Chris Stephens

Published to mark the artist's 90th birthday, this is the first and only book to provide an overview of Bryan Organ, one of the world's great portrait painters.

In the 1910s and 1920s the unique landscape of the chalk downs of southern England began to exert a new fascination on writers, historians, archaeologists and artists. Modernists such as Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and William Nicholson immersed themselves in exploring these enigmatic, ancient places. The stark, rolling forms of the downs suited the modern aesthetic, offering a place where prehistory and modernity could converge. With the growing political tensions of the 1930s, this modern engagement with ancient landscape took on a symbolism that still resonates. Images of Britain evolved as the downs became both symbols of wartime vulnerability and resilience and the site of machine gun emplacements and crashed aeroplanes. Art of the Chalk Downs investigates this extraordinary collision of ancient and modern, idea and place, and the network of artists who worked and lived there. Seventy-five plates of paintings, watercolours, prints and photographs are accompanied by texts written by leading art historians James Russell and Stephens.

During the 1890s and early 1900s Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) produced a body of work that combines intimate subject matter with abstract form through the simplification of pictorial elements and observation of decorative fabrics and wallpapers. Through these devices he developed an art that is unashamedly decorative and yet always replete with subtle suggestions of deeper meanings. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft. Illustrating many rarely seen paintings from private collections, this book offers a fresh look at the early career of this much-loved artist. Introduced by Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne Museum, and with an original essay by Belinda Thompson.

This is a beautifully produced catalogue accompanying the Holburne Museum’s groundbreaking retrospective of Henry Moore’s sculptures that could fit in the hand. At the heart of Moore’s practice was the directness of working on a small scale, whether carving small stones or pieces of wood, casting lead, modelling in clay or, in later years, modelling in plasticine around a found stone or bone to be cast in bronze. The exhibition will include sculptures in stone, wood, terracotta, plaster, lead, plasticine and bronze, and span themes recurrent in his work: the reclining female figure, the mother and child, the human head, and the fallen warrior. It will include maquettes for some of his best-known, public sculptures alongside lesser-known works, including the display for the very first time in a museum exhibition of a recently discovered early lead cast of Mother & Child. The catalogue presents 85 illustrations with an introduction by Chris Stephens.

Ben Nicholson: Distant Planes provides a succinct and insightful introduction to a little-known period of the artist's career: his years in Switzerland. Nicholson is one of the great British modernists of the twentieth century and this publication includes contributions from the leading specialists in the field, with original essays by Dr Lee Beard, director of the Ben Nicholson catalogue raisonné project, Peter Khoroche, author of Ben Nicholson: Drawings and Painted Reliefs (2002), and Chris Stephens, Director of the Holburne Museum, Bath. In 1958, at the height of his creative powers and buoyed by recent accolades at the Venice Biennale and elsewhere, Nicholson left behind the coastal wilds of Cornwall for the serene beauty of Lake Maggiore. With a seemingly inexhaustible index of formal ideas, in Switzerland he returned with renewed vigour to the carved relief. Piano Nobile's publication is richly illustrated and includes several major reliefs which are presented alongside landscape drawings, both of which explore a poetic sense of place that was crucial to Nicholson's work during the period. It also includes previously unpublished material relating to Nicholson and his Swiss period.

The definitive account of the modern art made in St Ives between the 1930s and the 1960s, telling the story of this extraordinary artistic community and its legacy. For twenty-five years the small town of St Ives was one of the leading places in the world for the production of avant-garde art. The community there spanned three generations and included such international figures as Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, as well as a number of the foremost artists in post-war Britain, including Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Roger Hilton. They found themselves contributing to the international search for art in the post-war world and they established a modernist practice that continues to influence today. The story of St Ives and artists who lived and worked there has captured the imagination of art lovers since it began. This book is the product of decades of research by leading authority Chris Stephens, and will illuminate the period for dedicated fans and new readers alike.

Henry Moore has influenced the history of twentieth - century sculpture more decisively than anyone else. He was one of the first contemporary sculptors to realise his ideas in the public space throughout the world. His oeuvre was a lasting source of inspiration for an entire generation of artists – from Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso to the younger generation of German sculptors. Henry Moore (1898 – 1 986), known as the “Picasso of Sculpture”, is regarded as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century and the epitome of the modern artist. Typical of his work is the interrelationship between nature and abstraction. He discovered the “voi ds“, so - called openings and holes which heighten the sculptural, three - dimensional effect of his works. With this new approach Moore exercised a strong influence on younger sculptors, who gained decisive impulses from his sculptures. This volume presents M oore as the dominant personality of modern sculpture in collaboration with the members of the younger generation of artists.

Terry Frost was one of Britain's great abstract painters. His career spanned seven decades, starting with his introduction to art in a prisoner of war camp, and stretching into the twenty-first century. He drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, but most especially from poetry and from the landscapes of Cornwall, Yorkshire, the Greek islands and America. Resolutely abstract, his paintings collages and sculptures are known for their exuberance and strong colour. Joyful and celebratory, his work is also a sensitive and contemplative articulation of the way in which the artist experience the world. In this book Chris Stephens presents Frost's art within a historical context and in relation to the work of his international contemporaries.