The indispensable guide to the most exciting painters of recent years, chosen by leading arts professionals - now in paperback...

"In any exhibition of amateur work . . . it is not at all unusual to find many charming water-colour drawings, but . . . it is very rarely that the work in the oil medium is anything but dull, dead, and lacking in all vitality and charm." — Harold Speed
Such provocative assertions are characteristic of this stimulating and informative guide, written in a highly personal and unique style by a noted painter and teacher. Brimming with pertinent insights into the technical aspects and painting in oils, it is also designed to help students perfect powers of observation and expression...

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author’s basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud...

Shadows are holes in light. We see them all the time, and sometimes we notice them, but their part in our visual experience of the world is mysterious. In this book, an eminent art historian draws on contemporary cognitive science, eighteenth-century theories of visual perception, and art history to discuss shadows and the visual knowledge they can offer...

The third edition of the acclaimed Routledge Companion to Aesthetics contains over sixty chapters written by leading international scholars covering all aspects of aesthetics...

This popular anthology of twentieth-century art theoretical texts has now been expanded to take account of new research, and to include significant contributions to art theory from the 1990s...

Artist, architect, poet and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435). Inspired by the order and beauty inherent in nature, his groundbreaking work sets out the principles of distance, dimension and proportion; instructs the painter on how to use the rules of composition, representation, light and colour to create work that is graceful and pleasing to the eye; and stipulates the moral and artistic pre-requisites of the successful painter. On Painting had an immediate and profound influence on Italian Renaissance artists including Ghiberti, Fra Angelico and Veneziano and on later figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, and remains a compelling theory of art.

Unlike many books on painting that usually talk about art or painters, James Elkins’ compelling and original work focuses on alchemy, for like the alchemist, the painter seeks to transform and be transformed by the medium...

From Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to provocative dung-splattered madonnas, in today's art world many strange, even shocking, things are put on display. This often leads exasperated viewers to exclaim--is this really art?...

The ‘death of painting’ and its subsequent resurrection in transformed conditions is an oft-rehearsed leitmotif of the modernist era, yet from the postconceptual painting revival of the early 1980s to the present new perspectives have emerged that reopen the entire field, not only globally but historically beyond the past century...

The twelve essays in this volume reflect the most important trends in the study of musical performance. Three areas are investigated: the psychology of performance, the semantics of performance, and the relation between performance and analysis...