Summary: This book puts history back into the history of art. It approaches the British and Irish art worlds from the historical viewpoint, avoiding theories unsupported by facts. By studying the intricate mechanisms whereby artists turned oil on canvas into money - or not - the book explains how artists' reputations were made or broken. Individual artists discussed include Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Jacob Epstein, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and many more. Readers will be startled and intrigued to find how such artists fought to survive amid the network of powerful individuals, critics and gallery owners that controlled their destinies.
This book sets a new standard as a work of reference. It covers British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and it encompasses nearly 9,000 painters and 90,000 paintings in more than 1,700 separate collections. The book includes as well pictures that are now lost, some as a consequence of the Second World War and others because of de-accessioning, mostly from 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. By listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, this book becomes a unique and indispensable work of reference, one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting.
This book provides a conceptual and global overview of the field of Surrealist studies. Methodologically, the companion considers Surrealism’s many achievements, but also its historical shortcomings, to illuminate its connections to the historical and cultural moment(s) from which it originated and to assess both the ways in which it still shapes our world in inspiring ways and the ways in which it might appear problematic as we look back at it from a twenty-first-century vantage point. Contributions from experienced scholars will enable professors to teach the subject more broadly, by opening their eyes to aspects of the field that are on the margins of their expertise, and it will enable scholars to identify new areas of study in their own work, by indicating lines of research at a tangent to their own. The companion will reflect the interdisciplinarity of Surrealism by incorporating discussions pertaining to the visual arts, as well as literature, film, and political and intellectual history.
As much as any country, England bore the brunt of Germany's aggression in World War II, and was ravaged in many ways at the war's end. Celebrated historian David Kynaston has written an utterly original, and compellingly readable, account of the following six years, during which the country rebuilt itself. Kynaston's great genius is to chronicle the country's experience from bottom to top: coursing through through the book, therefore, is an astonishing variety of ordinary, contemporary voices, eloquently and passionately evincing the country's remarkable spirit. Judy Haines, a Chingford housewife, gamely endures the tribulations of rationing; Mary King, a retired schoolteacher in Birmingham, observes how well-fed the Queen looks during a royal visit; Henry St. John, a persnickety civil servant in Bristol, is oblivious to anyone's troubles but his own. Together they present a portrait of an indomitable people and Kynaston skillfully links their stories to bigger events thought the country. Their stories also jostle alongside those of more well-known figures like celebrated journalist-to-be John Arlott (making his first radio broadcast), Glenda Jackson, and Doris Lessing, newly arrived from Africa and struck by the leveling poverty of post-war Britain. Kynaston deftly weaves into his story a sophisticated narrative of how the 1945 Labour government shaped the political, economic, and social landscape for the next three decades.
A guide to directors who have worked in the British and Irish film industries between 1895 and 2005. Each of its 980 entries on individuals directors gives a resume of the director's career, evaluates their achievements and provides a complete filmography. It is useful for those interested in film-making in Britain and Ireland.
First delivered as part of an international conference held at Brest University in November 2007—under the aegis of the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC)—, this collection of essays essentially aims at interrogating history in order to better understand the political and ideological complexity of early XXIst-century Ireland. This complexity reflects, in many respects, Ireland’s uniqueness among the Western European nations. Some of the multiple persuasions within the gamut of Irish political ideology, from the Enlightenment to the present, are thus explored from diverse angles of approach—dialectical, taxonomic, theoretical, practical, individual, collective—, and through a diverse range of disciplines—human sciences, political science, social sciences, literature, philosophy and art history—and themes—from Jonathan Swift’s rhetorical complexity to the evolution of Irish republicanism after 9/11, including the reassessment of Daniel O’Connell’s political ideology, Owenism in Ireland, Oscar Wilde’s socialistic ideology, the ideological development of the Republican and Loyalist prisoners… This unique collection of essays, far from being a static historiographical description, provides food for thought and sheds light on the fascinating ambivalent dynamics lying at the heart of the building process of a modern nation resulting from the aggregate of individual will, collective ideals and Zeitgeist. The impressive variety of issues raised by authors of diverse origins (United States, Ireland, Britain, France), including leading experts in the above-mentioned areas (Richard English, Robert Mahony, Jonathan Tonge, Kieran Allen, John Sloan, Christopher Murray, Vincent Geoghegan…), therefore, widely contributes to the fact that the present book will be intellectually stimulating and enlightening, at least as an introduction, for all the students and scholars of Irish studies and other related disciplines.
