Axel Vervoordt: The Story of a Style

Eswaran Subrahmanian (Author)

We Are Not Users: Dialogues, Diversity, and Design

Wendy Hitchmough (Author)

Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical

9,One of Britain's most radical and influential artists working in the first decades of the twentieth century, Vanessa Bell was a pioneer for professional women Vanessa Bell was a leading figure within the Bloomsbury Group and known for her unconventional lifestyle, but her work as a painter, designer, and decorator has often been overlooked and relegated within the bombastic, male-dominated field of British modernism. With new research, including previously unpublished letters, Wendy Hitchmough explores the ways in which Bell (1879-1961) forged new pathways as a modernist woman. Writing openly about depression and mental health at a time when the subject was stigmatised, as well as challenging taboos surrounding women's bodies, Bell exploited the patriarchal society that oppressed her. She responded to the nudes and pastoral scenes of C?zanne, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse with themes of miscarriage and motherhood. She exhibited with her partner, Duncan Grant, and comparisons between their parallel careers highlight the gender disparities that shaped her life and work. Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical celebrates the artist's trailblazing approach to art as ...

Susan Owens (Author)

The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art

0,Winner of the Apollo Book of the Year Award 2024 Drawing is at the heart of human creativity. The most democratic form of art-making, it requires nothing more than a plain surface and a stub of pencil, a piece of chalk or an inky brush. Our prehistoric ancestors drew with natural pigments on the walls of caves, and every subsequent culture has practised drawing--whether on papyrus, parchment, or paper. Artists throughout history have used drawing as part of the creative process. While painting and sculpture have been shaped heavily by money and influence, drawing has always offered extraordinary creative latitude. Here we see the artist at his or her most unguarded. Susan Owens offers a glimpse over artists' shoulders--from Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hokusai to Van Gogh, K?the Kollwitz, and Yayoi Kusama--as they work, think, and innovate, as they scrutinise the world around them or escape into imagination. The Story of Drawing loops around the established history of art, sometimes staying close, at other times diving into exhilarating and altogether less familiar territory.