Joseph Turner, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman & El Greco

J.M.W. Turner: Standing in the Sun

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Britain's greatest and most mysterious artist, was the son of a Convent Garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem mental hospital. During his lifetime (1775-1851), Turner achieved fame and fortune for a range of work encompassing seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolors. His friend and colleague C. R. Leslie remembered him thus: "Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. He might be taken for the captain of a steamboat at first glance; but a second would find more in his face than belongs in any ordinary mind. There was the peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation."
For this new biography, the first comprehensive narrative of Turner's life in a generation, Anthony Bailey has searched through the archives, studied the scholarly literature, made use of much research done in the last thirty years, and looked at almost all of Turner's sketchbooks as well as many of his paintings and watercolors. He has uncovered fresh material and put together other facts, previously known, to shed new light on those complicated and secretive man.
Anthony Bailey has set out to write a biography of the man, not a book about his paintings, and J.M.W. Turner comes vividly to life in theses pages. Both reclusive and gregarious, private and vainglorious, tough and vulnerable, a long-tern bachelor who fathered two daughters, Turner was full of contradictions, and Anthony Bailey rises masterfully to the challenge of describing them here.
Standing in the Sun: A Life of J.M.W. Turner by Anthony Bailey
HarperCollins, 1998, ISBN: 0061180025

David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective

David Hockney is perhaps the most widely celebrated artist of recent decades, producing work in almost every medium - painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking - as well as designing critically acclaimed sets for the stage. David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective brings together for the first time an exciting selection of Hockney's work on paper and in sketchbooks, presenting many drawings that have never been reproduced before - including several from the artist's personal collection. Spanning his entire career, from 1954 to the present, these images show how drawing lies at the very heart of David Hockney's work, a fundamental aspect of his graphic approach to every medium.
Among the pieces reproduced here are portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and images of California and the other places David Hockney has visited, together with subjects that reveal more personal aspects of the artist's life. Authoritative essays by Ulrich Luckhardt and Paul Melia, curators of the first major retrospective of Hockney's drawings in fifteen years, examine the artist's skills as a draftsman, presenting a chronological view of his evolving style and technique, and placing the drawings in the context of his work as a whole. Biographical notes and a select bibliography are also included, making David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective an invaluable source of reference as well as a beguiling and dazzling compendium of drawings by one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.
David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective by Ulrich Luckhardt and Paul Melia
Chronicle Books, 1996

Cindy Sherman: Film Stills

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, a series of 69 black-and-white photographs created between 1977 and 1980, is widely seen as one of the most original and influential achievements in recent art. Witty, provocative and searching, this lively catalogue of female roles inspired by the movies crystallizes widespread concerns in our culture, examining the ways we shape our personal identities and the role of the mass media in our lives.
Cindy Sherman began making these pictures in 1977 when she was 23 years old. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blond actress, played by Cindy Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills - or perhaps publicity pix--purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home. The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen and lounging in the bedroom. Onto something big, Cindy Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex kitten, the hot-blooded woman of the people, the ice-cold sophisticate and a can-can line of other stereotypes.
Cindy Sherman eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés. Other artists had drawn upon popular culture but Cindy Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones - those 8 x 10 glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it isn't real. In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The 69 solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America--the period of Sherman's youth and the starting point for our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Cindy Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large.
Although most of the characters are invented, we sense right away that we already know them. That twinge of instant recognition is what makes the series tick and it arises from Cindy Sherman's uncanny poise. There is no wink at the viewer, no open irony, no camp.
In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art purchased the series from the artist, preserving the work in its entirety. This book marks the first time that the complete series will be published as a unified work, with Sherman herself arranging the pictures in sequence.
Cindy Sherman: Film Stills by Cindy Sherman and Peter Galassi
ISBN: 0870705075

El Greco by David Davies

El Greco (1541-1614), born Domenikos Theotokopoulos, was one of the most fascinating and distinctive artists of the sixteenth century. His works are immediately recognizable for their brilliant colors, elongated figures, and spiritual intensity. Initially trained in Crete, in around 1567 El Greco moved to Italy where he purportedly studied with Titian.
A decade later he is documented in Toledo (south of Madrid), and he spent the rest of his long life in Spain. El Greco's paintings and writings offer a thoughtful, frequently inspired response to the varied environments in which he worked-and they reveal that he was deeply engaged with the religious and artistic thinking of his times.
This lavishly illustrated book-the first comprehensive English-language publication on El Greco in many years-addresses the full range of the artist's work in painting and sculpture, from his Byzantine icons to his late altarpieces. It considers his personality from both a religious and intellectual point of view, and presents the artist's religious, mythological, genre, landscape, and portrait works, providing the historical context in which they were made.
El Greco by David Davies, John H. Elliott and Gabriele Finaldi
ISBN: 1857099338

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