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The first fully illustrated account of the life and work of English painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), this authoritative work, which includes over 150 images, provides extensive visual analysis of individual paintings, set designs and drawings created by Wood in both Britain and France so bringing fresh perspective to his unique artistic development on both sides of the Channel. Wood's short career drew on a multitude of influences, all of which contributed to the development of his faux-naïve style. His oscillation between diverse artistic reference points is borne out in Katy Norris' fascinating narrative that analyses Wood's engagement with the Parisian avant-garde on the one hand, and the attraction of the simpler life he encountered in Cornwall, Cumbria and Brittany on the other. The emotional turmoil of his final years underlines the tensions between the two worlds that Wood inhabited and which he was ultimately was unable to reconcile. Filling a surprising gap in the published literature about this early 20th-century painter, Christopher Wood will appeal to readers who are yet to encounter Wood's work, as well as collectors and enthusiasts.
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Compelling and stunningly written' THE TIMES 'Wildly exciting . . . a classic' SPECTATOR 'Flawless . . . poetic . . . superbly portrayed' DAILY TELEGRAPH Three men. Three short, glittering lives. Young English painter Christopher Wood arrives in Paris in 1921 set on becoming the next great master. By day he studies; by night he attends parties with Picasso and Cocteau before paying too high a price for success. Richard Hilary, a confident if unprincipled Spitfire pilot, is suffering from terrible burns after being shot down. But the operations to restore him haven't deterred him from returning to action. And Jeremy Wolfenden, the cleverest of his set at All Souls College, leaves it all behind to report on the Cold War. But his louche private life makes him a plaything for the intelligent services, taking him on a fateful journey between East and West. The Fatal Englishman is a stunning tale of three short lives that burned brightly from a master storyteller.
Christopher Wood, aged 29, killed himself on a sunny afternoon in August 1930, at Salisbury station. He sat reading until the train was pulling into the station when he got up and threw himself in front of it, dying instantly. It was a sad and muddled end for a man who nine years before had set out for Paris with a very specific intention -- to become a painter. That he should have killed himself when he had succeeded remains an unsolved mystery. The legacy that Wood left includes, it has been said, "some of the most magical works in modern European painting" and in this, the first biography written about this complex man, Richard Ingleby, drawing extensively on previously unpublished material, tells how he strove from inauspicious beginnings to find his voice as a painter.
"In this authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original and accessible account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance--Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari--measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval ...
Looking in depth at the artist's life and work in both places, this work highlights the extent to which his pictures of Cornouaille were imbued with resonances and memories of Cornwall. Around 40 works are illustrated and discussed.
Credulity -- Reference by artifact -- Germany and "Renaissance"--Forgery -- Replica -- Fiction -- Re-enactment.
A story of a forgotten friendship explored through personal diaries and archive writings.
A revised edition of a very popular title, written by one of England's leading experts on Victorian art.
A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists—a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, painti...