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An exploration of how war, uncertainty, and displacement inspired one of Japan’s greatest painters

Three essays by leading scholars in the field of Japanese art explore Sesson Shūkei’s unique life and unconventional painting style, as well as how scholarly perceptions of the artist have changed over time. Fifty-three entries highlight major works by Sesson as well as those by other artists before, during, and after his time.

Sesson Shūkei (ca. 1492 – ca. 1577) stands out as an anomaly in the history of Japanese art. Among the vast canon of Japanese ink painting, Sesson departed from convention. Inspired by the untamed landscape of the eastern regions of Japan, Sesson led a peripatetic existence caused by a lifetime of experiencing warfare and upheaval – yet he created some of the most visually striking images in the history of Japanese ink painting. Drawing on new art historical and sociological insights into Japan’s sixteenth century, this book considers how war, uncertainty, and displacement can spawn untamed creativity. This publication explores new ways of understanding and interpreting one of Japan’s greatest painters and the world that shaped him.

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Пролистать книгу Sesson Shukei: A Zen Monk-Painter in Medieval Japan

Volume 1 of Joaquin Sorolla's catalogue raisonné is the first part of the culmination of a project initiated by Francisco Pons-Sorolla and Blanca Pons-Sorolla, which assembles all currently known works by the painter - some 4,000 pieces.

This first volume is dedicated to the collection of the Sorolla Museum in Madrid, Spain

Joaquin Sorolla's catalogue raisonné is the culmination of a project that was initiated by Francisco Pons-Sorolla and Blanca Pons-Sorolla, which assembles all the work of the painter known so far (over 4,000 works). The aim of this project is the publication of five volumes in which the works by Joaquin Sorolla Bastida (1863-1923) will be presented by themes: 1. Sorolla Museum; 2. The Sea and the Beach; 3. Portraits; 4. Landscapes; 5. Composition Works. Within these themes, the works will be presented chronologically, so that the evolution of the painter can be observed in each case.

This first volume of the catalogue is dedicated to the collection of the Sorolla Museum, which houses the largest collection of the artist's works. It displays a comprehensive panorama of the painter's oeuvre through 1,300 pieces.

The project is currently being financed by the Sorolla Museum Foundation, and is being carried out by Blanca Pons-Sorolla, with the collaboration of Teresa Jiménez-Landi and Mónica Rodríguez Subirana. Since the beginning of the project in 1987, a profoundly better understanding of Sorolla's work has been achieved.

About the Author:

Blanca Pons-Sorolla, great-granddaughter of Joaquín Sorolla, is an independent researcher of the artist's oeuvre, and has been working on his catalogue raisonné for many years.

Valencian master Sorolla's Impressionist paintings depict the most beautiful gardens and architecture in Spain.

Like Claude Monet's celebrated plein-air landscapes at Giverny, the series collected in this book represents among the best-loved examples of Joaquín Sorolla's (1863-1923) work, and a window into the Spanish painter's quest to capture the essence of a garden. Described by Monet as "the master of light," Sorolla and his landscapes, formal portraits, and historically-themed canvases drew comparisons to contemporary American painter John Singer Sargent. Sorolla had achieved renown on both sides of the Atlantic for grand scenes of Spanish life when he began a personal series of garden works, presented completely for the first time in this publication.

Painted at the palaces of La Granja and the Alcázar in Seville, the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, and at the painter's home in Madrid, these Impressionist works allowed Sorolla to apply his signature loose brushwork and training as a photographer's lighting assistant to gardens and the sculptures, architecture, and sitters that frame and animate them. Sorolla depicted reflections in fountains and pools, the sunlight dappling his glamorous sitters, sprays of orange blossoms, and shaded blue-and-white tile as he endeavoured to render the radiant peace of a summer afternoon.

About the Author:

Blanca Pons-Sorolla is the foremost scholar on the work of Joaquín Sorolla and has written and contributed to numerous books, including Sorolla: The Masterworks. She is the artist's great-granddaughter. She was deputy curator of the retrospective exhibition "Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923)" held at the Prado in 2009.

