James Hall On The Self Portrait

Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series celebrates writers and thinkers who have helped shape the conversation across the arts. Mixing classic and contemporary texts, reissues and abridgements, these are bite-sized, fully illustrated reads in an attractive, affordable and highly collectable package.

Excerpts from art critic, historian, lecturer, and broadcaster James Hall's lively and comprehensive cultural history of self-portraiture, focusing on artists including Dürer, Gentileschi, Van Gogh, and Kahlo. Surprising, questioning, challenging, enriching: the Pocket Perspectives series presents timeless works by writers and thinkers who have shaped the conversation across the arts, visual culture, and history. Celebrating the undiminished vitality of their ideas today, these covetable and collectable little books embody the best of Thames & Hudson.

Sheds new light on the long history of self-portraiture with fresh interpretations of famous examples and new works, ideas, and anecdotes This broad cultural history of self-portraiture brilliantly maps the history of the genre, from the earliest myths of Narcissus and the Christian tradition of “bearing witness” to the prolific self-image-making of today’s contemporary artists. Focusing on a perennially popular subject, the book tells the vivid history of works that offer insights into artists’ personal, psychological, and creative worlds. Topics include the importance of the medieval mirror craze in early self-portraiture; the confessional self-portraits of Titian and Michelangelo; the mystique of the artist’s studio, from Vermeer to Velázquez; the role of biography and geography for serial self-portraitists such as Courbet and Van Gogh; the multiple selves of modern and contemporary artists such as Cahun and Sherman; and recent developments in the era of globalization. Comprehensive and beautifully illustrated, the book features the work of a wide range of artists including Beckmann, Caravaggio, Dürer, Gentileschi, Ghiberti, Giotto, Goya, Kahlo, Kauffman, Magritte, Mantegna, Picasso, Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt and Van Eyck. The full range of the subject is explored, including comic and caricature self-portraits, “invented” or imaginary self-portraits, and important collections of self-portraiture such as that of the Medici.

How would it feel to stand in the Sistine Chapel as Michelangelo painted? To watch him create his breathtaking sculptures? James Hall, an art critic, historian, and lecturer, puts us in that amazing position, and in the process reveals intriguing details on the master artist’s life and thoughts. Despite a reputation for being a truculent loner, Michelangelo was an eloquent speaker in two dialogues compiled in the 1540s, and the "conversation” here comes from those and a number of other sources, including contemporary biographies, Michelangelo’s many letters and poems, and anecdotes and quotations relayed by contemporaries.

A lively and accessible introduction to self- portraiture, reflecting on the work of over sixty artists from the Renaissance to the present day. After six centuries, self-portraiture shows no sign of losing its ability to capture the public imagination. Self-portraits have the power to illuminate a range of universal concerns, from identity, purpose, and authenticity, to frailty, futility, and mortality. In this new volume in the Art Essentials series, author Natalie Rudd expertly casts fresh light on the self-portrait and its international appeal, exploring the historical contexts within which self-portraits developed and considering the meanings they hold today. With commentaries on works by artists ranging from Jan van Eyck, Francisco Goya, and Vincent van Gogh, to Frida Kahlo, Faith Ringgold, and Cindy Sherman, this book explores the emotive and expressive potential of self-portraiture. The Self-Portrait also considers a wide range of materials available for self-expression, from painting and photography to installation and performance. In the process, the book explores the central question of why artists return to the self-portrait again and again. In her vibrant and timely text, Rudd dissects this and other important questions, revealing the shifting faces of individuality and selfhood in an age where we are interrogating notions of personal identity more than ever before.

An exploration of the genesis and early development of the genre of self-portraiture in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries. The author examines a series of self-portraits in Renaissance Italy, arguing that they represented the aspirations of their creators to change their social standing.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

(Vocal Selections). Winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical, Michael R. Jackson's Pulitzer Prize-winning blisteringly funny masterwork exposes the heart and soul of a young artist grappling with desires, identity, and instincts he boths loves and loathes. This collection features 15 songs from the show arranged for vocal line with piano accompaniment. Songs include: Boundaries * Didn't Want Nothin' * Exile in Gayville * Inner White Girl * Intermission Song * Inwood Daddy * Memory Song * Periodically * Precious Little Dream / AIDS Is God's Punishment * Second Wave * A Strange Loop * A Sympathetic Ear * Today * Tyler Perry Writes Real Life * We Wanna Know.

A collection of over thirty poems by James Allen Hall in which he explores family and self-identity.

'Auto Focus' features the work of 75 contemporary photographers from around the world for whom self-portraiture is a central part of their work. Issues of identity, nationality, sexuality and race are raised by the portraits.