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Freud At Work: Lucian Freud in Conversation with Sebastian Smee

Lucian Freud is not only the most celebrated artist working in England, but one of the most private. He has frequently stated his reluctance to be photographed and he has almost never agreed to be interviewed.Following the publication of the last ten years of his work by Jonathan Cape in the autumn of 2005, the painter has agreed to talk to Sebastian Smee, a writer on art whom he greatly respects, in a series of conversations rather than formal interviews. He wants to talk about painting itself, the demands of his own work and the painters he admires. Two photographers have had access to Freud's studio. The late Bruce Bernard was a friend for many years and the subject of two of Freud's paintings. Bernard was an authority on photography, a great picture editor, and also a very fine photographer. He made a number of studies of Freud at work. Over the last five years in particular, Freud's assistant, the painter David Dawson, has been photographing the artist constantly. The results reveal various stages of works in progress, including paintings of Dawson himself, and the intensity of the activity in this very secret domain. The only precedent to such a document might be David Douglas Duncan's photographs of Picasso at work, but nothing as extensive has been published on such a major painter before.

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Maria Lassnig: The Pen is the Sister of the Brush: Diaries 1943-1997

Maria Lassnig’s writings can now be read in English for the first time. Encompassing Lassnig’s diary entries and notes, along with a selection of her poems and letters from 1943 to 1997, this book is illustrated with numerous photographs of the artist and reproductions of her drawings. Originally published in 2000 in German by Hans Ulrich Obrist, it includes major material not previously available in English to encompass the artist’s diverse oeuvre, her complex working process and rich life.

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Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings

Never particularly keen on exhibiting his work, British artist Euan Uglow (1932-2000) maintained a lower profile than other artists of his generation and kept many of his paintings out of the public view. Even so, his name is increasingly well known, and his beautiful, intelligent, humane and often witty landscapes, still lifes and figure studies are gaining the recognition they deserve. Appreciative critics are now joined by growing numbers of admirers who consider Uglow one of Britain's greatest post-war artists. This is the first book to examine Uglow's entire output in paintings. Richard Kendall's essay explores the formation of Uglow's fundamental attitudes, beliefs, and processes in the years 1950 to 1970, and Catherine Lampert looks at the content and personal nature of the artist's paintings over a lifetime, emphasizing especially his growing attention to colour and light. The volume reproduces every known oil painting by Uglow - a total of more than 400 works, some 80 of which are here reproduced for the first time. In addition to a chronology, bibliography and exhibition history for each work, the catalogue entries provide many other details and illuminating notes about the paintings, including the artist's own observations and the recollections of models, friends and critics.

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Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma

The definitive biography of Francis Bacon, re-issued with substantial new material to co-incide with a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain.

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Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Their Circle

An updated and redesigned edition of Richard Shone's study of the painters of the Bloomsbury group who were an important influence on the formation of taste in Britain during the early decades of this century. The writers and artists of the Bloomsbury group had an unparalleled and productive influence on British cultural life in the first thirty years of the 20th century. Among its members were the writers Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, the economist Maynard Keynes, the art critic Roger Fry and the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. This book describes in particular the two painters who were at the centre of the interplay of personal and intellectual life that characterised the group and to whom the Bloomsbury writers often sat for portraits. As a friend of Duncan Grant at the end of his long life and as a frequent visitor to Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse where Grant and Bell painted and which was a vital centre of Bloomsbury life outside London, Richard Shone is uniquely placed to dispel many of the myths and misconceptions that surround their work. This new edition has been updated, expanded and redesigned with eighty colour illustrations.

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Le Corbusier: A Life

The first biography of one of the greatest artistic figures of the century using many of le Corbusier’s letters and archives which no other writer has seen before.