s Chasing Napoleon presents a remarkable tour de force: a cycle of monumentally scaled portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, each of which depicts Napoleon at a psychologically charged, life-determining juncture. Through exhaustive documentary research – ranging from celebrated commemorative paintings, official and unofficial portraits, to prints, illustrations, cameos and coins – Scherman has arrived at a historically derived, composite image. His method of artistic conception could perhaps be called ‘forensic portraiture’. Confronting the challenge of producing an accurate likeness of a historical figure whose reign preceded the age of photography, these paintings metaphorically chronicle the life of Napoleon using only the image of his face.
The cycle begins with Napoleon’s First Shave and the gaze of a callow, but fearless young man, and concludes with The Last Shave: St Helena, when, on the eve of his death, an introspective and beleaguered general contemplates his arsenic-sealed fate. Battlefield genius, despotic emperor, megalomaniac conqueror, derided hero . . . each of these possible incarnations of Napoleon flickers through the paintings, invoking the flash of charisma as quickly as this is complicated by darker undertones which inform the observer’s encounter with these masterworks of portraiture. Shimmering behind each portrait is the implied history of France, its political, social and cultural narratives, which underwrites subtle shifts in the composition and treatment of the surface.
Central to the extraordinary power of these paintings is Scherman’s virtuosic use of encaustic (a mixture of wax and pigments) – a technique in which he is peerless. The paintings’ eroded, encrusted, dripped and scorched surfaces and the layered process of their creation strongly evoke the passage of time. The faces that stare out at us emerge from history, yet their translucent surfaces glow with physical immediacy.
The Napoleon series is followed by a collection of paintings evoking various of the protagonists and events of the French Revolution, some of them strikingly juxtaposed with their perceived counterparts in the Third Reich. Thus Marat (arguably the first person to make effective use of the daily press for political purposes) is placed alongside Goebbels (the first to use documentary film for sustained political ends), and the painter Jacques-Louis David meets his match in Albert Speer: similar personalities, similar career trajectories. Powerful and disturbing questions are raised by these extraordinary parallels, and it becomes clear that Scherman is deploying his art both to produce remarkably compelling portraits and to examine some of the darkest areas of the human psyche.
The book contains three texts: Jacques Henric provides a dynamic account of the cultural and historical importance of Scherman’s work and the frame of reference from which it springs, Hans Belting and David Moos discuss the specific project and execution of the Napoleon series, and an interview with Tony Scherman by Sanford Kwinter and Bruce Mau illuminates the artist’s motivation, practice and concerns.
TONY SCHERMAN was born in 1950 and received an M. Art postgraduate degree from the Royal College of Art in London in 1974. Since then he has lived and worked in Toronto. His paintings have been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in North America and Europe.
www.tonyscherman.com
This excellent introduction to looking at pictures is written in an approachable and inviting style, showing its readers how to observe and understand the ways in which different artists paint. Suitable for readers aged 8 to 80.
Robert Cumming has chosen about paintings to illustrate how artists such as Breughel, da Vinci, Hogarth, Mondrian, Picasso, Matisse and many others use colour, light and various techniques to achieve specific effects. Cumming is clear and down-to-earth in his approach, drawing on many years of experience lecturing at the Tate Gallery in London to both young and older audiences.
Published in ten languages, Just Look won the prestigious Silver Pencil Award in Holland.
ROBERT CUMMING studied Law and Art History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His first job was in the Education and Exhibitions Department at the Tate Gallery. In 1978 he joined Christie’s to set up and lead the team that created Christie’s Education which was to become the foremost international programme of courses on the fine and decorative arts and the training ground for many future art world professionals. Just Look was his first book. Just Imagine (see below) was his second. He has subsequently written nine books on various aspects of painting and collecting.
www.robertcumming.net
Understanding a painting comes out of the meeting of two people’s imaginations: the spectator’s and the artist’s. ‘If you are going to get into a painting and see what it is really about,’ explains Robert Cumming, ‘you will need to know what to look for and be prepared to use your imagination. Becoming involved in this way is what makes great art such a continual excitement – a voyage of discovery.’
Robert Cumming’s second book, is a lively guide to ‘reading’ the intellectual/emotional content of paintings: the use of symbols and the depiction of biblical/mythological events; the appeal to the sense of pattern, texture and colour; the expression of emotion through distortions of colour and shape; indications of social and cultural attitudes.
