Julian Bell

Respected painter and writer Julian Bell offers original insights into the art, practice and ongoing importance of painting. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

“I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and—of the artistic life,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1888. “And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there’s a chance that our hopes won’t be in vain.” His prediction would come true. In his brief and explosively creative life—he committed suicide a few years later at the age of thirty-seven—Van Gogh made us see the world in a new way. His shining landscapes of Provence and somber portraits of workers shattered the relationship between light and dark, and his hallucinatory visions were so bright they nearly blinded the world.He was a great writer as well. In his six hundred–plus letters to Theo he chronicled with heartbreaking urgency his mental breakdowns, acrimonious family relations, and struggles with art dealers, who largely ignored him until the last years of his life. Shading this dark story is the artist’s acquaintance with prostitutes and penury, stormy scenes with his friend Paul Gauguin, and dissipated Parisian nights with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Julian Bell’s passion for his subject brings the painter to life. Bell writes with slashing intensity, at once scholarly and defiantly partisan. “I have written this book out of my love for Vincent van Gogh, the uniquely exciting painter, and Vincent van Gogh, the letter writer of heart-piercing eloquence,” he declares. For Bell, Van Gogh was an artistic genius and more: he was a wonder of the world.

Vija Celmins creates intricate paintings and drawings of galaxies, oceans, and natural textures with a restrained palette, drawing viewers into their subtle beauty. This catalog showcases 90 artworks, artist commentaries, and insights from renowned writers and artists. Vija Celmins is a master of subtle visual power. She is best known for her captivating paintings and drawings depicting galaxies, surfaces of the moon, desert floors and oceans as well as spider webs. Her works are not monumental; they are painted with a restrained palette and defy quick vision. But once you get involved with them, your gaze gets caught up in them and they unfold their fascination and great beauty.. The catalog presents all of the approximately 90 exhibited artworks as well as a selection of documentary photographs. Several commentaries by the artist on her works are inserted between the image pages, most of them published for the first time. Contributions by renowned authors and artists such as Julian Bell, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Marlene Dumas and Robert Gober provide new perspectives on the artist's impressive oeuvre.

A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer, by an outstanding writer and critic. Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over what was real and what constituted 'nature', currents that would soon gather force to form modern science. Natural Light deliberates on the era’s uncertainties, as distilled in the work of painter Adam Elsheimer – a short-lived, tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret. Elsheimer’s diminutive, intense and mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and circles of ‘natural philosophers’ – early modern scientists – were starting to turn to the new ‘world system’ of Galileo. Julian Bell transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s, where Elsheimer and other young Northern immigrants – notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens – swapped pictorial and poetic reference points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions, Bell drives at the anxieties that underlie them – a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency, most of all in Elsheimer's final painting, a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was completed at a time of ferment in astronomy. Circulated through prints, Elsheimer’s pictorial inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt, Lorrain and Poussin. They even reached artists in Mughal India, whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what 'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse, the whole of the 17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.

Edición actualizada con artistas contemporáneos de esta clásica historia de la pintura a través del autorretrato que se publicó por primera vez hace más de 80 años. (Incluye 84 artistas nuevos y 31 obras realizadas desde el año 2000, fecha de la última revisión) El autorretrato se ha utilizado originalmente en la pintura sobre todo como investigación por parte del pintor de cómo plasmar ciertas expresiones o sentimientos y usarlas como promoción en la búsqueda de trabajo. Este libro recoge los mejores autorretratos de la pintura (De Durero a Rembrandt o David Hockney), la fotografía (Cindy Sherman), performance (Abramóvic), escultura e incluso instalaciones y también se puede leer como una interesante historia del ego de los artistas. Ordenado cronológicamente incluye citas de los artistas y un par de ensayos a cargo de Julien Bell y Liz Rideal. La portada es un espejo, de tal forma que el autorretrato 501 es el de su comprador final.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, many felt sceptical or confused about painting’s on-going cultural relevance. In this context, Julian Bell’s What is Painting? provided an accessible and inspired account of artistic thinking and practice, and of the complexities then facing artists and their audiences. Eighteen years on, the situation is partly reversed. Painting has proved too resilient a practice to be marginalized any longer. Yet is there any sense of forward momentum for the art? Interrogating the factors that have changed our ideas of painting over the past two centuries, Bell addresses relations between figuration and abstraction and between narrative and non-narrative painting, as well as the waning of conceptual art’s dominance and the proliferation of experiments with the physical limits of painting. He also clarifies general concepts such as ‘expression’ and ‘representation’. Fully revised to provide a fresh look at the situation of painting, this new edition maintains the objective of lucid, historically informative explanation that earned the original edition its status as a text of lasting value. The book provides a general reader’s introduction to theories of painting that is not only reliable, but also stimulating and amusing to read.

