Bøker av Julian Bell

Respected painter and writer Julian Bell offers original insights into the art, practice and ongoing importance of painting. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the ON series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer, by an outstanding writer and critic. Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over what was real and what constituted 'nature', currents that would soon gather force to form modern science. Natural Light deliberates on the era's uncertainties, as distilled in the work of painter Adam Elsheimer - a short-lived, tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret. Elsheimer's diminutive, intense and mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and circles of 'natural philosophers' - early modern scientists - were starting to turn to the new 'world system' of Galileo. Julian Bell transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s, where Elsheimer and other young Northern immigrants - notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens - swapped pictorial and poetic reference points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions, Bell drives at the anxieties that underlie them - a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency, most of all in Elsheimer's final painting, a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was completed at a time of ferment in astronomy. Circulated through prints, Elsheimer's pictorial inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt, Lorrain and Poussin. They even reached artists in Mughal India, whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what 'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse, the whole of the 17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.

A new, significantly revised edition of Julian Bell's 1999 book, taking a fresh, focused look at the situation of painting in contemporary culture.

This is the first book to survey the work of painter and printmaker Tom Hammick (b.1963). It sets Hammick's art within the context of contemporary debates about painting while relating it to the two-centuries-old Romantic tradition. Julian Bell explores in depth the artist's techniques, imagery and career to date.