Translated into six languages, JUST IMAGINE won The Times Senior Information Book Award and the Premio Pier Paolo Vergerio European Prize for Children’s Literature from Padua University.
The third edition of Charles Barr’s definitive work on the very British studio that made Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers includes a revised filmography and biography section, an epilogue which provides a view of Ealing from the perspective of post-Thatcherite Britain and new coverage of the career of Michael Balcon after the closure of Ealing.
‘as good a book on the British cinema as I have read . . . Barr has set out to link the attitudes enshrined in Ealing cinema to the changing thought and culture of Britain during and after the war, and, in so doing, has produced a quite triumphant blend of social analysis with readable film history.’ The Financial Times
Although Alfred Hitchcock achieved his greatest success and fame in America, he was inescapably English. In this book, Charles Barr rectifies the bias in critical writing towards Hitchcock’s Hollywood films by providing in his entertaining text a detailed and well-documented reading of such films as The Lodger, Blackmail, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, all films of enormous wit and sophistication. He also looks at the contribution, scarcely acknowledged by Hitchcock, of the writers and the source material. Illustrated throughout with over 200 well-chosen stills and frame enlargements. The extensively annotated filmography offers more factual detail than has been assembled before on Hitchock’s English output.
‘. . . Charles Barr’s lucid and precise English Hitchcock, the best of the crop of books published to mark the centenary.’ Philip French, The Observer
‘The movies Hitchcock made in the UK have been neglected for so long that this magisterial book by the doyen of British film studies comes with the force of a revelation.’ Sight and Sound
Katharine Hepburn had the longest and least conventional career of any great star, conforming to none of the stereotypes of superstardom and working successfully within the studio system without ever becoming its creature. Her screen persona was intelligent, wilful and independent, whether in the romance of Little Women (1933), the comedy of Bringing Up Baby or the adventure of The African Queen. She always appeared the equal of her male co-stars, who included Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and, in nine films, Spencer Tracy.
Andrew Britton’s account is outstanding among the literature of stardom. Using the films as his primary evidence, juxtaposed (where relevant) with contemporary journalistic coverage of Hepburn both as an actress and as a star personality, Britton analysed the meaning of her screen persona. One of the most consistent features of his writing was a refusal to look at movies as isolated works. Here, he finds antecedents for the Hepburn persona in the work of Henry James, and his treatment of her is illuminated by comparisons with two other equally individual stars, Greta Garbo and Bette Davis, relating, for example, Hepburn’s star image in the 1930s to that of Garbo, and her ‘spinster’ movies to those of Davis. In her one film with Ginger Rogers, he identifies Hepburn playing the Fred Astaire part.
Andrew Britton offers a feminist reading of Hepburn films in one of the few worthwhile studies of the American cinema to focus on a star. The book is also a consideration, among other things, of genre, camp, bisexuality and spinsterhood.
Included here are Andrew Britton’s cogent and perceptive programme notes for a Hepburn season at the National Film Theatre and a foreword by Robin Wood.
For over forty years, Clint Eastwood has enjoyed an unchallenged position as one of Hollywood’s biggest and most enduring stars. Always able, it seems, to work within the Hollywood system on his own terms, Eastwood has created a gallery of heroes, many clearly descended from his laconic Man With No Name for Sergio Leone, as well as more vulnerable characters such as the DJ in Play Misty for Me, or even the redneck of Every Which Way But Loose.
However, in serious critical discussions of 1970s and 1980s cinema, Eastwood’s work was relegated mostly to the sidelines as being ‘simple’ and/or politically reactionary popular entertainment. All this changed after the rapturous critical reception of Unforgiven (1991), which won Eastwood a well-deserved Academy Award.
This book presents Eastwood’s work as a body of film-making with a crucial place in the mainstream American cinema of the late 20th century. It deals with the films in which he starred for other directors, notably Dirty Harry and his other movies with Don Siegel, and films such as Bird of which he was director but not star, as well as his frequent work in both capacities.
Rather than giving a chronological account of Eastwood’s career (the approach of most other books about him), Edward Gallafent groups his movies for consideration within the genre or cycle to which they belong, setting them among other, comparable filmmaking of the time. This narrative neither demonises nor elevates Eastwood, but explores and stresses his position within an American cultural and historical framework.
The charm and grace of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing in such films as Top Hat and Swing Time perfectly represent the nostalgic qualities of the 1930s. Astaire and Rogers films are, however, much more than the sum of their numbers. The context, and thus meaning, for the song and dance are provided by dialogue, plotting and, crucially, the audience’s perception of the couple. Gallafent examines in detail how the Astaire-Rogers musicals relate to one another and provides an illuminating account of the films made separately by Astaire and Rogers during the 1940s, analysing the development of their star personas both together and apart.
