Changing how we look at and think about the color grey Why did many of the twentieth century’s best-known abstract painters often choose grey, frequently considered a noncolor and devoid of meaning? Frances Guerin argues that painters (including Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter) select grey to respond to a key question of modernist art: What is painting? By analyzing an array of modernist paintings, Guerin demonstrates that grey has a unique history and a legitimate identity as a color. She traces its use by painters as far back as medieval and Renaissance art, through Romanticism, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism to show how grey is the perfect color to address the questions asked by painting within art history and to articulate the relationship between painting and the historical world of industrial modernity. A work of exceptional erudition, breadth, and clarity, presenting an impressive range of canonical paintings across centuries as examples, The Truth Is Always Grey is a treatise on color that allows us to see something entirely new in familiar paintings and encourages our appreciation for the innovation and dynamism of the color grey.

A groundbreaking exploration of German expressionist cinema and technology.

In Frances Guerin's history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the use of light is the pivot around which a new national cinema and culture emerges. Guerin's interpretations center on use of light in films such as Metropolis (1926) and Der Golem (1920) and we see how light is the substance of image composition, the narrative structuring device, and the thematic concern.Choice Outstanding Academic Title

A history of rare archival amateur photographs and films from Nazi Germany

Over the last three decades, Jacqueline Humphries (b.1960) has, through an innovative painterly process, challenged the limits of abstraction. She has produced a body of work that reaches beyond modernism, Abstract Expressionism, and abstraction as we know it. Multi-layered in application, Humphries challenges the viewer to interact with her painting in diverse ways, inviting new approaches to looking and being with a work. Expertly analysing the ways in which Humphries has challenged convention and placed abstract painting at the centre of our twenty-first century visual environment, Frances Guerin's illuminating text reveals an artist at the peak of her powers.

Nothing is quite as exciting, or mysterious, as a masquerade ball. Who lurks hidden behind the mask? What secrets are concealed in the crowd of fake faces? Find out in this anthology featuring 16 unique stories from Gothic fantasy, fairy tale, and even a futuristic take on the classic theme.