Marc Lancet’s Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics reads less like a technical manual and more like a close, sustained meditation on a living craft. The book invites the reader into the humid, smoky hinterlands of Japanese kiln culture — into the pungent vocabulary of ash, flame, and clay — and does so with a critic’s attention to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr arrives, for readers and viewers alike, as more than a catalogue raisonné or a retrospective: it is a focused attempt to translate a restless, pictorial imagination into the language of the book. Glenn Barr’s work—at once cartoonish and baroque, playful and implacably strange—resists tidy taxonomies; this volume, by … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag stages Josh Agle’s work as more than a sequence of retro postcards; it presents a sustained aesthetic argument about pleasure, style, and the uneasy seductions of American postwar fantasy. La Luz de Jesus and Last Gasp have collected images that at first glance read as playful pastiche — bright … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise reads like a visual novella: a tightly edited, obsessively staged universe in which mid-century glamour and urban rot coexist, and where the human figure—often a femme fatale, a weary vixen, or a mechanized other—functions less as subject than as cultural index. The book, co-published by La Luz de Jesus and Last … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Matisse, Painter and Sculptor by Dorothy Kosinski
Dorothy Kosinski’s Matisse, Painter and Sculptor reads like a curator’s close-reading: richly attentive to objects, attentive to provenance and process, and driven by a desire to show how a single artist sustained two apparently distinct practices across a long career. Kosinski’s central move — to treat Matisse’s painting and sculpture not as separate chapters of a life … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Matisse, Painter and Sculptor by Dorothy Kosinski
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Frida Kahlo: 1907-1954 Pain and Passion by Andrea Kettenmann
Andrea Kettenmann’s Frida Kahlo: 1907–1954 – Pain and Passion stands as one of the most perspicacious art‐historical studies of Kahlo’s life and work. Merging rigorous archival scholarship with a sensitive reading of visual and textual materials, Kettenmann offers readers not simply a chronology of events, but a nuanced portrait of an artist whose identity was inextricably bound … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Frida Kahlo: 1907-1954 Pain and Passion by Andrea Kettenmann
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors by Jane Kallir
In Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors, Jane Kallir offers not merely a catalog of Schiele’s extraordinary draftsmanship but a nuanced exploration of the artist’s tumultuous inner life, aesthetic evolution, and the historical milieu that shaped him. Kallir, herself heir to Vienna’s Sezessionist legacy, brings a curator’s eye and a scholar’s rigour to her analysis, guiding the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors by Jane Kallir
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – History of Art by H. W. Janson
First appearing in 1962, H. W. Janson’s History of Art swiftly established itself as the preeminent undergraduate survey of Western visual culture, ultimately selling over four million copies across fifteen languages (Wikipedia). Conceived as a comprehensive, single‑volume narrative from Paleolithic cave paintings through mid‑20th‑century Modernism, its success lay in synthesizing vast chronologies into an accessible yet authoritative text. Structure … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – History of Art by H. W. Janson
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics in America by Robert Hunter
Ceramics in America, under the editorial stewardship of Robert Hunter, stands as a cornerstone publication for scholars, curators, and collectors devoted to the study of American ceramic arts. Now in its annual edition, the volume assembles rigorous scholarship that traverses the aesthetic, technological, and social dimensions of ceramic production from colonial times through the twentieth … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics in America by Robert Hunter
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Goya by Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes’s Goya stands as a tour de force of art history writing, blending rigorous scholarship with the flair of a seasoned cultural critic. Far more than a catalog of paintings, Hughes’s study excavates the fertile contradictions of Francisco Goya’s life and work—his oscillation between courtly success and outsider defiance, his engagement with Enlightenment optimism and his … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Goya by Robert Hughes
The New Renaissance Mindset 