Southeastern Art Gallery News

Mervyn Peake was one of the most multi-talented artists of the twentieth century. Best known for his Gormenghast trilogy of novels, one of the most sustained flights of imaginative writing ever attempted, Peake was also an author of children’s books and nonsense verse, a painter, war artist and poet. He illustrated such classic works as Treasure Island, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Ancient Mariner, Grimm’s Household Tales and Bleak House. A man of extraordinary vision and imagination, his illustrations, paintings and writings are unforgettable. His influence is felt to this day in the fields of literature and art, and he has been an inspiration to many.

In this highly illustrated new book, his son Sebastian Peake has collaborated with Alison Eldred and G. Peter Winnington, author of an highly acclaimed biography of Mervyn Peake, to compile a stunning collection of illustrations, paintings, photographs, letters, notebook pages and other material – much of which has never been published – to produce a unique memoir of the artist’s life and work. Contributors who discuss various aspects of his literary and visual output include the writers Michael Moorcock and Joanne Harris, Langdon Jones, editor of Titus Alone, artists John Howe and Chris Riddell, David Glass and John Constable, creators of the stage version of the Gormenghast trilogy, and Estelle Daniels, producer of the BBC dramatization. The book includes sections on Peake’s upbringing as the son of a missionary in China, his development as an illustrator, artist and writer, marriage and fatherhood, his wartime experiences, creation of the Titus trilogy, Mr Pye and other literary works, and his tragic decline as illness overcame him, resulting in early death.

Peter Owen Ltd More Info

“Let’s go see the Frida Kahlos.”
It seemed inconceivable that after decades of exhibitions, auctions, books, and movies, unpublished Frida Kahlo artwork could still be found anywhere, much less a shop in a converted textile factory. “Well, if you don’t believe me just come along,” replied her traveling companion. Levine, having recently relocated to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, could not resist and was soon en route to La Buhardilla Antiquarios (The Attic Antiques).

Down an arched stone corridor in a small back room sat two wooden chests, a metal trunk, a wooden box, and a battered old suitcase. On the lid of the suitcase was the name “Sra. KAHLO DE RIVERA.” The shop owners opened the five cases to reveal a jumble of objects, including paintings, drawings, keepsake boxes, annotated books, clothing, a diary, and other assorted items and ephemera. Levine picked up one of ten airmail letters, inscribed with the words “personal archive of Frida K. and personal archive of my private life.”

Finding Frida Kahlo presents, for the first time in print, an astonishing lost archive of one of the twentieth century’s most revered artists. Hidden from view for over half a century, this richly illustrated, intimate portrait overflows with fascinating details about Kahlo’s romances, friendships, and business affairs during a three-decade period, beginning in the 1920s when she was a teenager and ending just before she died in 1954. Full of ardent desires, seething fury, and outrageous humor, Finding Frida Kahlo is a rare glimpse into an exuberant and troubled existence: A vivid diary entry records her sexual encounter with a woman named Doroti; a painted box contains eleven stuffed hummingbirds, concealed beneath a letter in which she laments her discovery that her husband, Diego Rivera, had been monstrously dissecting “these beautiful creatures” to extract an aphrodisiac; an altered French medical book describes the pain she was suffering from the amputation of her right leg, written by Kahlo upon pages that illustrate an amputation technique; a letter to a friend expresses her loneliness, and a simple request for coconut candies. Frida Kahlo never wrote an autobiography. Instead, she left behind a much more complex material universe.Finding Frida Kahlo offers scholars and fans alike an opportunity to examine firsthand Kahlo’s secret world and draw their own conclusions about how she imagined her place in it.

Princeton Architectural Press More Info

A fantastic source of inspiration, the book gives insight into the inner workings and private inspiration of creatives from the world of advertising, design, graphic design, fashion design, art, street art, and illustration. Intimate and often unseen, sketchbooks document the sources of inspiration as well as the journey to final execution. Providing a showcase of ideas, the sketchbooks themselves are complemented by interviews where the artists explain how they use their sketchbooks and how these relate to finished works, giving readers a direct and unmediated insight into the process of research and creation.

Laurence King Publishers More Info

Whether probing personal identity or exploring the world around them, twenty-six indigenous photographers present images that are fresh, provocative, iconoclastic, surprising, and—in the broadest and deepest meaning of the word—authentic. Their works range from the artful studio portraits of Benjamin A. Haldane (Tsimshian), who photographed Native communities throughout southeast Alaska and British Columbia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, to the cutting-edge digital photographs of contemporary Native artists. Their cameras variously capture startled eyes, hidden laughter, misappropriated icons, and neon signs of cultural change.

Heyday Press More Info

Marie Adrien Persac (1823-1873) was a French-born Louisiana artist who worked in a range of mediums to produce a unique view of the lower Mississippi Valley at midcentury. In the first catalogued exhibition devoted solely to this multifaceted but overlooked talent, paintings, drawings, maps, and photographs from numerous holdings have been brought together to present fresh insights and reevaluate this artist’s place in the annals of American history and material culture.

Due in part to his broad talents artist, cartographer, architect, civil engineer, photographer, and art teacher Persac’s work is of major importance to Southern history researchers and art historians. His paintings of south Louisiana plantation houses have captured that now-varnished lifestyle in minute detail, approximating the exactitude of architectural drafting. Today this series is invaluable to scholars of the period, as is Persac’s painting of a steamboat interior—the only one known to exist—and another French Opera House, which burned to the ground in 1919.

Louisiana State University Press More Info

This savvy resource helps artists and art professionals generate the publicity that keeps their artwork and business in the public spotlight. Provided are practical tools for attracting the media’s attention and building bridges between artists, their galleries, and collectors, and between museums and their audiences. This new edition provides the latest word on new art markets; how to research the Internet, build a Website, and launch e-mail publicity campaigns.

Allworth Press More Info

Henri Cartier-Bresson is one of the most influential and beloved figures in the history of photography. His early work helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his unerring ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with ‘the decisive moment’ – the title of his first major book.

Released to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer’s life and work.

The heart of the book surveys Cartier-Bresson’s career through 300 photographs while a wide-ranging essay by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, offers an entirely new understanding of Cartier-Bresson’s extraordinary career and its overlapping contexts of journalism and art.

The extensive supporting material – featuring detailed chronologies of the photographer’s professional travels and his picture stories as they appeared in magazines – will revolutionize the study of Cartier-Bresson’s work.

The final section of the book – which runs to more than eighty pages of often newly discovered and systematically ordered reference material based on the hitherto unexplored archive of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris – is almost a publication in itself.

Thames & Hudson More Info