In the mid-twentieth century, a pioneering group of painters began pursuing new directions in figurative art, investing representations of the human body with unprecedented expressiveness and depth. Among these painters who sought to more accurately capture the truth of human existence were the “S...

Dive deep, for the first time, into Man Ray’s career-long obsession with chess-themed artworks and their influence on international Modernism. Authorized by The Man Ray Trust, Permanent Attraction: Man Ray & Chess  is the first and only book on Man Ray’s chess-themed works in all media. Wit...

From epic road trips and voyages into the most remote lands to culture-soaked, tranquil stays in the world’s finest hotels, Artists' Journeys that Shaped Our World promises you an unforgettable journey. Join award-winning author Travis Elborough as he explores 30 paths to inspiration taken by some...

Chess, in all its glorious forms, has intrigued and challenged the human mind for nearly 2,000 years. But let’s face it, the literature on the game is often as dense as a stack of arcane telephone directories, or to put it bluntly, like trying to decode Martian Attack Code. It’s not exactly cavi...

Cubism remains perhaps the single most important development in the history of twentieth-century art. It was the creation of just two artists - Georges Braque, a Frenchman, and Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard - between the years 1907 and 1914. Working alongside each other in Paris, then the artistic capit...

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism - in Florence as Gertrude Stein's fr...

"...his stories are always interesting, lively and well written, giving an insight to the art world as he experienced it." — Literary Review "If you read one book on art this year, it must be this brilliant critique of art today seen through the lens of retired museum curator Julian Spalding...

Ezra Pound makes his Penguin Classics debut with this unique selection of his early poems and prose, edited with an introductory essay and notes by Pound expert Ira Nadel. The poetry includes such early masterpieces as “The Seafarer,” “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,�...

Step into the world of Frida Kahlo: behind the portraits and the surrealist art discover the fascinating woman who has transfixed the world. Fridamania has made Frida Kahlo's image ubiquitous: she has been reborn as a Halloween costume, Barbie doll, children's book character, textile print, phone c...

This intimate account offers a new, unexpected understanding of the artist’s work and of the vibrant 1930s surrealist scene. In 1938, just as she was leaving Mexico for her first solo exhibition in New York, Frida Kahlo was devastated to learn from her husband, Diego Rivera, that he intended to ...

“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.” Insel , the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other—about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris. German painter Inse...

A new translation of a masterpiece of modernist poetry Poet, novelist, playwright, and chess enthusiast, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) was one of the French belle époque's most compelling literary figures. During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never...

Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or N...

An international movement that followed specific geographical-cultural patterns, Conceptual Art built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, redefining the institutional and social relationships among production, work and audience in ways which have comprehensively transformed the nature of the art object...

Has pop burnt itself out? Paul Morley takes the reader on an epic drive through the history of music to find out. A succession of celebrities, geniuses and other protagonists led by Madonna, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Erik Satie, John Cage and Wittgenstein appear to give their points of view. Detours an...

Aptly described by playwright Eugene Ionesco as "one of the four or five great reformers of modern thought", Andre Breton (1896-1966) was the founder and prime mover of Surrealism, the most influential artistic and literary movement of the 20th century. Poet and theorist, artistic impresario and pol...

The similarities between madness and modernism are striking: defiance of convention, nihilism, extreme relativism, distortions of time, strange transformations of self, and much more. In this revised edition of a now classic work, Louis Sass, a clinical psychologist, offers a radically new vision o...

This stimulating introductory survey traces the origins and development of these two roughly parallel revolutionary twentieth-century art movements, exploring the full range of artistic production, including film, photography, collage, painting, graphics and object making. Matthew Gale skilfully pl...

A renowned art critic of the 1960s, Carla Lonzi abandoned the art world in 1970 to found Rivolta Femminile, a pioneering feminist collective in Italy. Rather than separating the art world luminary from the activist, however, this book looks at the two together. It demonstrates that even as Lonzi ref...

Andy Warhol is Pop, Pablo Picasso is Cubist and Marcel Duchamp is Dada. Artists gather in movements, just as wildebeests run in herds. Do you know the great art movements and how the great artists fit into them? Play Manifesto to test your knowledge or effortlessly learn a little art history. Co...