Modern

Poised at the start of the 21st century, we can see clearly that the previous century was marked by momentous changes in the field of design. Aesthetics entered into everyday life with often staggering results. Our homes and workplaces turned into...

Hailed the "Prince of the Impressionists", Claude Monet (1840-1926) transformed expectations for the purpose of paint on canvas. Defying the precedent of centuries, Monet did not seek to render only reality, but the act of perception itself. Working "en...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's (1841-1919) timelessly charming paintings still reflect our ideals of happiness, love, and beauty. Derived from our large-format volume, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work published to date, this compact edition...

The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo (1907-54) were in many ways expressions of trauma. Through a near-fatal road accident at the age of 18, failing health, a turbulent marriage, miscarriage and childlessness, she transformed the afflictions into...

Most art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for...

Meet the artist whose majestic breaking wave sent ripples across the world. Hokusai (1760-1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also significantly influenced Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of...

The Art Book of the Year, The TimesA Telegraph, Sunday Times, Financial Times, Economist, Tablet and Evening Standard Book of the YearA magnificent new biography of the founder of ImpressionismIn the course of a long and exceptionally creative life,...

Reviewing the work of Bonnard, one of the best-loved artists of the modern period, this book draws insights into his personality from his paintings. It is published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in February...

The newly revised and updated Charleston: A Bloomsbury House & Garden is the definitive publication on the Bloomsbury Group's rural outpost in the heart of the Sussex Downs. "It's absolutely perfect...", wrote the artist Vanessa Bell when she moved to...

The work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) reflects an ongoing belief in the power of brilliant colors and simple forms. Though famed in particular for his paintings, Matisse also worked with drawing, sculpture, lithography, stained glass, and collage,...

A highly anticipated biography of the enigmatic and popular Swedish painter. The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was 44 years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained. While her naturalistic...

Mary Greensted tells the story of the birth and development of the arts and craft movement in Britain with the help of numerous illustrations showing the buildings, furniture, metalwork, and the people who influenced it. The movement was concerned with...

A landmark retrospective on the Art Deco painter exploring her intersectional identities Tamara de Lempicka (1894-1980), the "Baroness with a Brush," is often cast as one of Art Deco's most celebrated artists, though her work transcends categorization,...

Walter Sickert was one of the most influential artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An apprentice of Whistler and close associate of Degas, he engaged with the work of French artists of the time. Sickert in turn influenced many British...

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles is art critic Martin Gayford's account of the tumultuous nine weeks in which the famous nineteenth century artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin shared a house in the small French...

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized...

The beautifully illustrated and authoritative biography of Frida Kahlo 'Frida will hold its place as the first comprehensive biography of this most visceral of artists' Observer 'Mesmerizing' Time Frida is the story of one of the twentieth...

15 beautiful embroidery projects from the era of Jane Austen. Jane Austen was as skilful with a needle as she was with a pen. This unique book from Jennie Batchelor and Alison Larkin showcases recently discovered 18th...

In the mid-1930s, three giants of the international Modern movement, Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, fled Nazi Germany and sought refuge in Hampstead in the most exciting new apartment block in Britain. The Lawn...

Most commonly associated with the birth of the Impressionist movement in mid-19th-century Paris, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) in fact defied easy categorization and instead developed a unique style, strongly influenced by Old Masters, the body in motion, and...

Enter an ultra-patriotic era of "military mood" fashions, replete in red, white, and blue. One in a series of books from Schiffer Publishing documenting fashion trends in America, this is an invaluable resource for fashion designers looking to revive and...

This glorious gift book presents Van Gogh's lifelong love affair with the garden. Illustrated with an extraordinary range of works, from iconic oils such as Irises to exquisite etchings and intimate sketches, the book is a visual feast. The images are...

Exploring the ways in which painting, applied design and illustration intertwined over the course of the accomplished career of Paul Nash (1889-1946), this book provides a new perspective on one of the most gifted and celebrated English artists of the...

A century after his death, Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) still startles with his unabashed eroticism, dazzling surfaces, and artistic experimentation. In this neat, dependable monograph, we gather all of Klimt's major works alongside...

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Ends with one of the most reverberating shocks in modern crime fiction' The Sunday Times 'A dazzling, unexpected and haunting masterpiece' Daily Mail 'A work of genius... Stunning' Daily Express Jerome Morval has...

In 1925 the artists Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious moved to the Essex village of Great Bardfield, at first sharing lodgings. Over the course of several years and encouraged by Bawden and Ravilious' work, other artists came to live in the village,...

The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life told through her unique scrapbook.In 1838, Anne Sykes was given a diary on her wedding day. Using it to collect snippets of fabric, she created a record of her life and times. Nearly two hundred years later,...

London Underground By Design is the beautifully illustrated new book from Mark Ovenden, the acclaimed author of Great Railway Maps of the World, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Tube in 2013.Since its establishment 150 years ago as...

Who was the man behind The Scream, the iconic painting that so acutely expresses the anguish of the twentieth century? Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944) was twenty-eight when he embarked on a lifelong effort to paint his 'soul's diary' - and began a perverse...

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New Mexico: the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in...

From his images of deserted small towns and solitary figures in empty offices to his cheerfully tranquil New England landscapes, Hopper's most famous compositions can be seen as products of a life spent observing human nature. Hopper's images evoke an...

This generously illustrated volume examines Hammershoi's work as a whole and in relation to the artists of his generation. Hammershoi's enigmatic paintings, with their rich and muted palettes, have always enjoyed enormous popularity in Scandinavia, and...

A guide to the increasingly popular trend of transforming data into beautiful textile art. This stylish and fascinating book from up-and-coming textile art star Jordan Cunliffe shows how raw data, maps and personal experience can be distilled into...

No other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840-1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was the man Cezanne called "only an eye, but my God what an eye!" who stayed true to the principle of...

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the 20th century's greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated...

Self-taught and working in isolation until his death in 1973, Henry Darger realized an elaborate fantasy world of remarkable beauty and strangeness through hundreds of paintings and an epic written narrative. Angel-like Blengins with butterfly wings,...

Is a tower block, your unmade bed, your lavatory basin, or the bicycle chained to the gate next door a work of art? Why should a novel have a beginning, a middle, and an end; or even a story? Whether we recognise it or not, virtually every aspect of our...

After flirtations with Realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism, Kiev-born Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) found his metier in dissolving literal, representational figures and landscapes into pure emotionally-charged abstraction. In 1915, he created what is...

Historically, still life has been viewed as the lowest genre of art, but in fact it has been employed by leading British artists to grapple with some of the most profound themes relating to the human condition, and as a vehicle for artistic...

A spellbinding portrait of the Hampstead Modernists, threading together the lives, loves, rivalries and ambitions of a group of artists at the heart of an international avant-garde. Hampstead in the 1930s. In this peaceful, verdant London suburb,...