Lavishly illustrated with evocative stills, this account of the work of two of Hollywood’s most delectable performers will appeal to the couple’s many fans and to anyone who has savoured the almost weightless elegance of their dancing.
Film noir, with its darkly urban settings and its population of gangsters and femmes fatales, cops, private eyes and fall guys, gave the American cinema many of its finest films of the 1940s and 1950s – among them Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past and Kiss Me, Deadly. Its central characters were frequently criminals, sometimes attempting in vain a last big job that would allow them to escape to a new life. In a world that should have felt liberated by victory, failure or the threat of it haunted the petty criminal, the potential fall guy, the tired gumshoe and the two-bit femme fatale.
The genre brought together an unrivalled assembly of talent: directors such as Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder, writers including Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck. Aimed at the informed filmgoer and the film student, The Movie Book of Film Noir provides a definitive account of the phenomenon of film noir and in-depth analyses of many of the most notable movies, among them The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and Kiss Me, Deadly, and of the film noir revival in the 1970s and 1980s.
Full chapter list
FILM NOIR: INTRODUCTION Michael Walker
THE POLITICS OF THE MALADJUSTED TEXT Richard Maltby
NOIR IS ALSO A FRENCH WORD: The French Antecedents of Film Noir Ginette Vincendeau
HOW HOLLYWOOD DEALS WITH THE DEVIANT MALE Deborah Thomas
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FILM NOIR Deborah Thomas
TAME WOLVES AND PHONEY CLAIMS: Paranoia and Film Noir Jonathan Buchsbaum
FILM NOIR AND SUPPRESSIVE NARRATIVE: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Douglas Pye
ROBERT SIODMAK Michael Walker
THE MAN’S MELODRAMA: The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street Florence Jacobowitz
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (or Bringing Up Baby) Peter William Evans
DETOUR Andrew Britton
FALLEN ANGEL Bob Baker
THE BIG SLEEP: Howard Hawks and Film Noir Michael Walker
OUT OF THE PAST a.k.a. Build My Gallows High Leighton Grist
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth Andrew Britton
IN A LONELY PLACE V.F. Perkins
ANGEL FACE Edward Gallafent
KISS ME, DEADLY Edward Gallafent
THE BIG COMBO: Production Conditions and the Film Text Chris Hugo
ECHO PARK: Film Noir in the ’Seventies Edward Gallafent
MOVING TARGETS AND BLACK WIDOWS: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood Leighton Grist
A wide-ranging and stimulating appreciation of every film buff’s favourite genre, The Movie Book of the Western concentrates on the period since 1939, when the Western established itself in the mainstream of the American cinema. The films covered in depth run from Drum along the Mohawk and Dodge City, both made in that year, to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and other films of the recent Western revival. Among the major figures in the history of the Western whose work is discussed are John Wayne, John Ford, Anthony Mann and Delmer Daves. The text, mainly written by film critics associated with MOVIE magazine, is aimed at the informed filmgoer as well as the film student and is illustrated throughout with stills that capture the flavour of the Western.
