Stass Paraskos is an artist who has been a major influence on generations of art students. From the 1960s to the 1980s he taught at some of the most innovative art schools in Britain, including Leeds College of Art, De Montfort University and the University for Creative Arts. In the 1990s he developed the Cyprus College of Art into a creative meeting point for artists and art students from around the world, turning it into what the art historian Ben Read has called Europe's answer to Black Mountain College in the United States.  Yet Paraskos was not born into the art world. His family were poor peasant farmers in Cyprus. When he came to England in the 1950s it was to work as a cook in one of the new Greek restaurants becoming popular at the time. In this book Norbert Lynton tells the story of Paraskos's development as an artist and appraises his work. As well as becoming a significant teacher in Britain, Paraskos remains the only Cypriot artist to have work in London's Tate Gallery, and his lyrical style of painting has been exhibited around the world.  Lynton also tells the story of the notorious Paraskos Trial which turned Paraskos into an international celebrity. In 1966, Paraskos was prosecuted for obscenity by the British police for an exhibition of his work held in Leeds. Along with Lynton, other luminaries from the art world spoke in favour of Paraskos, including Herbert Read and Quentin Bell. Even the Government Minister Roy Jenkins, then Home Secretary, spoke out against the prosecution. But despite this the case was lost and Paraskos became famous as the last artist in Britain to be successfully prosecuted for obscenity under the Vagrancy Act of 1832.

Stass Paraskos

Arts & Photography

Lynton, MR Norbert

History & Criticism

Orage Press

Michael Paraskos is one of a new generation of writers, artists and critics associated with the New Aesthetics, an informal group that is challenging the mainstream art world with a fundamental belief that art is a material response to the material world. In this collection of essays, articles and reviews, written for newspapers and magazines including the Epoch Times and Art Review, Paraskos casts a critical eye over the current cultural scene, writing on topics ranging from Duchamp and the Turner Prize to van Dyck and the Victorian obsession with sex.

Is Your Artwork Really Necessary?

Paraskos, Michael

Alfred Orage was one of those mysterious figures in our cultural history who was in his lifetime extremely influential, and after his death almost forgotten. He was the man who co-founded the Leeds Arts Club, possibly the only genuine manifestation of Expressionism in pre-second world war Britain, which promoted the philosophy of Nietzsche, the mystical socialism of the early Labour movement and suffragette feminism, as well as literary and artistic modernism. He turned the weekly newspaper the New Age from a failing organ of the Christian Socialism movement into the British equivalent of Germany's Der Sturm, and the most widely read cultural periodical of its age. And he was the first mentor of one of the most important writers on modern art of the twentieth century, Herbert Read, helping to shape his philosophy of art, and through him the direction of international modernism.  In this book Tom Steele follows Orage's career alongside the history of the Leeds Arts Club, showing that modernism in Britain was not wholly a London-centred affair. Whilst Roger Fry and Bloomsbury were following and promoting French modernism in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Orage and other figures associated with the Leeds Arts Club, including Holbrooke Jackson, Arthur Penty, Michael Sadler, Frank Rutter and of course Herbert Read, were engaged in the far more radical modernist ideas coming out of Germany, with Sadler even collecting paintings by Wassily Kandinsky in Leeds as early as 1913.

Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893 - 1923

Steele, Tom

Rupert Gunnis is one of the founding fathers of Cypriot historiography. Whilst working as an administrator in the British Colonial Government of Cyprus in the 1930s he visited every town and city on the island, recording its interesting historic buildings and sites. In this facsimile of 1936 edition of the resulting book, not only do we gain a snapshot of a Cyprus that has now long gone, but find a text that is still surprisingly useable as a guide to the material culture of Cyprus.

Historic Cyprus: A Guide to Its Towns and Villages, Monasteries and Castles

Travel

Gunnis, Rupert

Europe

Michael Paraskos is one of the new generation of art critics who are redefining the way we make and see art in the twenty-first century. He is a leading figure in the New Aesthetics movement, an informal grouping of artists and writers who emphasise the physical and material nature of art above its conceptual meaning.  In Regeneration Paraskos puts forward an argument for an aesthetic framework for art which does not look back to the academic aesthetics of previous centuries, but is rooted in the physical and material nature of how artists actually make art. By doing this, he suggests, an art theory based on essential nature of art can come into existence, rather than a repetition of futile attempts to discuss art as if it is music, or poetry, or linguistics, or visual politics. Art is art, he suggests, and it does not need to borrow theories from other human activities to justify its existence.  But Regeneration is not simply a discussion of art theory. It is a record of a highly personal, and sometimes painful, journey into discovering the true nature of art. Originally intended for private distribution only to trusted friends in the art world, Regeneration offers a rare glimpse into the experiences that lead art theorists and critics to think, say and do the things they do.

Regeneration

From the 1930s to the 1960s Herbert Read was probably the world's leading writer on modern art. His name is closely associated with the key figures of international modernism, from Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, to Kurt Schwitters and Naum Gabo, to name but a few. He also worked with major figures in literature, including George Orwell and T.S. Eliot, and was an active member of the British anarchist movement. But Read was also an exile, driven by poverty as a child from his idyllic rural home in Ryedale to grow up in industrial Halifax and Leeds. For him this represented an expulsion from Eden, and it is difficult to understand Read as a modernist writer and critic without recognising this profound sense of loss. Only relatively late in life was Read able to return to Ryedale. In this collection of writings we hear Read telling in a straightforward but moving way his memories of a Yorkshire childhood. Through his poetry and prose we gain a real sense of his longing to return. And once he is back in the Ryedale landscape where he was born there is a profound feeling in his writings of him belonging to the land.

Between the Riccall and the Rye

Read, Herbert Edward

Biographies & Memoirs

The Aphorisms of Irsee is a collection of definitive statements on the nature of art by the artist Clive Head and the writer Michael Paraskos. The aphorisms were formulated whilst Head and Paraskos were teaching at a summer art camp in Irsee, southern Germany. Sometimes controversial, often funny, the aphorisms are designed to challenge our understanding of art by defining its essential characteristics. Head and Paraskos do this not only in terms of the question "what is art?" but the equally important question, "what are the conditions in which art can appear?" With a new introduction for the third edition by Michael Paraskos, the Aphorisms of Irsee are radical, challenging and thought provoking, and a joy to read. They set out a new agenda for art in the twenty-first century.

The Aphorisms of Irsee

Head, Clive

Clive Head is one of the leading British painters of his generation. His remarkable images of urban streets draw on a wide range of traditions, Poussin, Titian and Canaletto, through to American realism, and even elements of Pop. But at their heart his paintings are attempts to answer the simple question: how do I resolve the space in the painting so that it is credible? In this book, based on a talk delivered to art students at the University of Northampton, Head talks with a straightforward frankness about how he makes his paintings and the philosophy that underpins them. He discusses the experience of exhibiting at London's National Gallery, and considers what he believes to be the key issues facing painters in the early twenty-first century. Part six of the New Aesthetics.

Sun Setting Over Victoria

Η ΜΥΘΟΛΟΓΙΑ ΤΗΣ ΚΥΠΡΟΥ (Greek Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Παρασκος, Στας

Mythology & Folk Tales

All That Was Left of Them

Read Sir, Herbert Edward

Poetry

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