Royal Academy of Arts

Artist, designer, architect, author, publisher, and curator: Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is a truly 21st century creative, influential across a variety of media. During his childhood, criticism of his father s poetry he was labeled as a dissident meant that Ai and his family were exiled to a remote region of China for 16 years. Following the death of Chairman Mao, Ai left to train as an artist in Beijing and New York. Ai is today an artist of global stature, and his strong social conscience has galvanized a generation of Chinese artists. With works that touch on topics such as imprisonment, borders, and disaster, Ai has often found himself in conflict with the Chinese authorities. "Ai Weiwei" is published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Royal Academy in London the largest showing of Ai s work to date. This volume includes installations and artworks specially created for the exhibition, an interview with Ai by Tim Marlow, and contributions from a team of scholars, analyzing the variety of Ai s output and concerns."

Abstract Expressionism will forever be associated with the energy and vibrancy of 1950s New York. Artists injected a new sense of confidence in painting, experimenting with improvisation, spontaneity, and color. This bold publication and the major exhibition it accompanies seek to reevaluate the movement, making the case that far from being unified, Abstract Expressionism was in fact complex and ever-changing. This volume includes works by the most celebrated artists associated with the movement?not just Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning, but also Kline, Newman, Still, Smith, Reinhardt, and Gorky. Sculptors such as David Smith and photographers such as Aaron Siskind are also represented. With texts by well-known experts in the field, this is a landmark publication.

Revolution: Russian Art, 1917-1932 encapsulates a momentous period in Russian history that is vividly expressed in the diversity of art produced between 1917, the year of the October Revolution, and 1932 when Stalin began to suppress the avant-garde and its debates. Based around the great exhibition of 1932 held at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, the book explores the fascinating themes and artistic developments of the first fifteen years of the Soviet state, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, posters, graphics and film. The exhibition itself was to be the swansong of avant-garde art in Russia: new policies quickly ensured that Socialist Realism - collective in production, public in manifestation and Communist in ideology - was to become the only acceptable art form. This volume is a timely and authoritative exploration of how modern art in all its forms flourished, was recognised, celebrated, and broken by implacable authority all within fifteen years.

In 1964 Lucian Freud set his students at the Norwich College of Art an assignment: to paint naked self-portraits and to make them 'revealing, telling, believable... really shameless'. It was advice that the artist was often to follow himself. Visceral, unflinching and often nude, Freud's self-portraits give us an insight into the development of his style as a painter. The works provide the viewer with a constant reminder of the artist's overwhelming presence, whether he is confronting the viewer directly or only present as a shadow or in a reflection. Essays by leading authorities - including those who knew him well - explore Freud's life and work, and analyse the importance of self-portraiture in his practice and the intensity that he maintained when studying his own.

In 1946 the art critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker, first used the term 'Abstract Expressionism'. The two words combine the emotional intensity of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European Abstract schools. Although they were being painted by then little-known artists working in low-rent studio space, works of Abstract Expressionist art now dominate the walls of major museums. This important publication re-evaluates the movement, recognising its complex and fluid reality, and branching further into multimedia. As such, this book encompasses sculptors such as David Smith and photographers such as Aaron Siskind as well as some of the most famous painters of the twentieth century, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still.