_R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles_ explores the relationship between Kitaj’s art and the places where he lived. This is the first significant publication about the artist in over a decade and provides a chronological overview of Kitaj’s career. Published to accompany Piano Nobile’s exhibition of the same title, it includes 43 paintings and drawings with catalogue entries containing original research, in many cases presenting new information about Kitaj's sources and sitters for the first time.The book contains three essays, which describe the artist's lives in London and Los Angeles. Andrew Dempsey recounts Kitaj’s relationship with artists, institutions and art critics during his thirty-eight-year period in London. Colin Wiggins, who worked with Kitaj on his National Gallery exhibition in 2001, writes about the artist’s last decade in Los Angeles. Marco Livingstone in his essay remembers the long correspondence he shared with Kitaj. A further section includes extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, which are now held by the Tate Archive and are published here for the first time.
One of the most popular and influential British artists of our times, David Hockney has never ceased to change his style and ways of working, always re-energizing his art with new solutions, fresh ideas and technical mastery. Now excitedly embracing his ‘late period’, Hockney remains as engaged as ever with the questions he has always posed for himself – what to depict, how to depict it and how to persuade the spectator that he or she is an active participant rather than just a passive witness. Published to mark Hockney’s 80th birthday and in the wake of the most extensive Tate retrospective ever accorded to a living artist, this new edition includes a new preface, afterword and final chapter covering work of the past two decades. Tracing a line from the beginnings of Hockney’s career in the early 1960s, the portraits and images of Los Angeles swimming pools, his drawings and photocollages, to his highly acclaimed stage designs for the opera, video works, his iPad drawings and other novel forms of picturemaking, Marco Livingstone shows the continuing preoccupation with invention and artifice that has made this artist’s work at once popular and enduring.
Exploring the full breadth of work by British artist Adrian Berg RA (1929-2011), and drawing heavily on the artist's personal archive, this book discusses Berg's meticulous engagement with the landscape which resulted in an impressive oeuvre created over a long career.Embracing the figurative when abstraction was in the ascendancy, Berg's artistic mission was to push the boundaries of representative painting to discover new interpretations of familiar scenes. Accordingly, his paintings revisited particular places repeatedly — most notably the view of Regent's Park from his studio window at Gloucester Gate.Highly colourful and engagingly written, this book provides a long overdue appraisal and celebration of an artist who is key to the conversation around the development of British landscape painting, that most celebrated of British traditions.
Joe Tilson RA (1928-2023) was one of the great figures in post-war British art and a pivotal artist of the British Pop Art movement during the 1960s. His work ever evolving, he explored many new directions and a great variety of mediums after moving away from his Pop origins. Astonishingly, no general monograph documenting all these phases of Tilson’s prolific production has ever been published. This book remedies this through a series of insightful chapters, exploring each decade of the artist’s career, written by Marco Livingstone, a respected authority on British contemporary art. Featuring a lively and visually rich design, this unique work will guide the reader through the evolution of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British art.
Providing a thematic overview of the multifarious work produced by Derek Boshier (1937-2024) from the post-war period to the digital age, this fascinating publication reveals how Boshier’s deceptively playful imagery offers analytical commentaries on societal issues and the fragility and fragmentation of human identity. Among contemporaries such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips, Boshier was a central figure in the British Pop Art movement. Embracing Pop sensibilities, his early work juxtaposed figurative painting and imagery to call attention to nuclear anxieties and the growing consumerism of 1960s Britain. Yet this is just one aspect of Boshier's remarkable artistic journey, which has drawn in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, graphic design and printmaking. The book's broad sweep includes recent paintings and drawings created in America at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and features commentaries by artists, academics, curators and writers who explore how Boshier's ground-breaking activity interrogates truth and logic, fantasy and reality in the modern age. With contributions by James Cahill, Philip Colbert, Eddie Chambers, Susan Compo, Rachele Dini, Inga Fraser, Jann Haworth, Leslie Jones, Emily Langridge, Gregory Salter, Penny Slinger and John Stezaker.
David Hockney’s continuing belief in the importance of the portrait and his virtuoso skill in creating a sense of close communication between artist, sitter and viewer has resulted in some of the best-loved works of the postwar era. From the 1950s on, Hockney’s most persistent subject matter, in paintings, drawings, collages and photoworks, has been of people usually very close to him, as well as of himself. These works are narratives of autobiographical relationships: they reflect the intimate and often intense stories of this artist’s life. They also explore different formal ways of representing the passage of time and at the same time the unavoidable but marvellous stillness of portraits. The works include fascinating sequences as he paints his mother or Henry Geldzahler or Celia Birtwell on and off for decades; the special qualities attached to depictions of lovers; and the range of celebrities, writers and artists – Billy Wilder, Armistead Maupin, W.H. Auden, Henry Moore, Christopher Isherwood – who have been part of a very full life. The text by a distinguished European critic and curator reinforces the point that this hugely popular English-born artist, who made America his second home, has become a figure of worldwide appeal.
Jim Dine's vivid, candid and detailed reminiscences about his friendship and working relationship with Aldo Crommelynck, the printer of Matisse and Picasso, over a period now of more than 30 years are full of affection, humour and layer upon layer of information. In conversations with the art historian Marco Livingstone, Dine, one of the greatest post-war American artists, charts the extent to which his experience of working with a man who was not only a great printer, but also a skilled draughtsman, an aesthete, dandy and bon viveur, coloured and enriched his experience of France on every level, from an appreciation of its art and culture, its city life and countryside, to its food and its specialist shops - especially those in which to find the best tools and musical instruments.Dine's ruminations take some unexpected but illuminating detours, even into the making of bespoke bicycles, that prove deeply revealing of the specific nature of his love for France and of his many debts to an esteemed colleague, fellow traveller and much loved friend.
