Courtauld Gallery
Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve - OUT OF PRINT
260 x 216 mm, 144 pages, hardback, 80 colour illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
DOWNLOAD PRICE: £12.50
ISBN: 9781903470541
Out of print in the UK, but still available in the US and Canada. CLICK HERE.
Essays by Caroline Campbell, Curator at the Courtauld Gallery; Susan Foister, Senior curator at the National Gallery, London; Dr Stephanie Buck, Curator of Drawings at The Courtauld Gallery.
This is the catalogue to the first exhibition in Britain to be devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) who was one of the greatest German Renaissance painters. Cranach spent the majority of his career in Wittenberg, as court artist to the powerful Electors of Saxony, and was a close associate of the Protestant theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546). Throughout his career, Cranach devoted his considerable artistic talents to the furthering of the Lutheran cause. He found in Eve’s temptation of Adam a subject which was ideally suited to his outstanding gifts as a portrayer of landscape, animals and the female nude, and to which Protestant theologians like Luther did not object.
The Courtauld’s Adam and Eve is arguably the most beautiful of Cranach’s fifty or more depictions of this subject. It brilliantly combines devotional meaning with pictorial elegance and invention. The scene is set in a forest clearing where Eve stands before the Tree of Knowledge, caught in the act of handing an apple to a bewildered Adam. This exhibition will explore the making and meaning of this Protestant and courtly masterpiece, and the contexts in which it was made and seen. It will incorporate much conservation and technical research. More than twenty loans of paintings, drawings and prints will be drawn from major British and international collections, including the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 2010. 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. More
As a result of generous loans of over one hundred outstanding works of art, in 2002 the Courtauld Gallery was able to extend its collection further into the twentieth century. For the first time the Gallery was able to show historically coherent groups of works representing key developments in the art history of the early 20th century. This is the catalogue to the new display. More
This is the first publication dedicated to the extraordinary series of paintings of London that André Derain produced at the height of his avant-garde notoriety, having been newly branded a Fauve or 'wild beast' in Paris for his uncompromising use of pure colour. More
This is the first publication 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. More
"The whole thing is a curatorial and scholarly triumph ... the catalogue essays do full justice to the power of Michelangelo's intellect, as well as to hand and eye." (Richard Dorment, Telegraph)
Michelangelo's Dream (or Il Sogno) is one of the finest of all Italian Renaissance drawings and is amongst The Courtauld Gallery's greatest treasures. Executed at the height of the artist's career, this magnificent work exemplifies Michelangelo's unrivalled skill as draughtsman and his extraordinary power of invention. More
Accompanying an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, this catalogue explores one of the most important and historically neglected art forms of Renaissance Florence: cassoni – pairs of chests that were lavishly decorated with precious metals and elaborate paintings and were often the most expensive of a whole suite of decorative objects commissioned to celebrate marriage alliances between powerful families. More
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 post-war 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. More
This is the first book to consider Lewis’s drawing as a distinct contribution to his art, despite the importance he attributed to draughtsmanship. Lewis wrote that the line in drawing was nothing less than “the bone beneath the pulp”. “It is more difficult upon a piece of white paper ... to deceive the expert spectator than it is with a lot of oil paint upon a canvas.” This book traces his drawing from youthful figure studies and portraits to the surreal abstractions and dreamscapes of his later years. More
The Spooner collection of British watercolours is one of the finest of its kind, featuring all the leading artists of the period 1750–1850. Among the fine sheets included are watercolours of the Lake District by John White Abbott, and rural scenes by several artists – Gainsborough, Turner, Cozens, Rowlandson, Francis Towne, Samuel Palmer. Architecture dominates the setting in works by Girtin, Cotman and Sandby. More
This book accompanied an exhibition which united La Loge for the first time with Renoir's other treatments of the subject and with loge paintings by contemporaries, including Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Concentrating on the early years of Impressionism during the 1870s, the book explores how these artists used the loge to capture the excitement and changing nature of fashionable Parisian society. More
This book accompanies the new display of the Courtauld family silver collection in the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, which opened in June 2003. All the silver presented in the book was produced or hallmarked by three generations of the Courtauld family of goldsmiths. More
This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and The Courtauld Gallery, London, which will be the first full display of the Courtauld’s outstanding collection of watercolours by J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). The collection spans the artist’s career, ranging from an important early view of the Avon Gorge, Bristol, made when Turner was just sixteen years old, to examples of the monumental highly finished watercolours of his maturity and the celebrated expressive late works. More
This is an overdue investigation into one of the most remarkable artistic enterprises of the seventeenth century, much cited but seldom discussed, David Teniers the Younger’s publication in 1660 of the magnificent Theatrum Pictorium or Theatre of Painting, the first illustrated and printed collection catalogue. More
The Courtauld Gallery holds the finest group of works by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) in Britain. This is the catalogue to an exhibition showing the entire collection together for the first time, marking the culmination of The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 75th anniversary. The importance of the collection lies not only in its exceptionally high quality but also in its wide range, with seminal paintings and rarely seen drawings and watercolours from the major periods of the artist’s long career. More