This beautifully illustrated new volume on the Surrealist movement uncovers the influence magic, myth and the occult had on its development.

Like no other 20th-century movement, Surrealism was keenly inspired by tropes of magic, myth and the occult. In their engagement with the irrational and the unconscious, numerous of its members looked to magic as a poetic and deeply philosophical discourse, related to both arcane knowledge and individual self-empowerment. In their works, they heavily drew on esoteric symbols and cultivated the image of the artist as a magician, visionary, and alchemist. This catalog explores the myriad ways, in which magic and the occult informed the development of the Surrealist movement in international perspective, from the “metaphysical paintings” of Giorgio de Chirico through to works of the post-war period. Lavishly illustrated, it combines longer research essays with focused chapter introductions, all penned by leading scholars in the field.

Amongst the many fascinating artists included in the volume are Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Enrico Donati, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Roland Penrose, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, and Remedios Varo.

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Пролистать книгу Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity на сайте издательства.

A Revolution of Light and Color

Occasionally, when something seems very familiar you lose sight of what makes it so special: Flemish Masters. From van Eyck to Bruegel sets out to counteract this effect and opens our eyes once again to the revolution that took place in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries that shaped the course of European art. In 48 lavishly illustrated analyses, Matthias Depoorter explores how painters such as Van Eyck, Van der Weiden, Massys, Bosch, and Bruegel reached unprecedented heights, and are rightfully considered innovators to this day. The defining factor was their perfecting and mastery of the oil painting technique as well as their groundbreaking attention to optical lighting effects. The new technical possibilities offered a different way of looking at the world and ultimately a new way of painting. No less innovative was the level of detail. These painters were thoroughly acquainted with each other’s work — this volume shows the fundamental artistic cross-fertilization. A must-read for anyone who wants to fall in love with the old masterpieces anew.

About the Author:

Matthias Depoorter (*1980) is a writer and an art historian. He was one of the curators of the seminal exhibition Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent and coordinated the accompanying scholarly publication.

This beautifully illustrated, expansive overview of Dutch and Flemish art during the 17th century illuminates the creative achievements of one of the most important eras in Western art.

The Golden Age in Holland and Flanders roughly spanned the 17th century and was a period of enormous advances in the fields of commerce, science ― and art. Still lifes, landscape paintings, and romantic depictions of everyday life became valued by the increasingly wealthy merchant classes in the Dutch provinces, while religious and historic paintings as well as portraits continued to appeal to the Flemish patronage.

The Golden Age brought us Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, and Van Dyck, but it was also the period of Frans Hals’ revolutionary portraiture, Adriaen Brouwer’s depictions of the working class at play, Jan Brueghel’s velvety miniatures, and Hendrick Avercamp’s lively winter landscapes. Norbert Wolf applies his vast understanding of the interplay between history, culture, and art to explore the forces that led to the Golden Age in Holland and Flanders and how this period influenced later generations of artists.

Accompanied by luminous color illustrations, Wolf’s accessible text considers the complex political, religious, social, and economic situation that led to newfound prosperity and, thus, to an enormous artistic output that we continue to marvel at and enjoy today.

About the Author:

Norbert Wolf is an art historian and author based in Munich. He has published several books with Prestel, including "Art Nouveau", "Art Deco", "Impressionism", "Spanish Painting", and "The Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish Painting", as well as monographs on Albrecht Dürer and Titian.

Without a doubt, Picasso is one of the most important and versatile artistic personalities of the twentieth century. But how does a body of work become so successful, and how does it wind up in major collections, museums, and exhibitions? Not infrequently, it is the courage of individuals who recognize genius in the works and advocate for them in the face of conservatism and criticism. In Picasso’s case, this role in Germany fell to the Bremen art dealer Michael Hertz. It was his commitment in the post-war period that resulted not only in the museumization of the artist after the Second World War, but that also greatly benefited Kunsthalle Bremen, which has one of the most extensive collections of the artist’s prints. This volume brings together the outstanding printworks, including lithographs, linocuts, and book illustrations. Picasso’s oeuvre of prints can be regarded as a fascinating collection, in which can be read the triumph of the affordable medium in post-war Germany, as well as the dealer’s strong commitment.

