In this eye-opening study, British art historian Matthew Collings clears the dust off the Old Masters, revealing just how original and subversive they really were in their own lifetimes. The key figures he has chosen are Titian, Rubens, Velásquez, and Hogarth. Appreciating it takes a little patience and some art historical context, and Collings does a fine job aiding the would-be aesthete’s eye and brain.

Matt's Old Masters: Titian, Rubens, Velasquez, Hogarth

Arts & Photography

Collings, Matthew

History & Criticism

Orion Publishing

This definitive volume on artist Keith Tyson’s thirty- year career examines all aspects of his artistic endeavors. 
British Turner Prize–winning artist Keith Tyson is known for a distinctive and diverse body of work, including drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture. Showing a wide range of influences extending from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, he has an interest in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us every day. For over thirty years, Tyson has probed, dissected, explored, and questioned reality. Not fixed to one artistic style, Tyson’s mission is to challenge himself and the audience, while working with diverse materials―paint, clay, metal, resin―to question our knowledge of the world we perceive as real, and art’s role in representing it. 
Iterations and Variations offers an overview of the artist’s work in many media, with gallery installation views. Featuring 400 illustrations, and contributions by a number of leading critics, this is an edifying look at the acclaimed artist. 429 color illustrations

Keith Tyson: Iterations and Variations

Ruf, Beatrix

Tyson, Keith

Rappolt, Mark

Koek, Ariane

Archer, Michael

Thames&Hudson

Ron Arad is one of the most successful and creative contemporary designers. He was born in Tel Aviv in 1951 and, in 1973, moved to London to study at the AA School of Architecture. In the early 1980s he established, with Caroline Thorman, One Off Ltd., a design studio and workshop, followed in 1989 by Ron Arad Associates, an architecture and design practice. In 1997 Arad was appointed Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art in London and two years later became Professor of Industrial Design there. as Cappellini, Kartell, Moroso and Vitra. Besides his activity as a product designer, he also works in the field of architecture and his projects include the Tel Aviv Opera in Israel. critic, who, as he points out, doesn't know much about design but wants to understand more. The conversation between Collings and Arad starts with the question: what is design? From this first, basic question they embark on a journey that touches the most important art and design issues, inside and outside Ron Arad's work. Stimulated by the Matthew Collings' questions, Ron Arad goes through the main aspects of his work, explaining some of his projects in detail and talking about his relationship with design, architecture and art in general. The interview is divided into 10 sections on 10 different subjects and illustrated with many of Ron Arad's projects, accompanied by narrative captions that explain their history and their main features and characteristics.

Ron Arad

Ron Arad Associates

Phaidon Press

Yes, it's shocking and sensational and makes headlines, but is it art? What happened to beauty and loveliness? Modern works by "Brit Brats" and other explosive artists are explored in this knowing book that combines hard art historical information with refreshingly candid, wonderfully readable reflections on today's dynamic art scene. 
Each of six chapters becomes a journey, a tour around the world to art galleries, museums, and artists' studios, a trip back and forth in time-from the earliest heroic beginnings of modern art to the circuslike atmosphere of Sensation, the famous/infamous exhibition seen recently by record-breaking museum crowds on both sides of the Atlantic. These gorgeously illustrated rides are by turns smooth, surprising, alarming, but they are always informative and entertaining in answering such essential questions as: Will future generations accept today's art as a vivid expression of how life was really lived during the 1990s? Or will they scratch their heads and wonder how we could have put up with such stuff-how we could have valued it as art?

This is Modern Art

Watson/Guptill

Modern art is controversial, intimidating, and bound to divide any group of people into opposing camps. But how many of us really understand it? With wit, knowledge, and plenty of illustrations, artist and author Matthew Collings opens our eyes to the shock of the new. He whisks us on a journey across the globe to galleries, museums, and studios, all the while offering hard information on major artists and movements as well as answers to the types of questions ordinary befuddled viewers might have: What makes art modern? Can anyone do it? And, whatever happened to beauty? An entertaining and enlightening survey.

This Is Modern Art

Weidenfeld Nicolson Ltd

Sarah Lucas is one of the best known of the so-called young British artists that came to prominence in the 1990s. Active in a variety of media including sculpture, photography and installation, her perennial themes of sex, death, and gender are laced with a bleak humour that gives her work a distinctive and instantly recognisable voice.

Sarah Lucas

Individual Artists

Tate

At last an incredibly readable book about the London art world. For every long word there are dozens of short ones. It's a map of the mind, a journey to the heart of darkness, a step in a puddle, a ride on a tour boat, a week in traction. Learn lots of things and be entertained as well. From the anguished screaming tortured canvases of Francis Bacon to the witty ironic twirling sliced farmyard animals of Damien Hirst, let Matthew Collings take you by the hand and gently guide you through art's Yellow Pages.

Blimey!: From Bohemia to Britpop : The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst

Collins, Matthew

21 Pub

It Hurts

MacMillan, Ian

This long-awaited sequel to Matthew Collings's hugely successful portrait of the British art world, "Blimey!" brings us up-to-date in a world that has changed immeasurably since 1997. Not least of all because of "Blimey's" publication, the Young British Artists who were the focus of that book have gone on to become huge stars in the international scene: they have starred in their own news-making exhibition, "Sensation", which nearly brought the art establishment, to say nothing of the borough of Brooklyn and the mayor of New York City, to its knees; artists like Gary Hume, Tracey Emin, and Chris Ofili have become media celebrities; and "insider" gossip isn't insider anymore but covered in the newspapers and television on a regular basis. "Art Crazy Nation" brings us up to date with Collings's much-imitated, never-duplicated style: his skewed scenarios, autobiographical blips, personal observations, off-kilter but strangely precise judgments, and more. The old characters will reappear, but they are no longer the main focus. What's new and what's next are his questions, questions he answers with his seemingly blithe but in truth penetrating wit and style. "Art Crazy Nation" will have the same boldness of design; cool photographs of people, places, and art; and a mixture of grungy realism and glamour for which Matthew Collings has become famous. 
Praise for Matthew Collings: 
"Hilarious and horrible, intelligent and frightening, "Blimey!" is the book the art world deserves." --Adrian Searle, "The Guardian" 
"An acid farrago of anecdotes, capsule biographies and pithy critical assessments. ("It Hurts") is highly entertaining and informative." --"The New York Times" 
180 color. 7.25 x 8.75 in.

Art Crazy Nation: The Post-Blimey London Artworld

This is Civilisation by Collings, Matthew (2008) Paperback

21 Publishing Ltd

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Books by Collings, Matthew