Thames&Hudson Scottish Art Macdonald Murdo

Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to a subject of sustained and growing significance in contemporary culture, this volume in the World of Art series redefines contemporary Chinese art in the last forty years since the end of China's Cultural Revolution, placing it in the context of unprecedented cultural, political and urban transformation • This book offers neither an art historian's chronological review of Chinese art in post-Mao China, nor does it join the debate of previous terminologies coined by art critics; instead, it provides the most up to date understanding of contemporary Chinese art through original research and informed curatorial perspectives on the selected representative work, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, installation, video, performance and participatory art

The art and architecture of Egypt during the age of the pharaohs capture the imagination of the modern world. Vivid, graceful forms decorating monuments that emanated ambition and authority spark our wonder about this distant culture. Ever youthful and elegant men and women encounter odd, animal-headed gods and monsters amid scenes of work and leisure, in a paradise of plain, bright colours, where hieroglyphic texts hint at grand ideas • The tombs and temples of ancient Egypt reveal how art and monumental building first flowered at the heart of civilization. Among the great creative achievements of ancient Egypt we discover a set of constant forms: archetypes in art and architecture that state clearly and concisely the contemporary view of authority, divinity, beauty and meaning

A stimulating resource that guides readers through the most significant symbols from art history, spanning many civilizations and centuries while revealing the common heritage of a global visual language • The Hidden Language of Symbols covers a wide-ranging selection of visual culture and art under one unified theme: symbols. Often not immediately apparent, our day-to-day lives abound with symbols of various kinds, from national emblems to emojis, allegories to logos, all of which have a fascinating story • Organized across four all-encompassing themes-power, faith, hope, and uncertainty-this stimulating illustrated account of forty-eight key symbols from global art history is aimed at museum-goers, armchair art sleuths, or anyone who wants to understand the history of their visual environment from an unusual and creative angle

Known for his multi-storey murals gracing buildings all over the world, Melbourne-based artist Rone uses his work to explore the friction and connection between beauty and decay, youth and ruin • Rone was a seminal figure in the explosive Melbourne street art scene of the early 2000s. With his beginnings in street art, stencil and screen printing, Rone is now best known for his haunting images of women's faces, rendered in arresting detail on silos and store fronts, museums and apartment blocks. His immersive installations have continued his investigation into divergent themes of beauty and ruin, materiality and loss, through the transformation of condemned, derelict or forgotten spaces - with each artwork painstakingly produced, only to be destroyed

The extraordinary life story of Song Huai-Kuei, better known as Madame Song, follows the arc of 20th-century history. Artist, entrepreneur and impresario, Song broke cultural barriers for love, transcended Cold War borders for her art, and laid the foundations for a global fashion industry. With her cosmopolitan outlook, she defined an influential vision for Chinese culture on the world stage and asserted an Asian perspective in 21st-century art and design. Madame Song is a name that everyone interested in the roots of contemporary visual culture needs to know • At the heart of this volume is a critical biography that explores Song's youth in revolutionary China, her cross-cultural marriage to Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov, her success within avant-garde circles in Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War, and finally her efforts within China to revive traditional aesthetics in tandem with the explosive rise of global couture

A gorgeously illustrated survey of chinoiserie from the 18th century to today • Chinoiserie is a term for Western art and design inspired by a largely invented vision of China. Marco Polo’s sensational account of his visit to the exotic East in the 13th century sparked a fascination with China that reached a fever pitch in the 18th century and continues to this day. Art historian and artist Aldous Bertram has long been captivated by chinoiserie. He organizes Dragons & Pagodas by theme, including porcelain, color and pattern, flora, fauna, people, architecture and tropical exoticism. Each chapter is bursting with images of everything from grand European summer palaces and whimsical pagoda follies to charming details of screens, porcelain figurines and ornate plasterwork, from modern rooms swathed in floral wallpaper to paintings, tapestries and palm-topped columns

