Kathryn Brown

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices.The first in-depth examination of this major artist’s impact on contemporary art, this book explores how contemporary practitioners have used Degas’s creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Through close analyses of paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Brown shows how Degas's technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways by contemporary artists including: Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren.Eschewing familiar conceptions of influence, the book opens transhistorical dialogues that generate new perspectives on histories of 19th-century art. These encounters also reframe contemporary art practices, prompt innovative ideas about the agency of visual artefacts, and offer a new methodology for writing about art. With such breadth of analysis, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship in Degas studies, contemporary art, reception theory, art history, and fine art.

This accessible new book offers a fresh view of art auctions, exploring their multifaceted role in today’s international art market and their transformation into spectacular theatres of the contemporary art world. From glittering black-tie events to the anonymity of the digital realm, auctions stage the creation of value and can make or break artists’ careers. They are a strange phenomenon: relics from the 18th century which remain at the heart of the art market. And yet art auctions have undergone huge change in the past decades, adapting to online formats, encroaching on territory which was once the preserve of galleries, and expanding ruthlessly into new regions and categories. Kathryn Brown's incisive new survey assesses the ongoing relevance of auctions to contemporary art markets and discusses the opportunities, controversies and conflicts of value to which they give rise.

Curious Eeny Mole emerges from her dark hole home to discover the world up above. There were once three sisters who lived at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. Their names were Eeny, Meeny, and Miney Mole. In that hole dark was light, day was night, and summer and winter seemed the same. The older sisters, Meeny and Miney, were happy in their hole. They loved the deep darkness of it, the soft dreaminess of it, the familiar tidiness of it. They did not ever want to leave. One day Eeny Mole discovers something wonderful Up Above. And she goes exploring.

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices.The first in-depth examination of this major artist’s impact on contemporary art, this book explores how contemporary practitioners have used Degas’s creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Individual chapters are devoted to dialogues between Degas’s art and works produced by Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren.Through close analyses of selected paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas’s technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways. By experimenting with the materials and methods of existing works, contemporary artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and prompt a reconsideration of ideas that have informed histories of 19th-century French art.The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach and prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear encounters between artworks. This encourages a new conception of the agency of visual artefacts and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with each other. While this study sheds new light on Degas’s art and that of his interlocutors, it also has methodological significance for the writing of art history.

For most of the Gryphs in Arias's flock, their arduous trek from the mainland ended with discovering new territory and starting a brand new eyrie. For Arias, however, the journey has only just begun.Ever since the events at Dantzik, Arias hasn't been the same. Plagued by a constant fatigue, his waking hours are spent both haunted by the past and worried about the future. What is wrong with him? Where are Brynne and Tybrake? Is the Pale still a threat? Are his friends, still stranded across the sea, safe?Is anyone ever truly safe?Unsatisfied with sitting by idly, Arias sets out on a quest to uncover answers. He finds himself on an epic journey of self-discovery, where he'll learn of a shocking new ability, encounter a mysterious and powerful creature, and finally be forced to confront the dark ties that exist within his world... and within himself.

Curious Eeny Mole emerges from her dark hole home to discover the world up above Curious Eeny Mole emerges from her dark hole home to discover the world up above There were once three sisters who lived at the bottom of a deep, dark hole. Their names were Eeny, Meeny, and Miney Mole. In that hole dark was light, day was night, and summer and winter seemed the same. The older sisters, Meeny and Miney, were happy in their hole. They loved the deep darkness of it, the soft dreaminess of it, the familiar tidiness of it. They did not ever want to leave. One day Eeny Mole discovers something wonderful Up Above. And she goes exploring.

Arias's future-and that of the unlikely flock he's travelling with-is uncertain. New challenges present peril at every turn, granting them no promise of a safe destination. Arias fears that the group's differences will threaten to tear it apart, and Hlaena, his only surviving family member, seems to be hiding something from him. A race against time is the last thing he needs... but it may be exactly what the future holds.

Henri Matisse’s experiments with form and colour revolutionized the twentieth-century art world. In this concise critical biography Kathryn Brown explores Matisse’s long career, beginning with his struggles as a student in Paris and culminating in his celebrated use of paper cut-outs and stained glass in the last decade of his life. The book challenges various myths about Matisse and offers a fresh perspective on his creativity and legacy. Chapters explore the artist’s enthusiasm for fashion and cinema, his travels, personal ties, interest in African art, love of literature and willingness to challenge audience expectations. Through close readings of Matisse’s works, Brown offers new insight into the artist’s friendships and battles with dealers, critics, collectors and fellow artists.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse’s position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist’s work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d’artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art’s capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse’s self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse’s artist’s books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse’s position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist’s work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d’artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art’s capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse’s self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse’s artist’s books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.

The first monograph to examine the depiction of reading women in French art of the early Third Republic, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 evaluates the pictorial significance of this imagery, its critical reception, and its impact on notions of femininity and social relations. Covering a broad range of paintings, prints, and sculptures, this book shows how the liseuse was subjected to unprecedented levels of pictorial innovation by artists with widely differing aesthetic aims and styles. Depictions of readers are interpreted as contributions to changing notions of public and private life, female agency, and women's participation in cultural and political debates beyond the domestic household. This highly original book explores images of women readers from a range of social classes in both urban and rural settings. Such images are shown to have articulated concerns about the impact of female literacy on labour environments and family life while, in many cases, challenging conventions of gendered reading. Kathryn Brown also presents an alternative way of conceiving of modernity in relation to nineteenth-century art, a methodological departure from much recent art historical literature. Artists discussed range from Manet, Cassatt and Degas, to less familiar figures such as Lavieille, Carrière, Toulmouche and Tissot.

The first monograph to examine the depiction of reading women in French art of the early Third Republic, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 evaluates the pictorial significance of this imagery, its critical reception, and its impact on notions of femininity and social relations. Covering a broad range of paintings, prints, and sculptures, this book shows how the liseuse was subjected to unprecedented levels of pictorial innovation by artists with widely differing aesthetic aims and styles. Depictions of readers are interpreted as contributions to changing notions of public and private life, female agency, and women's participation in cultural and political debates beyond the domestic household. This highly original book explores images of women readers from a range of social classes in both urban and rural settings. Such images are shown to have articulated concerns about the impact of female literacy on labour environments and family life while, in many cases, challenging conventions of gendered reading. Kathryn Brown also presents an alternative way of conceiving of modernity in relation to nineteenth-century art, a methodological departure from much recent art historical literature. Artists discussed range from Manet, Cassatt and Degas, to less familiar figures such as Lavieille, Carrière, Toulmouche and Tissot.