Full chapter list
CRITICISM AND THE WESTERN Douglas Pye
COUNTRY MUSIC AND THE 1939 WESTERN: From Hillbillies to Cowboys Peter Stanfield
A BETTER SENSE OF HISTORY: John Ford and the Indians Richard Maltby
WHY DO COWBOYS WEAR HATS IN THE BATH?: Style Politics for the Older Man Martin Pumphrey
SOCIAL CLASS AND THE WESTERN AS MALE MELODRAMA David Lusted
JOHN WAYNE’S BODY Deborah Thomas
THE DIETRICH WESTERNS: Destry Rides Again and Rancho Notorious Florence Jacobowitz
METHOD WESTERNS: The Left-Handed Gun and One-Eye Jacks Jonathan Bignell
GENRE AND HISTORY: Fort Apache and the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Douglas Pye
THE WESTERNS OF DELMER DAVES Michael Walker
A TIME AND A PLACE: Budd Boetticher and the Western Mike Dibb
THE COLLAPSE OF FANTASY: Masculinity in the Westerns of Anthony Mann Douglas Pye
DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK Robin Wood
DODGE CITY Charles Barr
DUEL IN THE SUN Robin Wood
NOTES ON PURSUED Andrew Britton
WESTWARD THE WOMEN: Feminising the Wilderness Peter William Evans
SHANE THROUGH FIVE DECADES Bob Baker
JOHNNY GUITAR V.F. Perkins
DOUBLE VISION: Miscegenation and Point of View in The Searchers Douglas Pye
HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS Richard Lippe
NOT WITH A BANG: The End of the West in Lonely Are the Brave, The Misfits and Hud Edward Gallafent
HOW THE WEST WAS WON: History, Spectacle and the American Mountains Sheldon Hall
ULZANA’S RAID Douglas Pye
PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID Brad Stevens
CLASS FRONTIERS: The View from Heaven’s Gate Brian Woolland
DANCES WITH WOLVES Michael Walker
UNFORGIVEN Leighton Grist
FOUR TOMBSTONES 1946-1994 Edward Gallafent
Hollywood has always alerted its audiences to the nature of its products as Westerns, horror films, musicals and so on, and film writers have tended to rely on genre as the basis for charting the landscape of Hollywood cinema. However, genre theory has developed relatively little since the influential work that was done in the late 1960s and 1970s. In Beyond Genre, Deborah Thomas suggests that there are broad, over-arching melodramatic and comedic modes – and romantic inflections of each – that shape our expectations when we settle down to watch a film and are fundamental to an understanding of mainstream American cinema. The book’s arguments are tested in detailed and perceptive accounts of films ranging from To Be or Not to Be and The Palm Beach Story in the 1940s to Schindler’s List and Groundhog Day in the 1990s. Thomas builds her hypotheses on close analysis of performance, narrative and visual style, providing valuable, indeed model readings of a number of seminal movies. With its assured synthesis of theory and textual analysis, Beyond Genre is an essential text for critics and students of film.
The studio system, which had dominated Hollywood for more than half a century, finally fell apart in the late 1960s. The uncertainty that followed opened the way for independent producers, many of whom were already specialising in exploitation movies with titles like Slumber Party Massacre, which were targeted at the 12 to 20-year-old age group. These films, with their starvation budgets and impossible shooting schedules, gave a start to a number of notable directors. Others were meanwhile trying their luck in television or shooting experimental movies.
The first post-studio directors, the so-called ‘movie brats’ (Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese and De Palma) are now famous. After them came a generation of directors, often controversial, who now make some of Hollywood’s most interesting pictures. This book, based on in-depth interviews, looks at the experiences of some thirty of them in getting established and keeping afloat in the new Hollywood, including comment on the unequal opportunities faced by female and black film-makers. Drawing upon information gathered in interviews more often than quoting directly from them, Jim Hillier has produced an absorbing account from the film-makers’ viewpoint of the business of film-making.
Some of this generation of directors made box-office hits such as Terminator (James Cameron), The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme), Gremlins (Joe Dante), Sleeping with the Enemy (Joseph Reuben) and Look Who’s Talking (Amy Heckerling). Others continued to make inexpensive horror movies. Still others divided their time between cinema and television, among them Michael Mann, who directed Manhunter for the cinema and produced Miami Vice and Crime Story for television, and David Lynch of Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks. Among those included are Bill Duke (A Rage in Harlem), Mike Figgis (Internal Affairs), Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God), Tim Hunter (River’s Edge), Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Jim McBride (The Big Easy) and Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan).
Today, the name Hollywood conjures up not simply tinseltown itself but the whole of the American film industry. The New Hollywood bears witness to the diversity and vigour still remaining in the 1980s and early 1990s in an industry that had become increasingly dispersed, less rigidly organised – and much more costly. Jim Hillier’s book provides the essential background to understanding the economic and creative forces that carried American cinema into the 21st century.
Includes list of sources, index and director credits for: George Armitage, Kathryn Bigelow, Charles Burnett, Rob Cohen, Martha Coolidge, Joe Dante, Ate de Jong, Jonathan Demme, Bill Duke, Abel Ferrara, Mike Figgis, Mark Frost, Mick Garris, Mark Goldblatt, Randa Haines, Amy Heckerling, Reginald Hudlin, Tim Hunter, Amy Jones, Jonathan Kaplan, Spike Lee, Aaron Lipstadt, Sondra Locke, Michael Mann, Rockne S. O’Bannon, Bobby Roth, Joseph Ruben, John Sayles, Susan Seidelmann, John Singleton, Penelope Spheeris, Lewis Teague and Mario van Peebles.