Art And Celebrity

A lively and accessible study of what happens when the ‘serious’ world of art collides with celebrity.

First published in German by DuMont in 2008.

Explores the vibrant visual and theatrical culture of eighteenth-century England. Focuses on the central role of images in the invention of modern celebrity culture.

The secrets of great portraits are shared with photographers at every level in this resource that includes sections on cameras, illumination, film and digital, lighting set-ups, creativity and conceptualization, connecting with the subject, and having a point of view. Original.

The first English-language monograph on the French dancer and model, Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture explores the haunting legacy of this intriguing and glamorous figure, an international celebrity at the dawn of our star-struck modernity. Situating Mérode at a pivotal moment in the history of fame and visual culture, this study probes the neglected prehistory of a visual culture obsessed with celebrities and their images.

This book offers a beautiful exploration of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's works in lithography. It explores the new artistic approach to the poster at the end of the 19th century, which bridged visual and popular culture and turned the relationship between 'high' and 'low' art on its head. Technical innovations in lithography pioneered by Lautrec and other artists produced larger sizes, more varied colours and new effects and launched the role of the poster as a powerful tool for communication and marketing in fin de siecle Paris. Lautrec's embrace of celebrity helped to define the famous hotspots (theatres, cabarets and cafe-concerts) of fin de siecle Paris and made their stars recognisable figures across the whole city. Works by contemporaries such as Pierre Bonnard, Theophile Alexandre Steinlen and Jules Cheret also feature, and Lautrec's influence on British, and particularly Scottish, artists of the period will be explored. These include Walter Richard Sickert, Arthur Melville, John Duncan Fergusson, William Nicholson and James Pryde. Exhibition: Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (06.10.2018 - 20.01.2019).

In this age of insta-stardom and selfies, Pop Art still defines the world we live in. Emerging in the 1950s, Pop Art arrived in an explosion of colour, offering bold representations and plenty of humour. All of the celebrities, events and politics that came to define two turbulent decades are encapsulated in their work. Pop Art challenged the establishment and offered a new modernism, blurring the line between art and mass production. Uncover 100 stories in this essential guide to a groundbreaking movement. Enjoy enlightening critiques of iconic works; meet key figures including Warhol and Hockney; and discover inspirational ideas and novel new methods.

Black Celebrity examines representations of postbellum black athletes and artist-entertainers by novelists Caryl Phillips and Jeffery Renard Allen and poets Kevin Young, Frank X Walker, Adrian Matejka, and Tyehimba Jess. Inhabiting the perspectives of boxer Jack Johnson and musicians “Blind Tom” Wiggins and Sissieretta Jones, along with several others, these writers retrain readers’ attention away from athletes’ and entertainers’ overdetermined bodies and toward their complex inner lives. Phillips, Allen, Young, Walker, Matejka, and Jess especially plumb the emotional archive of desire, anxiety, pain, and defiance engendered by the racial hypervisibility and depersonalization that has long characterized black stardom. In the process, these novelists and poets and, in turn, the present book revise understandings of black celebrity history while evincing the through-lines between the postbellum era and our own time.