While acknowledging the legacy of Herbert Read’s classic 1959 study A Concise History of Modern Painting in the World of Art series, academic and artist Simon Morley places the foundation of modern art much earlier than Read, at the emergence of Romanticism and the dawn of the industrial age. Structured loosely chronologically by period, the focus is as much on individual artists as well as movements, with works discussed within a broader context - stylistic, historical, geographical, and gender and ethnic frames - themes that recur throughout the chapters. Generously illustrated, the global and diverse range of artists featured include William Blake, Edouard Manet, Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich, Willem de Kooning, Amrita Sher-Gil, Faith Ringgold and Kehinde Wiley

This book traces the extraordinary life of an artist whose unforgettable imagery combined cruelty and wit, honesty and insolence, pain and empowerment • Admired by the Surrealists and photographed by the greatest, Frida was most renowned for her self-portraits and unusual still lifes. She learned about suffering at an early age. She contracted polio when she was six and was seriously maimed in a bus accident at the age of eighteen, which led to injuries that affected her for the rest of her life. She had a legendarily turbulent marriage to the great mural painter Diego Rivera, with whom she formed a strong attachment to indigenous Mexican folk art and a deep commitment to Communism

Devoted to all-white houses, this book celebrates the ever- popular "non-color" as a perfect backdrop for contemporary lifestyles • Sometimes seen as an absence of color, white in fact reflects the purity of the entire spectrum. In the history of design, white houses often embody the bright, clean clarity associated with twentieth-century giants Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Richard Meier • White Houses presents the most striking, innovative, and unusual white houses by contemporary architects, spanning the globe from Asia to the Americas. The featured houses represent every scale and a wide range of locations and terrains, from seaside retreats to space-saving urban homes and grand country residences. From radical new takes on traditional building forms in Latin America to state-of-the-art urban projects in Europe and Japan, each house employs the apparent simplicity of white to reflect light and accent materiality, pressing the frontiers of form to the point of abstraction

Rembrandt is among the few outstanding artists of universal appeal, his striking self-portraits lauded the world over – yet he remains an elusive, enigmatic figure • Here, the distinguished art historian Christopher White carefully considers the known facts to build a sensitive and thorough account of the artist’s life and work. He describes the radiant happiness of Rembrandt’s marriage, tragically cut short by the death of his wife, and discusses the catastrophe of his bankruptcy. The psychological factors that may have awakened Rembrandt’s sudden interest in landscape are also explored, as is the artist’s final decade, when he retreated into the private world of his imagination. This comprehensive introduction has now been revised and updated to reflect recent scholarship, and the bibliography has been expanded; Rembrandt’s artworks are now faithfully reproduced in colour throughout

A new translation of Giorgio Vasari's Life of Raphael, fully illustrated, that presents Vasari's appealing narrative with new precision • Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, written in 1550 and 1568, is a classic text of cultural history. This monumental assembly of artists' lives from Giotto to Michelangelo paints a vivid picture of the progression of art in the hands of individual masters • This illustrated stand-alone edition of Vasari's Life of Raphael offers a new translation of this rich and remarkable life, elegantly rendering Vasari's literary text in modern terms. A work of authoritative skill and precision, this new translation preserves Vasari's exciting narrative, alongside beautifully reproduced color illustrations

A dazzling selection of Van Gogh's most famous paintings, as well as some lesser-known masterpieces, many drawn from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam • Nearly 130 years after his death, Vincent van Gogh continues to exert a powerful fascination over viewers and historians. This superb book offers readers a selection of the artist's most unforgettable canvases, as well as some lesser-known examples, many drawn from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam • The volume explores the works in the context of Van Gogh's short but brilliant career, in which frequent spells of isolation were paired with lively engagement with his peers and the popular ideas of his time. Additionally, Van Gogh's continuous stream of letters written to family and friends-one of the most important archival resources of nineteenth-century art-provides a narrative thread around which this study develops