Photo: Naomi Wood
Books
Julian Bell has written many books and articles about artists and cultural history
Natural Light
The 1600s: the decade of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, and of Caravaggio's radically dark altarpieces; the years when Galileo started launching a scientific revolution. All of them scratching at an urgent anxiety: how does reality hold together, once the old classical world systems have fallen apart? What, in other words, is 'nature'?
Julian Bell’s new book, Natural Light, introduces us to Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610), a young artist from Frankfurt who frequented the same streets of Rome stalked by Caravaggio. Brooding on those pressing far-reaching questions, Elsheimer created intense and mysterious compositions on tiny copper panels. His art – later to become something of a cult secret – prompted others to rethink what 'the light of nature' might mean. Small as they were, his pictorial inventions touched the imaginations not only of his friend Peter Paul Rubens, but of painters as unalike as Rembrandt and Claude Lorrain. Even in India, the Mughal artist Payag would originate his own responses to these strange new visions of humanity and its footing in the world.
Ways of Drawing
2019
Ways of Drawing brings together a sophisticated, exciting range of reflections on markmaking by practising artists, teachers and writers. From explorations of how it feels to draw and personal accounts of artistic development, to short, imaginative propositions for looking, understanding and experiencing afresh, this collection repositions drawing as a vital creative and intellectual endeavour.
The book is divided into three sections: ‘Studio Space’, which focuses on drawing within four walls; ‘Open Space’, which ventures out into the cityscapes and landscapes around us; and ‘Inner Space’, which returns to the living, feeling, drawing person. Each section is comprehensively illustrated with a wealth of drawings, prints and paintings by faculty and alumni of the Royal Drawing School, works by established artists past and present, and photographs of artists at work.
What is Painting (2nd edition)
2017
At the turn of the twenty-first century, many felt sceptical or confused about painting’s on-going cultural relevance. In this context, Julian Bell’s What is Painting? provided an accessible and inspired account of artistic thinking and practice, and of the complexities then facing artists and their audiences. Eighteen years on, the situation is partly reversed. Painting has proved too resilient a practice to be marginalized any longer. Yet is there any sense of forward momentum for the art? Interrogating the factors that have changed our ideas of painting over the past two centuries, Bell addresses relations between figuration and abstraction and between narrative and non-narrative painting, as well as the waning of conceptual art’s dominance and the proliferation of experiments with the physical limits of painting. He also clarifies general concepts such as ‘expression’ and ‘representation’.
Fully revised to provide a fresh look at the situation of painting, this new edition maintains the objective of lucid, historically informative explanation that earned the original edition its status as a text of lasting value. The book provides a general reader’s introduction to theories of painting that is not only reliable, but also stimulating and amusing to read.
Vincent Van Gogh: A Power Seething
2015
“I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and―of the artistic life,” Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1888. “And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there’s a chance that our hopes won’t be in vain.” His prediction would come true. In his brief and explosively creative life―he committed suicide a few years later at the age of thirty-seven―Van Gogh made us see the world in a new way. His shining landscapes of Provence and somber portraits of workers shattered the relationship between light and dark, and his hallucinatory visions were so bright they nearly blinded the world.
Julian Bell’s passion for his subject brings the painter to life. Bell writes with slashing intensity, at once scholarly and defiantly partisan. “I have written this book out of my love for Vincent van Gogh, the uniquely exciting painter, and Vincent van Gogh, the letter writer of heart-piercing eloquence,” he declares. For Bell, Van Gogh was an artistic genius and more: he was a wonder of the world.
Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World
2015
This is the first book to survey the work of painter and printmaker Tom Hammick (b.1963). It sets Hammick's art within the context of contemporary debates about painting while relating it to the two-centuries-old Romantic tradition. Julian Bell explores in depth the artist's working processes, imagery and career to date, arguing that Hammick's work constitutes one of the richest imaginative achievements in late 20th- and early 21st-century British art. Many of Hammick's pictures respond to the landscape of South-East England, where he has spent much of his life. Others are inspired by his encounter with the wilderness of Canada's remote maritime provinces, a regularly revisited imaginative resource that has given his work much of its distinctive flavour.
Hammick has spent three periods in Canada: as both a student and later visiting lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax between 1989 and 2002, and in 2005 after being awarded a residency at the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, now called the Rooms. Informed by the author's sustained contact with Hammick over many years, illustrated with over 120 carefully selected images, and produced in close collaboration with the artist, Tom Hammick: Wall, Window, World will appeal to the artist's collectors and wide popular audience, as well as students, art-world professionals and painting enthusiasts. It is available also in a special edition incorporating the three-part colour etching Fallout, created by the artist specially for this publication in an edition of 60.
Mirror of the World: A New History of Art
2007
With remarkable clarity, Julian Bell tells the story of how art has evolved through the millennia and across the world. He follows the changing trends in the making and significance of art in different cultures, and explains why the art of the day looked and functioned as it did. Key images and objects-some of them familiar works of art; others, less known but equally crucial to the story-act as landmarks on the journey, focal points around which the discussion always centers. Along the way, Bell answers fundamental questions such as "What is art and where does it start?" and "Why do humans make it and how does it serve them?
Previous histories tended to focus only on the masterpieces of Western art, in the process excluding the work of women or non-Western artists, or else considering developments around the world as separate, unrelated phenomena. Bell's achievement is to take a global perspective, bringing the distinct stories together in one convincing narrative. He draws insightful and inspired connections between different continents and cultures and across the millennia, which results in a rich and seamless introduction to the world of visual creativity.
Hundreds of carefully selected illustrations show how artists from different ages and societies often shared the same formal, technical, and aesthetic concerns, while others took divergent paths when their vision dictated it.
Natural Light - 2023
Ways of Drawing - 2019
What is Painting - 2017
Van Gogh A Power Seething - 2015
Tom Hammick; Wall, Window, World - 2015
Mirror Of The World - 2007