Kitaj's enigmatic and highly personal paintings contemporary culture, Jewish engage with his identity, and the horror of the Holocaust. His hero is Cezanne: "He is my greatest painter of all and the three last Bathers are my favorite art of all."Kitaj recently embarked on a series of seven major new paintings inspired by Cezanne's Bathers for an exhibition at the National Gallery, London. These new works are reproduced here for the first time, together with a series of black chalk drawings, directly inspired by Cezanne. The book includes a short essay about Kitaj's work, which places the new paintings in the context of his earlier works and reveals his constant preoccupation with the Old Masters. There is also a new and previously unpublished interview with the artist.

Kitaj: In the Aura of Cezanne and Other Masters

Arts & Photography

Wiggins, Colin

Rudolf, Anthony

History & Criticism

National Gallery London

Traces the development of post-impressionism through the works of such post-impressionist painters as Cezanne, van Gogh, Seurat, and Gauguin

Post-impressionism (Eyewitness Art)

Teen & Young Adult

DK Pub.

Ana Maria Pacheco: In the National Gallery

Adler, Kathleen

Yale University Press

Tom Hunter is a London-based photographer of international renown for his engaging, distinctive, and often provocative re-creations of Old Master paintings. In 1998 he won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award for A Woman Reading a Possession Order, a beautifully crafted photograph based on a composition by the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer (16321675).Featuring selections of the bold images that established Hunter’s reputation, together with new work, this book conveys the artist’s deep concern with depicting the lives of the residents of Hackney, East London, as captured in the headlines of Hunter’s local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette. These startling, sometimes tragic, stories are retold in carefully staged photographs, whose compositions are frequently derived from paintings in the National Gallery.An essay by best-selling novelist Tracy Chevalier examines Hunter’s story-telling, while Colin Wiggins discusses the relationship between Hunter’s work and paintings in the National Gallery and elsewhere.

Tom Hunter: Living in Hell and Other Stories

CHEVALIER, TRACY

Individual Artists

Known for his expressive portraits and London landscapes, draftsman, printmaker, and painter Leon Kossoff (b. 1926) is one of the most significant British artists of the past fifty years. A member of the School of London––a group of loosely representational painters including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud––Kossoff views drawing as fundamental to the artistic process and has turned to art history for inspiration throughout his career. This handsome book features a selection of drawings and prints made over thirty years after paintings by such artists as Poussin, Rubens, Velázquez, Degas, Cézanne, and Goya. Absorbing essays discuss how Kossoff has used this body of drawings to inform his original paintings and analyze how the particular influence of Old Masters has been incorporated into his work.

Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting

Conisbee, Philip

Wilson-Bareau, Juliet

British artist Alison Watt (b. 1965) creates monumental paintings depicting richly draped fabric. These canvases show closely cropped folds, gathers, tucks, and creases––all sensuously developed from a selective palette of white, grey, burnt sienna, cadmium red, and yellow.The National Gallery’s seventh Associate Artist, Watt has been working in a studio near the permanent collection. This proximity to masterpieces she has long admired has concentrated her focus on the tradition of drapery in western art and inspired her dramatically abstracted reinterpretations. This beautifully designed and illustrated book presents her most recent series of powerful, large-scale paintings. In an essay featuring photographs of Watt at work in the gallery studio, Colin Wiggins reviews the artist’s creative process. Also included is a new piece written by celebrated Scottish poet Don Paterson that responds to these works.

Alison Watt: Phantom

Paterson, Don.

For 50 years Bridget Riley has been regarded as one of Britain's most important abstract artists, renowned for large paintings that feature complex, repetitive geometric shapes and undulating linear patterns. It is fascinating to discover that she sees her decidedly modern paintings as following in an Old Master pictorial tradition. This affinity stems from a lifelong passion for paintings in the National Gallery, London, with which she was first associated as a young student, and later as a Trustee and exhibiting artist.This book celebrates the artist's long engagement with the National Gallery. The authors discuss the significance of paintings from the Gallery's collection that Riley chose for exhibition alongside her own works, and they explain how the fluid lines of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, together with their palette of ochres, salmon, greens, and light blues, translate into the abstracted shapes that appear in Riley's work. The authors also demonstrate how the techniques and methods of modern masters including Cézanne, Seurat, and Matisse exert an important influence on Riley's paintings.

Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work

Bracewell, Michael

Prather, Marla

British artist Michael Landy (b. 1963) is known primarily as an installation artist. His work, along with others associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), was first catapulted to the world spotlight when it was featured in the notorious Sensation exhibition (1997). His sculptural installations and performances explore political and social themes, such as the nature of consumerism and commodity.
In 2009, Landy began a three-year artist residency at the National Gallery, London. He chose to focus his project on representations of saints and their accompanying stories, often gruesome, which were once part of common culture but are now largely unknown. Landy’s preoccupation with recycling narratives and repurposing imagery results in Saints Alive, the subject of this book, conceived to include drawings, collages, and a series of kinetic, interactive sculptures with moving parts and sounds.

Michael Landy: Saints Alive

CORK, Richard

Sliwka, Jennifer

Sean Scully (b.1945) is an Irish-born, American-based painter and printmaker, best known for his monumental oil paintings which draw on the traditions of Abstract Expressionism. This catalogue showcases a recent body of work inspired by the National Gallery’s own collection and in particular by J.M.W. Turner’s The Evening Star (c.1830). For Scully, this elegiac picture constitutes one of Turner’s most profound paintings, leading to new departures in his own work. Using the motif of stripes or chequerboards, Scully evokes landscapes and architecture, horizons, fields, and coastlines, in which his contemplative forms become reminders of personal experiences and distinctive moments. Vast, bold panel paintings with richly textured surfaces are illustrated together with delicate works on paper: aquatints and luminous pastels. The accompanying text includes newly commissioned essays, and poetry by Vahni Capildeo and Kelly Grovier, while a unique photo essay by Irish novelist Eimear McBride highlights the sweeping impasto, strong brushstrokes, and vivid colors that distinguish Scully’s painting.

Sea Star: Sean Scully at the National Gallery

Herrmann, Daniel

For almost four decades, R.B. Kitaj played an integral role in British art. His enigmatic and highly personal paintings engage with contemporary culture, his Jewish identity and horror of the Holocaust. Shortly after his controversial retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London in 1994, he moved back to his native United States and now lives and works in Los Angeles. His great hero is Cezanne: "He is my greatest painter of all and the three last Bathers are my favourite art of all". He recently embarked upon a series of six major new pictures inspired by Cezanne's Bathers for an exhibition at the National Gallery, London. In this fully illustrated book, Kitaj's new paintings are reproduced for the first time, together with a series of beautiful black chalk drawings, directly inspired by Cezanne. The new paintings are discussed in the context of earlier works by Kitaj, which reveal his constant preoccupation with the Old Masters. The book includes a short essay about Kitaj's work, plus a new and previously unpublished interview with the artist.

Kitaj in the Aura of Cezanne and Other Masters

National Gallery Great Britain

Kitaj, R.B.

National Gallery Company

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Books by Wiggins, Colin