About the Authors:

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) is regarded as the epitome of the twentieth-century artist. In addition to his paintings and sculptures, his graphic works also enjoy special fame.

Michael Hertz (1912–1987) made a name for himself in the post-war period as an art dealer. Through his contacts to the French art scene, he encountered the work of Picasso and became the exclusive representative for his printworks in Germany.

A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain's leading art historians and critics.

The 21st century has seen a surge of interest in English art of the interwar years. Women artists, such as Winifred Knights, Frances Hodgkins and Evelyn Dunbar, have come to the fore, while familiar names – Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer – have reached new audiences. High-profile exhibitions have attracted recordbreaking visitor numbers and challenged received opinion. In The Real and the Romantic, Frances Spalding, one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics, takes a fresh and timely look at this rich period in English art.

The devastation of the First World War left the art world decentred and directionless. This book is about its recovery. Spalding explores how exciting new ideas co-existed with a desire for continuity and a renewed interest in the past. We see the challenge to English artists represented by Cézanne and Picasso, and the role played by museums and galleries in this period. Women artists, writers and curators contributed to the emergence of a new avant-garde. The English landscape was revisited in modern terms. The 1930s marked a high point in the history of modernism in Britain, but the mood darkened with the prospect of a return to war. The former advance towards abstraction and internationalism was replaced by a renewed concern with history, place, memory and a sense of belonging. Native traditions were revived in modern terms but in ways that also let in the past. Surrealism further disturbed the ascetic purity of high modernism and fed into the British love of the strange.

Throughout these years, the pursuit of ‘the real’ was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the ‘romantic’, as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.

About the Author:

Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and leading authority on 20th-century British art. Her books include acclaimed biographies of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. She is Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art. In 2005 she was made a CBE for Services to Literature.

One of the most revered Latin American artists of the early 20th century, best known for his abstract and primitive paintings, with key works from private collections published for the first time.

With 70 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, this is the largest survey of Torres-García’s work to be on view in an American gallery since Joaquín Torres-García curated his own exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1950. The book includes previously unpublished texts by the artist and iconic works that were kept by the family as representative examples of different moments in his career, first by the artist and later by family members who inherited them as a group. Torres-García founded the avant-garde group Circle and Square (Arp, Kandinsky, Léger, Mondrian), where he was inspired by indigenous art from the Americas, Africa, and Oceania, which reinforced his vision of symbols and cosmic order.

About the Author:

Abigail McEwen is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. Tomàs Llorens is the Director of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Previously, he served as Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. Frederic Tuten is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist best known for his novel Tintin in the New World.

“Art nègre? I don’t know it.” With this provocative tone, Picasso tried to deny his relationship with art from outside of Europe. However, through hundreds of archival documents and photographs, this volume illustrates how non-European art from Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and Asia was a recurring source of inspiration for the artist.

Side-by-side comparisons illustrate the links between Picasso’s oeuvre and diverse “primitive” arts. In both, we find the same themes ― nudity, sexuality, impulses, death, and more ― along with parallel artistic expressions of those themes ― such as disfiguration or destruction of the body.

The volume is completed with a chronology of the relevant works and photographs of the artist in his studio.

Figurative painting of the past five years, represented here by an exciting young generation of artists and vital practitioners, addresses the challenge of contemporary representation through expressionistic compositions and new techniques reflecting digital fluency.

Figuration is one of the oldest art forms, but it continually evolves, along with our changing understanding of human identity. The artists featured here often source imagery from the Internet, and draw on aesthetics developed in Internet-first channels. Digital techniques and affordances are incorporated into rendering processes with traditional media: brushstrokes are more precise, lines are sharper, and color is more highly keyed. In these works, expressionism is located more in the composition than in the paint handling.

This richly illustrated collection of figurative works is accompanied by texts that connect the present moment in painting to the early 1980s, when the emergence of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel revitalized the art dialogue after the extended dissolution of Minimalism, and to its roots in the practice of painters like Picabia.

