'Masterful and beautifully written. Riveting and compellingly authentic. Grips you like a vice from the first page and never lets you go' Damien Lewis Two men are on the run. They have four hundred miles to go across hostile territory. Soldiers on the ground track them day and night, a helicopter circles above, life becomes a second-by-second fight for survival. Each muscle movement, drop of sweat, glance and instinct matters. Every second counts. Through long slogs across country, risky raids for supplies, moments of sheer panic, and under the intense pressure to survive, an unbreakable bond between two men is forged. This stunningly written, adrenaline-pumping novel is a little-known classic of its genre. SHORTLISTED FOR THE FIRST EVER BOOKER PRIZE IN 1969 ‘England's prose has the tough, spare elegance of steel scaffolding... a brilliant achievement’ The Times
How did the United States become not only the leading contemporary art scene in the world, but also the leading market for art? The answer has to do not only with the talents of American artists or even the size of the American economy, but also--and especially--the skills and entrepreneurship of American art dealers. Their story has not been told...until now. Landscape with Figures is the first history of art dealing in the United States, following the profession from eighteenth-century portrait and picture salesmen in the colonies to the high-profile, jet-set gallery owners of today. Providing anecdotal and carefully researched biographies of the prominent dealers from more than two centuries of trade, author Malcolm Goldstein shows how magnanimous personalities and social networking helped to shape the way Americans have bought and valued art. These dealers range from Michael Paff, whose enthusiasm often overshadowed his expertise but nonetheless helped him sell faux Old Master paintings to major collectors in the early nineteenth century; to the imperious Joseph Duveen, dealer to magnates like Henry Clay Frick; to visionary Leo Castelli, who helped to usher in a revolution in modern art during the 1960s by showing such avant-garde artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. Goldstein also shows that the American art trade, while male-dominated, has been galvanized by female dealers, including the inimitable Edith Gregor Halpert, Peggy Guggenheim, and Mary Boone. Their fascinating stories unfold in the context of world art history, the rise of major art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and the growing zeal of art collectors who would eventually pay millions for individual works of art. Unprecedented and critical to understanding today's art world, Landscape with Figures is a must for artists, art history students, and art lovers.
An astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, the art of landscape painting, and one experience in a man's life that became a lightning rod for inspiration. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.
Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day.0Drawing on a wide geographical sampling, Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years, ranging from ecology, gender, race, performativity, conflict, colonialism and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book is informed by the belief that artists can provide an embodied, emotional response to landscape, which is an essential driver in the urgent task of combating the environmental crisis we now face.0The book comprises a series of essays that explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists' film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. Early chapters map the theoretical terrain for both landscape and artists' moving image creating a foundation for the chapters that follow devoted to practice. These address themes of identity politics, performativity and animals and examine examples of British 'weather-blown films' and work from around the world including Indigenous Australian film landscapes. The book offers an informed, personal view of the subject and threaded through the narrative is a concern with the environment and the vexed question of whether an appreciation of nature's aesthetics undermines a commitment to ecology.0The book is written in a clear, engaging style and is enlivened by Elwes's own experiences as a video artist, writer and curator, and the primary material she draws on derived from conversations with fellow practitioners across the years.
Fred Cuming RA is one of the most respected landscape artists of the present day, and he is particularly admired for his ability to capture atmosphere and a powerful sense of place. His work is sensitive, immensely thoughtful and considered, poetic and inspirational. In this work, the author explains why he paints, the struggles and rewards, and his working methods. Visual intelligence, observation, colour, subjects and sites are all discussed as he explains the power of paint, the influences upon him and his sources of inspiration.
With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s. With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s.
"You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space--as well as our place in it--is the subject of Edward S. Casey's study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. Casey's discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and photography, from prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language--a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject." -- Book jacket.
Fred Cuming, whose work and painting methods have recently been the subject of a highly successful video in a series featuring distinguished Royal Academicians, has now put some of his thoughts and images into a book.
Because nature is so expansive and complex, so varied in its range of light, landscape painters often have to look further and more deeply to find form and structure, value patterns, and an organized arrangement of shapes. In Landscape Painting, Mitchell Albala shares his concepts and practices for translating nature's grandeur, complexity, and color dynamics into convincing representations of space and light. Concise, practical, and inspirational, Landscape Painting focuses on the greatest challenges for the landscape artist, such as: • Simplification and Massing: Learn to reduce nature's complexity by looking beneath the surface of a subject to discover the form's basic masses and shapes.• Color and Light: Explore color theory as it specifically applies to the landscape, and learn the various strategies painters use to capture the illusion of natural light.• Selection and Composition: Learn to select wisely from nature's vast panorama. Albala shows you the essential cues to look for and how to find the most promising subject from a world of possibilities. The lessons in Landscape Painting—based on observation rather than imitation and applicable to both plein air and studio practice—are accompanied by painting examples, demonstrations, photographs, and diagrams. Illustrations draw from the work of more than 40 contemporary artists and such masters of landscape painting as John Constable, Sanford Gifford, and Claude Monet. Based on Albala's 25 years of experience and the proven methods taught at his successful plein air workshops, this in-depth guide to all aspects of landscape painting is a must-have for anyone getting started in the genre, as well as more experienced practitioners who want to hone their skills or learn new perspectives.
