Art & design styles: c 1900 to c 1960

  • Gauguin and Polynesia

    £40.00

    The Post-Impressionist artist and writer Paul Gauguin led an extraordinary, troubled and restlessly itinerant life; he came late to painting and spent most of his last decade in the Pacific islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas, where he produced paintings loosely based on Polynesian tradition that heralded the emergence of primitivism and would exert a profound influence on modernist artists from Picasso and Matisse to Jackson Pollock. In this illustrated life of Gauguin, Nicholas Thomas retells the artist’s story for a twenty-first-century audience, giving greater consideration to the Pacific contexts of his experience, and to Pacific perspectives on his art and his legacy.

  • High Street

    £20.00

    A facsimile edition of the classic ‘High Street’, which pairs the timeless illustrations of Eric Ravilious with a fascinating text by architectural historian J. M. Richards. First published in 1938, this charming book introduces the British high street. Shops include the family butcher, the cheesemonger, the baker and confectioner and the oyster bar, as well as specialised establishments such as the plumassier, the clerical outfitter and the submarine engineer. Only 2000 copies of the original book were printed before the lithographic plates were destroyed in the London Blitz. As a result, it has become one of the most collectible of all artists’ books from this period. This beautiful facsimile edition features all 24 of Ravilious’s colour illustrations, and includes an essay by Gill Saunders, Senior Curator of Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, that sets the book in its historical context.

  • Threads

    £16.99

    John Craske was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned 36, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as ‘a stuporous state’. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also of the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of the evacuation of Dunkirk. Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So Julia Blackburn’s account of his life is far from a conventional biography.

  • Diane Arbus

    £25.00

    Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow’s biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist.

  • Threads

    £25.00

    John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman, was born in 1881 and in 1917, when he had just turned 36, he fell seriously ill. For the rest of his life he kept moving in and out of what was described as ‘a stuporous state’. In 1923 he started making paintings of the sea and boats and the coastline seen from the sea, and later, when he was too ill to stand and paint, he turned to embroidery, which he could do lying in bed. His embroideries were also the sea, including his masterpiece, a huge embroidery of The Evacuation of Dunkirk. Very few facts about Craske are known, and only a few scattered photographs have survived, together with accounts by the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland, who discovered Craske in 1937. So Julia Blackburn’s account of his life is far from a conventional biography.

Nomad Books