This new monograph is published in the British Sculptors and Sculpture Series, under the general editorship of Sir Alan Bowness. It includes an illustrated essay, which place Wright's achievement in the context of British sculpture in the twentieth century and focuses on its links with science, and a profusely illustrated catalogue of Wright's complete sculpture, as well as catalogues of his prints and his sketchbooks.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.
Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester is a complete catalog and illustrated guide to all of Greater Manchester's public sculptures and monuments. Manchester historian Terry Wyke provides detailed individual entries for each sculpture featured, including information about the artist and the commissioning agent, date of installation, and the sculpture's historical and artistic significance. More than 350 black-and-white photographs reveal the diversity and beauty of Manchester's many public monuments. The eighth volume in Liverpool University Press's highly acclaimed and prize-winning Public Sculpture of Britain series, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester will be an incomparable resource for both armchair and actual travelers, as well as for English historians and art scholars alike. "These are excellent volumes in an outstanding and continuing series, one of the most original and important such projects under way. They set an international standard for the recording and publication of public sculpture."—Judging panel, 2003 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History, on the Public Sculpture of Britain series
Collecting and promoting art was at the heart of John Gibbs' life although his friends and colleagues knew little of the extent of his activities, and the wider art world knew even less. He and his wife Sheila challenged our concept of collecting, acquiring works for public and educational institutions as well as for their own family, including the youngest children. This book reveals for the first time how they created one of the first confident collections of contemporary Welsh art, and demonstrated the value of modern art in Christian faith. The collections they created include works by Ceri Richards, Lucian Freud and Paul Nash, all acquired to help us appreciate the power of art.
The "Black Country" is an area historically known as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution—a thriving regioin built around deep coal seams, conjuring up images of fiery red furnaces by night and black, sooty citadels by day. Yet today the resource-rich region also features many striking public sculptures. This volume provides a comprehensive catalog to all of the historic sculptures and public monuments in Staffordshire and the Black Country. George Noszlopy and Fiona Waterhouse catalog each individual sculpture in detail, including information about the sculptor, the sculpture's historical and artistic significance, the commissioning agent, and the date of installation. The volume also features 350 black-and-white photographs that document the diverse and rich beauty of the region's public monuments. The ninth volume in the widely acclaimed, award-winning Public Sculpture of Britain series, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country is an invaluable resource for British historians, art scholars, and travelers alike.
Britain in the nineteenth century saw a series of technological and social changes which continue to influence and direct us today. Its reactants were human genius, money and influence, its crucibles the streets and institutions, its catalyst time, its control the market. In this rich and fascinating book, James Hamilton investigates the vibrant exchange between culture and business in nineteenth-century Britain, which became a center for world commerce following the industrial revolution. He explores how art was made and paid for, the turns of fashion, and the new demands of a growing middle-class, prominent among whom were the artists themselves. While leading figures such as Turner, Constable, Landseer, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Dickens are players here, so too are the patrons, financiers, collectors and industrialists; publishers, entrepreneurs, and journalists; artists' suppliers, engravers, dealers and curators; hostesses, shopkeepers and brothel keepers; quacks, charlatans, and auctioneers. Hamilton brings them all vividly to life in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the business of culture in nineteenth-century Britain, and provides thrilling and original insights into the working lives of some of the era's most celebrated artists.
J.M.W. Turner was a painter whose treatment of light put him squarely in the pantheon of the world’s preeminent artists, but his character was a tangle of fascinating contradictions. While he could be coarse and rude, manipulative, ill-mannered, and inarticulate, he was also generous, questioning, and humane, and he displayed through his work a hitherto unrecognized optimism about the course of human progress. With two illegitimate daughters and several mistresses whom Turner made a career of not including in his public life, the painter was also known for his entrepreneurial cunning, demanding and receiving the highest prices for his work. Over the course of sixty years, Turner traveled thousands of miles to seek out the landscapes of England and Europe. He was drawn overwhelmingly to coasts, to the electrifying rub of the land with the sea, and he regularly observed their union from the cliff, the beach, the pier, or from a small boat. Fueled by his prodigious talent, Turner revealed to himself and others the personality of the British and European landscapes and the moods of the surrounding seas. He kept no diary, but his many sketchbooks are intensely autobiographical, giving clues to his techniques, his itineraries, his income and expenditures, and his struggle to master the theories of perspective. In Turner, James Hamilton takes advantage of new material discovered since the 1975 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, paying particular attention to the diary of sketches with which Turner narrated his life. Hamilton’s textured portrait is fully complemented by a sixteen-page illustrations insert, including many color reproductions of Turner’s most famous landscape paintings. Seamlessly blending vibrant biography with astute art criticism, Hamilton writes with energy, style, and erudition to address the contradictions of this great artist.