"Paris Escapades" is a beautiful book of Paris collages by Sir Peter Blake. A follow-up to his infectiously entertaining and highly successful "Venice Fantasies," Blake demonstrates his unerring sense of felicitous and unexpected juxtapositions, a gift for visual story-telling and an eye no less acute for having a permanent twinkle. As with the Venice images that preceded them, Blake features many familiar monuments in his Paris pictures but submerges them in extraordinary events that turn them into the stuff of dreams. There is enough air of reality in some pictures, such as the Seine freezing over, to entrap the unwary spectator. But as elephants are hoisted above Notre Dame cathedral and crowds gather for a charabanc outing or for a mass kiss-in that even festival-going hippies would have found a bit extreme, the beauty and allure of Paris becomes populated by the overactive mind of one of the great imaginative artists of our time. Each of the 28 images in" Paris Escapades" is accompanied by the artist's wry commentaries, and the book is preceded by an interview with Marco Livingstone in which Blake discusses his lifelong involvement with collage. Hugely entertaining as a visual voyage of discovery, "Paris Escapades" ends up a window into the methods and thought processes of a much loved artist.
_Uncertain Swimmer_ is the second monograph on the work of British artist Jonathan Wateridge (b. 1972, Lusaka, Zambia), presenting around eighty paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022\. Following on from the bodies of work Enclave and Expatria (2016–18), _Uncertain Swimmer_ develops the artist’s interest in modes of representation and the legacies of twentieth-century modernist painting through a visual and social exploration of the motif of the pool, depicting swimmers and sunbathers, often by night. Far from being an escapist environment of aspiration and privilege, Wateridge imbues the pool with a disquieting atmosphere, creating a cumulative feeling of unease and ennui among those present, now seemingly unsure of their world. The publication charts a marked evolution in the artist’s style from the realism of his earlier paintings with complex multi-figure compositions to more solitary, gestural and expressive works. His masterly application of paint takes new forms in the beautiful, curious and often haunting paintings and works on paper showcased here. Art historian and curator Marco Livingstone’s essay considers the change from Wateridge’s naturalistic paintings to the flattened, reduced shapes, forms and lines of the modernism- and abstraction-infused pieces he is making today. Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch and Paul Cézanne are among numerous art historical influences cited by Livingstone, who ruminates on the identity of the people in Wateridge’s portraits and the mercurial spaces they occupy, examining how Wateridge’s current critical preoccupations have transitioned from the autobiographical to more formal concerns. In the featured conversation between Wateridge and fellow painter Caroline Walker, the two artists discuss their overlapping experiences studying painting at Glasgow, as well as Wateridge’s fourteen-year break from painting until 2005\. He eventually returned to the medium when he realised it excited him more than anything else. Wateridge elaborates on his fascinating painting process, staging shoots in studios with hired actors and using elements from the photographs in the paintings, often over a period of years. On his canvases, he will scrape back the paint and reapply it, frequently taking pictures of the paintings in their various stages; he will then print the photographs and draw over them to continue working out what he will do with the final paintings. For Wateridge, a painting works when it stops failing, and he embraces unforeseen conclusions. Jonathan Wateridge has recently exhibited with the Hayward Gallery, London; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, New York and Brussels; TJ Boulting, London; Galerie Haas, Zurich; Pace Gallery and HENI, London. Wateridge's art is in the collections of institutions worldwide, including Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; Pinault Foundation, Venice; the Saatchi Collection, London; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; and Simmons & Simmons, London. He has been featured in publications such as _The Sunday Times, The Independent, Fad Magazine, Artforum_ and _Artnet_. Wateridge is represented by Nino Mier Gallery.
This centennial catalogue celebrates the remarkable achievements of the Whitechapel Gallery between 1901-2001. Featuring essays by Jonathan Jones, Jeremy Millar, Guy Brett, Mark Francis, Catherine Lampert, Jon Newman, Juliet Styen, Marco Livingstone, Felicity Lunn, Paul Bonaventura, Rachel Lichtenstein and Alan Dein, Janeen Haythornthwaite and Brandon Taylor. Artists surveyed include Ian McKeever, Tim Head, Alfredo Jaar, Ian Breakwell, Susana Solano, Cathy de Monchaux, Tunga, Boyd Webb, Matthew Higgs and Paul Noble, Zarina Bhimji, Hamish Fulton and John Murphy
Stanley and Livingston are the greatest explorers in the universe. By means of a mysterious porcelain ring known as a Star Flush, Stanley and Livingston are able to traverse the galaxies. Along with an 18 ton giant golden sabre-toothed tabby cat, a bizarre alien beast called a gumpathump, and four robot porters, Stanley and Livingston venture into deepest, darkest outer space to explore other planets. But all is not well in the cosmos! Power-mad psychiatrist, Dr. Sigmund Looz and two lunatics from his group therapy sessions have been unleashed on an unsuspecting universe through the Star Flush. Monsters! Machines! Strange alien races and places! Perilous predicaments! It's all here!
Beloved is not only the title of this book but the way I see her. It is her name every time my heart speaks. Beloved is the ending and the beginning. She is the ending of my loneliness and searching, while beginning happiness forever. She is Beloved. Beloved is Her. Beloved...
