Tate Gallery

Tate Modern: The Handbook

This book celebrates the opening of Tate Modern in London and introduces readers to the building, the collection, and the new approach to modern and contemporary art. The gallery presents the twentieth century through the reinterpretation of four classic themes: the nude, landscape, still life, and history painting. Their reemergence in modern art as the body, the environment, the everyday, and society is discussed in four introductory texts and through selected writings. The second half of the book is an A to Z of 100 key artists in Tate Modern's international modern collection that are introduced by eleven art historians.
The Tate's collection of international modern art begins with the revolutionary developments that were taking place at the turn of the twentieth century and continues through to today's radically different situation, when media, techniques, and forms of presentation inconceivable 100 years ago dominate the art scene. The benefits of thematic rather than chronological organization are immediate and wonderful, allowing, for example, a view of Monet's Waterlilies next to a stone circle of Richard Long. Such pairings eloquently bear witness to both the great distance and the tremendous affinities between works of art and ways of working at either end of a century.
Tate Modern's individuality lies not only in its collection or its location in the middle of London, in the historical and culturally diverse Bankside district of Shakespeare and Dickens, but also in its architecturethe dramatic conversion of the Bankside Power Station. The Handbook illuminates the movements and terms that have shaped our understanding of the past century. This book is not just about one of the most influential museums in its field, but is also an important tool for the understanding of modern art.

The Tate Modern Handbook

In 2000, the first edition of the Tate Modern Handbook introduced readers to the startling architecture of the brand-new modern art museum on LondonÂ’s south bank, now the most visited modern art museum in the world.

This new revised edition, published in response to the first reorganization of the collection, presents the artworks afresh and examines the part Tate Modern now plays in global cultural life. Andrew Marr contributes an essay examining the Tate Modern phenomenon, while an expanded A-Z of works in the collection includes entries on more than 120 artists, plus explanations of key terms in art and museology. More than simply a guide to Tate Modern, this is an ideal introductory survey of 20th- and 21st-century art.

The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Watts: Symbolism in Britain, 1860-1910

James McNeill Whistler

The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act

The Stage of Drawing presents remarkable works on paper selected by the artist Avis Newman from the prestigious collection of Tate, London. Including both well-known and less familiar drawings from the mid-1700s by British and international artists, this book, and its accompanying exhibition, offers the opportunity to view developments in drawing over the past three centuries.

The subjects addressed by the book range from literary and theatrical influences on such artists as Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Blake, and Henry Fuseli, to the gestural act in 20th-century drawing as seen in the work of Natalya Goncharova, Francis Bacon, Lucio Fontana, Cy Twombly, Blinky Palermo and Andy Warhol. This book presents a unique view of drawing and its place in the history of art.

William Blake

One day in the late 1760s, when William Blake was a little boy enrolled in a London drawing school, a strange thing happened as he walked across Peckham Rye. He saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." These spirits, and a host of other creatures that peopled his fervent imagination, would later be immortalized in the engravings and poems he printed on his own press, which have placed him in the first rank of British artists and literary figures. And so it is surprising that this fine book--impeccable in every respect, from the detailed yet easy-to-follow notes on individual prints, drawings, and paintings to the quality and thoughtful presentation of the 250 reproductions--wasn't published sooner. It accompanies "William Blake," the largest-ever exhibition of the artist's works, which originated at the Tate Britain and is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through May 27, 2001.

Essays by biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd and Romantic poetry specialist Marilyn Butler set the stage for the haunting images of powerful, accursed, and spectral figures on succeeding pages. The four sections of the book address key aspects of Blake's art. The first one focuses on the influence of Gothic style and spiritualism on his style. The second deals with Blake's life during the 1790s in the South London village of Lambeth, where he harnessed his printmaking innovations to radical political views. It is intriguing to learn how even Blake's new, typically contrary method of etching in relief was a metaphor for his belief in divinely inspired innate ideas. The third section discusses the odd characters that peopled Blake's works, and the fourth surveys his major illuminated books (including Songs of Innocence and Experience), which he created, in his words, "under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly." --Cathy Curtis

The only manuscripts to survive that lead to the production of one of William Blake's published illuminated books are those of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, his most accessible and best-loved work. Here, one of the world's foremost authorities on Blake's manuscripts and illuminated printing details the evolution of this masterwork and its entire production process.

