Seven Keys to Modern Art

Thames & Hudson

Published 2019.

Hardcover

• ASIN: 0500021627

• ISBN-13: 978-0500021620

https://www.waterstones.com/book/seven-keys-to-modern-art/simon-morley/9780500021620

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seven-Keys-Modern-Simon-Morley/dp/0500021627

A liberating approach to interpreting modern and contemporary art, focusing on twenty major artworks from around the world and representing a diversity of styles, mediums, and artists.

With modern art’s proclivity for self-expression, originality, and the abstract, great works can often seem indecipherable. This book provides the tools to help interpret the seemingly bizarre and often intimidating aspects of modern and contemporary art by exploring twenty works in terms of seven key perspectives: history, biography, aesthetics, experience, theory, criticism, and the market.

I show how twenty well-known but little-understood works of art can serve as useful gateways not only for understanding each other, but also for appreciating works by the same artists and the wider world of art in general. Morley points to visual and theoretical dimensions of art that are not immediately obvious, reconstructing the perspectives of artists and the context within which works were made. 

"“Artist and art professor Morley unlocks the sometimes indecipherable world of modern and contemporary art. Students, art aficionados, and museum-goers will appreciate this compact guide and its astute observations.”"
― Booklist Online

 Writing on the Wall : Word and Image in Modern Art

Thames & Hudson

Published in 2003.

Hardcover and paper UK Edition

• ASIN: 0500238111

• ISBN-13: 978-0500238110

From the cut-up Cubist collages of Picasso to the monumental filmic narratives of Fiona Banner, and from the schoolboy subversion of Magritte to the demotic scrawl of Cy Twombly, the use of words is one of the defining features of modern art. Indeed, with many contemporary works, only those without text are remarkable. Exploring the strange, unsettling, and often humorous results when words escape their traditional confines and inhabit artworks, this book is the first sustained consideration of the manifold infiltrations of the written word into the visual arts from the nineteenth century to the present day.

I trace the growing bond between word and image, explaining how artists have harnessed the resulting tension to form identities, challenge authority, and make sense of a world in constant change. Writing on the Wall discusses familiar movements from the Impressionists to the present day, focusing on many works of modern art such as Dada nonsense words, Surrealist painting-poems, Constructivist typographies, oriental calligraphy, postwar gestural painting, and much more. As I consider these works, I reveal how artists have responded to an environment increasingly saturated with words, and also asks how the mass media have adopted and adapted artistic devices in propaganda, typography, and advertising. The book ends with a look at current developments in the world of hypertext, where word and image have at last found an essential unity.

"An intriguing survey of word-imbued artworks of the modern period, Writing on the Wall will surely be a touchstone for readings on the relationship between language and art across time. While filling a gap in the current scholarship on text in art, Morley has crafted in clear, accessible prose, a study that is easily extrapolated beyond modernism, indeed beyond the fine arts. It is an adventuresome work, and extremely stimulating."—Kathy O'Dell, author of Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s

 L'Art Les Mots

Hazan

French Edition Hardcover

• ASIN: 2850259551

• ISBN-13: 978-2850259555

 The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art). Editor.

Whitechapel Art Gallery/The MIT Press

Paperback

• ASIN: 0854881786

• ISBN-13: 978-0854881789

 Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century. Contributor.

The MIT Press

Paperback

• ASIN: 0262534975

• ISBN-13: 978-0262534970