Lying at Europe's remote western edge, Ireland long has been seen as having an artistic heritage that owes little to influences beyond its borders. This publication, the first to focus on Irish art from the eighth century AD to the end of the sixteenth century, challenges the idea that the best-known Irish monuments of that period-the high crosses, the Book of Kells, the Tara Brooch, the round towers-reflect isolated, insular traditions. Seventeen essays examine the iconography, history, and structure of these familiar works, as well as a number of previously unpublished pieces, and demonstrate that they do have a place in the main currents of European art. While this book reveals unexpected links between Ireland, Late-Antique Italy, the Byzantine Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons, its center is always the artistic culture of Ireland itself. It includes new research on the Sheela-na-gigs, often thought to be merely erotic sculptures; on the larger cultural meanings of the Tuam Market Cross and its nineteenth-century re-erection; and on late-medieval Irish stone crosses and metalwork. The emphasis on later monuments makes this one of the first volumes to deal with Irish art after the Norman invasion. The contributors are Cormac Bourke, Mildred Budny, Tessa Garton, Peter Harbison, Jane Hawkes, Colum Hourihane, Catherine E. Karkov, Heather King, Susanne McNab, Raghnall Floinn, Emmanuelle Pirotte, Roger Stalley, Kees Veelenturf, Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk, Niamh Whitfield, Maggie McEnchroe Williams, and Susan Youngs.
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945-2000 serves as an extended introduction and reference guide to the British and Irish novel between the close of World War II and the turn of the millennium. Covers a wide range of authors from Samuel Beckett to Salman Rushdie Provides readings of key novels, including Graham Greene’s ‘Heart of the Matter’, Jean Rhys’s ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ and Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ Considers particular subgenres, such as the feminist novel and the postcolonial novel Discusses overarching cultural, political and literary trends, such as screen adaptations and the literary prize phenomenon Gives readers a sense of the richness and diversity of the novel during this period and of the vitality with which it continues to be discussed
The field covered by this volume includes the work and influence of foreign-born painters such as Holbein and Van Dyck as well as native masters from Gower and Milliard to Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Sandby. We can follow step by step the development and flowering of British painting, and can compare, for example, the work of the English Sir Joshua Reynolds with the Scottish Allan Ramsay. Portrait and landscape, history piece, miniature, watercolour, there is a record of them all. The text is both scholarly and readable and the illustrations include well known examples of British painting and others seldom or never before reproduced between the covers of a book. This is the fifth edition of this work, newly enhanced with colour illustrations.
This relates Clarke to the Irish Literary Revival and the cultural contexts of his time while tracing that "fine generosity, lavish colour and concrete imagery." Contents: Portrait; Introduction; (i) Austin Clarke (1896-1974), (ii) Contexts, (iii) Catholicism, (iv) The Irish Literary Revival, (v) The Gaelic League, (vi) The Worlds of Austin Clarke, (vii) A New Generation; Part I. Remembering Our Innocence; 1 Short Poems 1916-1925, 2 Epic Narratives 1916-1925, 3 Pilgrimage (1929), 4 Night and Morning (1938), 5 Three Prose Romances, 6 Plays, 7 Conclusion; Part II. Nothing Left to Sing?; 8 Poems and Satires 1955-1962: (i) Short Peoms, (ii) Long Autobiographical Poems; 9 Flight to Africa (1963), 10 Mnemosyne Lay In Dust (1966), 11 Last Poems 1967-1974, 12 Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index^R
