The Courtauld is one of the United Kingdom’s great art collections, displayed throughout the magnificent historic setting of Somerset House in central London. This elegant book is a curated selection of its highlights — paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and decorative arts — each beautifully illustrated and accompanied by an insightful commentary. Notable among these treasures are remarkable Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, including the world-famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. This book is also an engaging account of how The Courtauld became an internationally renowned center for the teaching and research of art history, conservation and curating. It was founded nearly a century ago in the belief that art has the power to enrich people’s lives. The Courtauld continues that mission today, promoting the understanding of the visual arts and offering a place where everyone can find enjoyment and inspiration.

The Courtauld: Highlights

Arts & Photography

Serres, Karen

Gerstein, Alexandra

Wright, Barnaby

van Claerbergen, Ernst Vegelin

Gottardo, Ketty

History & Criticism

Scala

This publication is devoted to Walter Sickert's remarkable group of paintings of female nudes produced in and around Camden Town between 1905 and 1912 and now considered to be among his most important and provocative works.

Walter Sickert - Camden Town Nudes

Tickner, Lisa

Baron, Wendy

Paul Holberton Publishing

This catalogue accompanied the first exhibition to bring together the seminal group of paintings of London building sites by Frank Auerbach (born 1931). Produced between 1952 and 1962, the paintings are among the most profound responses made by any artist to the postwar urban landscape. These works chart the early development of Auerbach’s remarkable approach to painting, for which he is celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest living artists.

Frank Auerbach: The London Building Sites 1952-1962 (The Courtauld Gallery)

Moorhouse, Paul

Garlake, Margaret

Paul Cézanne’s famous series of paintings of peasants playing cards has long been considered among his most important and powerful works. The image of seated peasants, still and seeming silent, concentrating on their game of cards, can be seen as the human counterpart to the landscapes of Cézanne’s home countryside, notably Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which held such iconic significance for him. The two most ambitious versions show three card players, with spectators; in the other three the subject is distilled into a simpler form, with two figures facing each other, seen in profile, as in the Courtauld masterpiece. This catalogue accompanies a landmark exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, that will be the first to bring together the majority of these remarkable paintings alongside a magnificent group of Cézanne’s closely related portraits of Provençal peasants and rarely seen preparatory oil sketches and drawings.

Cézanne's Card Players (The Courtauld Gallery)

The story of the creative relationship between the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and the British artist Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) is largely untold, yet during the 1930s they were leading forces of avant-garde art in Europe and their work was profoundly connected. This book accompanies an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London, that will be the first to offer a comprehensive account of the parallel artistic paths charted by Mondrian and Nicholson during this remarkable decade. It will bring together an extraordinary group of paintings and reliefs to show how each artist was driven by a profound belief in the potential of abstract art to attain the highest aesthetic and spiritual power. Nicholson’s visit in 1934 to Mondrian’s studio in Paris, where they were both involved with the Abstraction-Création group, inspired a friendship that would last until Mondrian’s death ten years later and would see them working in neighboring London studios for two years from 1938. Together they contributed to a number of groundbreaking exhibitions and avant-garde publications, in which their work was often presented side by side, expressing their shared commitment to creating new forms of abstract art. The friendship spanned a highly productive period for both artists who, in their different ways, were determined to refine and intensify their abstract work. Nicholson found powerful confirmation of his artistic convictions through Mondrian’s example, which emboldened his approach and led him to produce some of the very greatest works of his career. At the same time Mondrian was taking new directions in his painting, making greater use of expanded areas of white space in combination with restrained but intensive areas of vibrant color. He also renewed the possibilities of his famous horizontal and vertical black lines leading to his development of the ‘double line’, which greatly enhanced the visual dynamism of his compositions and are recognized today as being among his most iconic painting. This publication will reunite paintings and reliefs which were exhibited or published together in the 1930s as well as the Mondrian works originally bought by collectors from Nicholson’s circle. It will explore in depth the importance of the relationship and the shared artistic sensibilities of the two artists, shedding new light upon this vital episode in the history of abstract art.

Mondrian || Nicholson: In Parallel (The Courtauld Gallery)

GREEN, Christopher

Beard, Lee

Bowness, Sophie

This fully illustrated catalog, with essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field of Picasso studies, tells the remarkable story of Pablo Picasso's breakthrough year – 1901 – as an artist. It brings together an extraordinary group of paintings to explore his rapid artistic development during this single year, which launched his career and reputation in Paris. These major paintings will be reunited from public and private collections internationally, making the catalogue a unique opportunity to experience Picasso's very first masterpieces.

