A liberating approach to interpreting modern and contemporary art, focusing on twenty major artworks from around the world and representing a diversity of styles, mediums, and artists.
With modern art’s proclivity for self-expression, originality, and the abstract, great works can often seem indecipherable. This book provides the tools to help interpret the seemingly bizarre and often intimidating aspects of modern and contemporary art by exploring twenty works in terms of seven key perspectives: history, biography, aesthetics, experience, theory, criticism, and the market.
Author, artist, and art historian Simon Morley shows how twenty well-known but little-understood works of art can serve as useful gateways not only for understanding each other, but also for appreciating works by the same artists and the wider world of art in general. Morley points to visual and theoretical dimensions of art that are not immediately obvious, reconstructing the perspectives of artists and the context within which works were made. Seven Keys to Modern Art is a liberating approach, offering a highly practical and universally applicable method of art interpretation and appreciation. 40 color illustrations

Seven Keys to Modern Art

Arts & Photography

Morley, Simon

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

While acknowledging the legacy of Herbert Read's classic 1959 study A Concise History of Modern Painting in the World of Art series, academic and artist Simon Morley places the foundation of modern art much earlier than Read, at the emergence of Romanticism and the dawn of the industrial age. Structured loosely chronologically by period, the focus is as much on individual artists as movements, with works discussed within a broader context--stylistic, historical, geographic, and gender and ethnic frames--themes which recur throughout the chapters. Generously illustrated, the global and diverse range of artists featured include William Blake, Édouard Manet, Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich, Willem de Kooning, Amrita Sher-Gil, Faith Ringgold, and Kehinde Wiley. This guide also includes an appendix in the form of questions the reader might like to ask about the artists and ideas discussed--in order to reconsider the works from a contemporary perspective.

Modern Painting: A Concise History (World of Art)

This systematic study explores the way in which words have encroached on the visual arts from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. Simon Morley identifies the key ways in which artists and movements of the modern and contemporary era used words - sometimes to compete with images, sometimes to supplant them, often to engender new kinds of relationship or new forms, or to break down old distinctions so that the seen and the said were no longer quite so different. The book is chronologically arranged, beginning with Cubist collages and going on to deal with Dada nonsense words, Surrealist painting-poems, Constructivist typographies, oriental calligraphy and post-war gestural painting, Pop's celebration of the brand name, the wholesale transformation of art modelled on nature into art modelled on the city's forest of manmade signs, feminist challenges to the dominance of a male-centred language, the inscription in art of voices from outside the Western mainstream, and digital hypertext.

Writing on the Wall : Word and Image in Modern Art

This systematic study explores the way in which words have encroached on the visual arts from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. Simon Morley identifies the key ways in which artists and movements of the modern and contemporary era used words.

Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. Simon Morley

History

Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art

From the cut-up Cubist collages of Picasso to the monumental filmic narratives of Fiona Banner, and from the schoolboy subversion of Magritte to the demotic scrawl of Cy Twombly, the use of words is one of the defining features of modern art. Indeed, with many contemporary works, only those without text are remarkable. Exploring the strange, unsettling, and often humorous results when words escape their traditional confines and inhabit artworks, this book is the first sustained consideration of the manifold infiltrations of the written word into the visual arts from the nineteenth century to the present day. Simon Morley traces the growing bond between word and image, explaining how artists have harnessed the resulting tension to form identities, challenge authority, and make sense of a world in constant change. Writing on the Wall discusses familiar movements from the Impressionists to the present day, focusing on many works of modern art such as Dada nonsense words, Surrealist painting-poems, Constructivist typographies, oriental calligraphy, postwar gestural painting, and much more. As he considers these works, Morley reveals how artists have responded to an environment increasingly saturated with words, and also asks how the mass media have adopted and adapted artistic devices in propaganda, typography, and advertising. The book ends with a look at current developments in the world of hypertext, where word and image have at last found an essential unity.

University of California Press

From the cut-up Cubist collages of Picasso to the monumental filmic narratives of Fiona Banner, and from the schoolboy subversion of Magritte to the demotic scrawl of Cy Twombly, the use of words is one of the defining features of modern art. Indeed, with many contemporary works, only those without text are remarkable. Exploring the strange, unsettling, and often humorous results when words escape their traditional confines and inhabit artworks, this book is the first sustained consideration of the manifold infiltrations of the written word into the visual arts from the nineteenth century to the present day. Simon Morley traces the growing bond between word and image, explaining how artists have harnessed the resulting tension to form identities, challenge authority, and make sense of a world in constant change. Writing on the Wall discusses familiar movements from the Impressionists to the present day, focusing on many works of modern art such as Dada nonsense words, Surrealist painting-poems, Constructivist typographies, oriental calligraphy, postwar gestural painting, and much more. As he considers these works, Morley reveals how artists have responded to an environment increasingly saturated with words, and also asks how the mass media have adopted and adapted artistic devices in propaganda, typography, and advertising. The book ends with a look at current developments in the world of hypertext, where word and image have at last found an essential unity.

Puppetry of the Penis: The Ancient Australian Art of Genital Origami

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts & Hobbies

Transworld Publishers, Ltd

A few years ago, Simon Morley and David Friend began performing their repertoire of "dick tricks" in Melbourne, Australia. Hitting England's shores to overwhelming critical acclaim at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival, their show has also played in Montreal and Toronto, and is on its way to Broadway.

Humor & Entertainment

FRIEND, DAVID

Humor

Transworld Publishers

THE SUBLIME /ANGLAIS (DOCUMENTS OF CO)

WHITECHAPEL GAL

'Fascinating...I'll never look at a rose in quite the same way again.' Adrian Tinniswood The rose is bursting with meaning.&nbsp;Over the centuries it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death and the mystical unknown.&nbsp;Today the rose enjoys unrivalled popularity across the globe, ever present at life's seminal moments. Grown in the Middle East two thousand years ago for its pleasing scent and medicinal properties, it has become one of the most adored flowers across cultures, no longer selected by nature, but by us.&nbsp;The rose is well-versed at enchanting human hearts. From Shakespeare's sonnets to Bulgaria's Rose Valley to the thriving rose trade in Africa and the Far East, via museums, high fashion, Victorian England and Belle Epoque France, we meet an astonishing array of species and hybrids of remarkably different provenance. This is the story of a hardy, thorny flower and how, by beauty and charm, it came to seduce the world.

By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose

Oneworld Publications

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morley, Simon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Morley, Simon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morley, Simon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Seven Keys to Modern Art

Modern Painting: A Concise History (World of Art)

Writing on the Wall : Word and Image in Modern Art

Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. Simon Morley

Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art

Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art

Puppetry of the Penis: The Ancient Australian Art of Genital Origami

Puppetry of the Penis: The Ancient Australian Art of Genital Origami

THE SUBLIME /ANGLAIS (DOCUMENTS OF CO)

By Any Other Name: A Cultural History of the Rose