This special edition of Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World incorporates the three-part colour etching Fallout, created specially for this book in an edition of 60, which is packaged with the book in a slipcase designed by the artist himself.Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World is the first book to survey the work of painter and printmaker Tom Hammick (b.1963). It sets Hammick's art within the context of contemporary debates about painting while relating it to the two-centuries-old Romantic tradition. Julian Bell explores in depth the artist's working processes, imagery and career to date, arguing that Hammick's work constitutes one of the richest imaginative achievements in late 20th- and early 21st-century British art. Many of Hammick's pictures respond to the landscape of South-East England, where he has spent much of his life. Others are inspired by his encounter with the wilderness of Canada's remote maritime provinces, a regularly revisited imaginative resource that has given his work much of its distinctive flavour. Hammick has spent three periods in Canada: as both a student and later visiting lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax between 1989 and 2002, and in 2005 after being awarded a residency at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, now called the Rooms. Informed by the author's sustained contact with Hammick over many years, illustrated with over 120 carefully selected images, and produced in close collaboration with the artist, Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World will appeal to the artist's collectors and wide popular audience, as well as students, art-world professionals and painting enthusiasts.

This is the first book to survey the work of painter and printmaker Tom Hammick (b.1963). It sets Hammick's art within the context of contemporary debates about painting while relating it to the two-centuries-old Romantic tradition. Julian Bell explores in depth the artist's working processes, imagery and career to date, arguing that Hammick's work constitutes one of the richest imaginative achievements in late 20th- and early 21st-century British art. Many of Hammick's pictures respond to the landscape of South-East England, where he has spent much of his life. Others are inspired by his encounter with the wilderness of Canada's remote maritime provinces, a regularly revisited imaginative resource that has given his work much of its distinctive flavour. Hammick has spent three periods in Canada: as both a student and later visiting lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax between 1989 and 2002, and in 2005 after being awarded a residency at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, now called the Rooms. Informed by the author's sustained contact with Hammick over many years, illustrated with over 120 carefully selected images, and produced in close collaboration with the artist, Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World will appeal to the artist's collectors and wide popular audience, as well as students, art-world professionals and painting enthusiasts. It is available also in a special edition incorporating the three-part colour etching Fallout, created by the artist specially for this publication in an edition of 60.

What is art and where did it begin?Why do we make it and why does it change? These are some of the many questions that Julian Bell considers in his highly acclaimed book, now available in paperback. Bell, himself a painter, takes a global perspective and uses uses a wide range of objects to set up juxtapositions that will challenge and enlighten the reader: dancing bronze figures from southern India, Romanesque sculptures, Baroque ceilings and jewel-like Persian manuscripts are discussed side by side as testaments to mankind’s universal creative instinct. Highly original in its ideas yet brilliantly straightforward in its prose, this book will appeal to everyone who wants – or needs, for purposes of study, the whole picture of the history of art in one concise and authoritative volume.

This text by Julian Bell, himself a painter, confronts the uncertainty and suspicion many people feel about art today. It sets out to challenge received ideas while addressing questions such as what is it that defines paintings?; and what does the practice amount to at the turn of the 21st century?