Stephen Coppel

Pablo Picasso's artistic output is astonishing in its ambition and variety. This handsome publication examines a particular aspect of his legendary capacity for invention: his imaginative and original use of paper. He used it as a support for autonomous works, including etchings, prints and drawings, as well as for his papier-collé experiments of the 1910s and his revolutionary three-dimensional 'constructions', made of cardboard, paper and string. Sometimes, his use of paper was simply determined by circumstance: in occupied Paris, where art supplies were hard to come by, he ripped up paper tablecloths to make works of art. And, of course, his works on paper comprise the preparatory stages of some of his very greatest paintings, among them Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937). With reproductions of more than 300 works of art and additional texts by Violette Andres, Stephen Coppel, Emmanuelle Hincelin, Christopher Lloyd, Johan Popelard and Claustre Rafart Planas, this sumptuous study reveals the myriad ways in which Picasso's genius seized the potential of paper at different stages throughout his career.

A new selection from Philip Hughes' unpublished notebooks going back over twenty-five years. In an astonishing collection of twenty-seven notebooks created over a quarter of a century, Philip Hughes has sought to capture the spirit of a place: its geological structure, its relationship with the surrounding landscape, and its occasional signs of human intervention. These painterly but topographically precise notebooks record moments when the artist has been moved to draw what he can see, whether from the shelter of a standing stone in Orkney, Scotland, from the air over the Simpson desert in Australia, or from a postal boat sailing through the Norwegian fjords. Pieced together by Hughes himself from over a thousand drawings, this is a logbook of momentary observations. Some are swift sketches of fields or horizons, others are slower studies of lichen and flowers in Antarctica, or lines of quartz in granite in Cornwall. The depth of feeling and knowledge Hughes has for different terrains and climates underpins the beauty of this essential and inspiring selection of notebooks.

A comprehensive survey of post-1960 American printmaking, published to accompany the first major UK exhibition on the subject at the British Museum, London.

Published to accompany the exhibition at the British Museum in 2012 with a preface from Neil MacGregor, this remarkable book explores Picasso's most important group of etchings, the Vollard Suite. Created between 1930 and 1937, a period in which the artist became immersed in sculpture, the suite reveals key themes - the classical world, its sculpture and myths - as topics which preoccupied Picasso and influenced much of his work. The etchings are presented together with sculptural objects from the British Museum's unique collection, as well as documentary photographs of the artist, his lover and model Marie-Therese Walter, and the greatest avant-garde Paris art dealer and print publisher of his day, Ambroise Vollard, from whom the suite takes its name. This is the first substantial publication of Picasso's Vollard Suite in over thirty years, stunningly reproduced from specially commissioned new photography.

This ground-breaking book follows the rise of a distinctive school of Australian art that first emerged in the 1940s. Beginning with the artists of the ‘Angry Penguins’ movement, Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan, whose work exhibited a new strain of surrealism and expressionism, the book continues with the rich variety of 1970s work by Jan Seberg, Robert Jacks and George Baldessin, moving through to contemporary artists such as Rover Thomas and Judy Watson. Stephen Coppel traces the major developments in Australian art from the 1940s to the present day, and examines the significant interplay with the British art scene. The book includes a substantial essay outlining the major developments in Australian art since the 1940s, the reception of Australian art in Britain and the recent rise of Aboriginal printmaking. It features 127 works by 61 artists, and includes concise artists’ biographies and individual commentaries on the works.