About the Author:

Jeffrey Deitch has helped to build the careers of some of the leading contemporary artists as a gallerist and curator. He is the former Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His book Live the Art: Fifteen Years of Deitch Projects, was published by Rizzoli in 2015.

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Пролистать книгу Unrealism: New Figurative Painting

The official book that accompanies the blockbuster exhibition in Ghent

Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) towered above his contemporaries. With his unprecedented technique, scientific knowledge and unparalleled powers of observation, Van Eyck lifted oil painting to previously unseen heights and helped determine the course of Western art. In Spring 2020 the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium hosted the largest ever exhibition of Van Eyck’s work. An Optical Revolution included artworks by Van Eyck, several pieces from his studio and international masterpieces from the late Middle Ages, which made the world of Van Eyck more tangible than ever. Central to the exhibition were the eight restored exterior panels of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a highly exceptional loan from St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent. After the exhibition the panels were returned to their original place in the cathedral and will never again be shown elsewhere.

This tie-in exhibition catalogue unravels some of the myths that surround Van Eyck and his technique while showing his complete oeuvre and his influence in a new perspective. With essays by leading experts from around the world, this book is an indispensable resource for Van Eyck fans and scholars alike.

About the Authors:

Maximiliaan Martens is a professor of art history at Ghent University.
Till-Holger Borchert is a German art historian and writer specialising in 14th- and 15th-century art. He has been artistic director of the Municipal Museums in Bruges since 2014.
Jan Dumolyn is a Belgian historian and professor at Ghent University.

Vasily Kandinsky became the pioneer of abstract art; he was a co-founder of the Blauer Reiter, an art theorist and an influential teacher at the Bauhaus. When he abandoned his promising career as a lawyer in favour of art at the age of 30, no one could have guessed that a few years later he would play a decisive role in determining and revolutionising twentieth-century art.

What the art critic Will Grohmann wrote in 1924 about Kandinsky in the historic series Junge Kunst, reflects current opinion at the time about the path Kandinsky had chosen towards abstraction, which was regarded as both irritating and bold. However, it was not just his radical views about art that polarised people; the charismatic painter also provoked them with his personality, prompting admiration and repudiation in equal measure. This volume is designed to appeal to book-lovers and is lavishly illustrated. It illuminates the principal milestones in Kandinsky’s artistic and private life, providing an insight into his legacy and focusing in particular on his years at the Bauhaus, where he taught together with artist colleagues like Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger.

Brushwork and poetry – the great awakening of Venetian painting around 1500.

In the Venice of the Renaissance, master artists like Bellini, Giorgione, Palma Vecchio and Titian explored the essence of mankind and nature and their relationship to each other with an unprecedented intensity. This attractive volume shows through important portraits and landscape representations the pioneering innovations of Venetian painting, which continued to leave their mark right up to the modern age.

The painting of the city on the lagoon captivates us not only through the wealth of colours and the nuances of the light, but also through the exceptional sensitivity with which the artists focused on their works. They created sophisticated portraits, seductive idealised likenesses and history paintings whose principal character is the atmospheric landscape. The publication examines the masterpieces in depth with regard to their remarkable innovative strength, the context in which they were produced, and contemporary interpretations.

About the Author:

Andreas Schumacher is the Director of Collections at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

Today we marvel at the shimmering light, the detail and hidden significances within the subtle techniques of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Frans Hals and their compatriots. 

The luminescent art of the Dutch Masters grew from the bounding confidence of the newly independent Netherlands in the early 1600s. Shed of religious conflict it encouraged a wealthy mercantile class that sought the oceans of the world in search of riches and influence, and a new sensibility in art that cast light across the actions and objects of daily life. 

The Dutch Masters are characterized by the abandonment of religious patronage, allowing, for the first time, a relentless focus on everyday subjects: the taverns, breakfast tables and living rooms of the newly wealthy and the places they loved to visit. 

This wonderful new book, also highlighting the work of the pioneering Rachel Ruysch, is the latest addition to Flame Tree’s highly successful Masterworks series.