Becoming Picasso: Paris 1901 (The Courtauld Gallery)

Richard Serra is one of the most important and revered artists working today. Rising to prominence on the New York art scene more than forty years ago, Serra (born 1939) is now celebrated internationally for his unprecedented monumental steel sculptures and for his radical approach to drawing. Richard Serra: Drawings for the Courtauld accompanies the first museum exhibition of Serra’s most recent drawings, which mark an exciting new departure for the artist. Made using thick black pigment applied to both sides of a clear plastic sheet, these drawings, which he calls ‘transparencies’, are extraordinary objects that challenge preconceptions of what constitutes a drawing. For Serra, drawing has always been an essential way of exploring new creative impulses, materials and working methods. His consistent ambition has been to make discoveries through the process of drawing itself, rather than to execute preconceived ideas. To this end, about two years ago Serra developed the innovative technique by which his ‘Drawings for the Courtauld’ are made. The forms that emerge are monumental: spiraling, circular or rectangular, they convey a sculptural sense of weight and balance. They also confront basic assumptions about drawing. Our perceptions of front and back, surface and depth, and most importantly the distinction between the drawn design and the material it is made from, are all challenged by these works. Serra has long admired The Courtauld Gallery’s collection and it is particularly fitting that these radical new works should be shown for the ﬁrst time at a museum with such a renowned and rich historical collection of drawings. But it is one of the Courtauld’s great paintings, Cézanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c. 1894, which has been a major touchstone for Serra throughout his career. The way Cézanne pushed the boundaries of perspective and space in the painting threw down a challenge for the young Serra that continues to drive him. “I looked at that painting and the hair on the back of my neck stood up,” Serra recalled recently. “You realize that someone has extended their vision in such a way that if you are going to make any contribution at all, you have to break new ground.” Serra’s ‘Drawings for the Courtauld’ are the latest expression of this lifelong pursuit.

Richard Serra: Drawings for the Courtauld (The Courtauld Gallery)

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Rising to prominence in Vienna alongside Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka in the turbulent years around the First World War, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) is one of the most important artists of the early 20th century and a central figure of Austrian Expressionism. He produced some of the most radical depictions of the human figure created in modern times – so radical that in 1912 Schiele was imprisoned for two months for exhibiting his ‘offensive’ nudes. At the trial the judge is alleged to have burned some of the artist’s drawings in open court with a candle flame. Accompanying the first ever museum show in this country devoted entirely to the artist, this publication will explore in detail one of Schiele’s most vital and original subjects – his extraordinary drawings and watercolors of male and female nudes. It will bring together an outstanding group of the artist’s works to chart his groundbreaking approach during his short but urgent career. Schiele’s technical virtuosity, highly original vision and unflinching depictions of the naked figure distinguish these works as being among his most significant contributions to the development of modern art. This sharply focused catalogue will be provide an opportunity to examine more than thirty of these radical works, assembled from international public and private collections for the exhibition. Schiele arrived in Vienna in 1906, aged just fifteen, to train as an artist. He quickly proved his precocious talent and the following year sought out Klimt, who mentored Schiele and helped establish his reputation. Nothing he produced during these first few years in Vienna prepares us for the extraordinary breakthrough Schiele made in 1910 when he began to draw the figure in an entirely new way and the subject of the nude took on an increasingly important role. Highly gestural and expressive, his nudes from this year are manipulated to perform a psychologically charged body language that soon became a hallmark of his art. This catalogue will begin with a rich selection of nudes from this seminal year including a number of Schiele’s powerful naked self-portraits. The main section will explore his provocative nudes of the following few years when he pushed artistic convention to offer a more direct expression of human experience, bound up with themes of self-expression, procreation, sexuality and eroticism. Many of these works affronted contemporary standards of morality and were considered pornographic. The last part of the book will look at works from the final productive years of Schiele’s short life before his untimely death in 1918 from Spanish influenza, aged just 28. His later nudes suggest a more classical solidity and sometimes lyricism, whilst retaining their unflinching rawness as naked bodies. Throughout the book will be a number of major self-portraits, demonstrating how Schiele’s approach was linked to his sense of self and his ongoing examination of his physical and psychological make-up. An important aspect of all these works is Schiele’s unique draftsmanship and the authors will investigate the development of his technique and approach to the medium that he made so distinctively his own, as well as his wide-ranging influence on the course of modern art that still resonates today.

Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude (The Courtauld Gallery)

Blackshaw, Gemma

Vergo, Peter

Accompanying an exhibition that will be the first to investigate the depiction ?of rural figures by one of the most admired British watercolorists of the 19th century, William Henry Hunt. Taking its lead from W.H. Hunt’s watercolor The Head Gardener, c. 1825, that is part of The Courtauld Gallery’s permanent collection, this focused display will be first to investigate Hunt’s depiction of rural figures in his work of the 1820s and 1830s. Consisting of twenty drawings borrowed from collections across the United Kingdom, William Henry Hunt: Country People will bring together watercolors depicting country people in their working or living environments, from farmer and gamekeeper to stonebreaker and gleaner. The representation of these country men, women and children, closely observed, raises questions about their status and way of life at a time of rapid agricultural and social change. These profound changes are also reflected in the literature of the period. William Henry Hunt was one of the most admired watercolorists of the 19th century. Better known as ‘Bird’s Nest Hunt’ for his intricate still lives of flowers, fruit and birds’ eggs, he exhibited prolifically at the Old Water Colour Society. His works were sought after by collectors, notably John Ruskin, a serious champion of his work.’

William Henry Hunt: Country People

Selbourne, Joanna

Frank Auerbach: The Charcoal Heads

TOIBIN, COLM.

Individual Artists

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