In the manuscript known as An Island in the Moon are found the beginnings of Songs of Innocence and in the Manuscript Notebook, a treasure of the British Library, over fifty poems in draft leading to Songs of Experience. All of the pages in manuscript of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are reproduced in color facsimile, including many of the drawings used in illustration, granting the reader a singular view of the artist's mind at work. Michael Phillips details the stages of Blake's composition and his remarkable technique of relief etching text and design on a single copperplate. For the first time, he demonstrates Blake's development of selective color printing of the design in opaque pigments over the original monochrome impression. Used in producing the first copies of Songs of Experience, this second step accounts for their dramatic contrast with the first issues of Songs of Innocence, which were hand-colored in transparent watercolors.

Blake united Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in 1794 and produced copies in greater numbers than any other work until his death. In the past, the last copies Blake made have been reproduced because of their elaborate and expensive decoration. Phillips concentrates upon the first copies, revealing the original conception of the work. An impressive selection of these plates are reproduced for the first time.

This beautifully illustrated book is a major contribution to Blake studies. It will delight Blake enthusiasts and all who are fascinated by the extraordinary processes of creation and reproduction it describes.

Chris Burden: When Robots Ruled the Air

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the famous portrait painter, spent his childhood traveling around Europe with his American expatriate parents. After studying at Paris's Ecole des Beaux Arts, he launched his career at the Paris Salon. But scandal ensued after he exhibited his most famous portrait, Madame X. The daring (at the time) picture of a beautiful socialite in a provocative dress, her shoulder strap slipping off, created such a stir among its viewers that Sargent eventually repainted the strap into a more proper position and relocated to London. There he continued portrait painting. Creating lush images full of light and incredible brushwork, "[He] breathed new life into the tradition of grand manner portraiture. Like his great predecessors he made his sitters look nobler, more beautiful than they were in reality.... What Sargent brought to the tradition that was new and different was his ability to infuse into his portraits a sense of the immediate and the actual, as if what we see before us is life unfolding as it really is." In 1907, the portraitist abandoned the craft and focused primarily on mural commissions, like the one for the Boston Public Library, and landscape painting.

This book, the catalog to a traveling exhibition that hits the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among other venues, includes three essays on Sargent's life and work and detailed background information for all the paintings shown. It is a manageable 285 pages, with 171 color and 85 black-and-white images. --Jennifer Cohen

The remarkable portraits for which John Singer Sargent is most famous are only one aspect of a career that included landscapes, watercolors, figure subjects, and murals. Even within portraiture, his style ranged from bold experiments to studied formality. And the subjects of his paintings were as varied as his styles, including the leaders of fashionable society, rural laborers, city streets, remote mountains, and the front lines of World War I. This beautiful book surveys and evaluates the extraordinary range of Sargent's work, and reproduces 150 of his paintings in color. It accompanies a spectacular international exhibition--the first major retrospective of the artist's career since the memorial exhibitions that followed his death.

Sargent (1856-1925) was a genuinely international figure. Born of American parents, he grew up in Europe and forged his early reputation in Paris. Later, he established himself in England and the United States as the leading portraitist of the day, and traveled widely in North Africa and the Middle East. Contributors to this book assess Sargent's career in three essays. Richard Ormond presents a biographical sketch and, in a second essay, reviews Sargent's development as an artist. Mary Crawford Volk explores his thirty-year involvement with painting murals--in particular the works at the Boston Public Library and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that Sargent regarded as his greatest achievement.

The book arranges Sargent's paintings into sections that reflect every phase and aspect of his career. We encounter, for example, such famous early works as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, Sargent's robust and brilliantly lit scene of fishing life in Brittany. We see many of his greatest American and English portraits, including his daringly posed portrait of Bostonian Isabella Stewart Gardner and his audacious painting of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, which caused a sensation in London in 1893. The book also includes important late works such as Gassed, his monumental painting of soldiers blinded by mustard gas on the western front, and many of his ambitious murals in Boston.

Sargent is a visually stunning, beautifully written, and perceptive work on one of the most important and admired artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Mark Rothko

Francis Towne