Most Popular Books by Peter Blake

Artist''s statement - About collage: Peter Blake in conversation with Natalie Rudd - Collage: a brief history - Biography.

The story of modern architecture is told here through the lives and works of three men who changed the face of the cities we live in. Le Corbusier gave to modern design a sure and brilliant sense of form; Mies brought an almost Gothic discipline of structure; and Wright heralded a new and dramatic concept of space and freedom. Through this triple focus, Peter Blake provides a perspective on the entire range of twentieth-century architecture.

In this beautiful and practical book, one of the world''s foremost sailors, Peter Blake, now head of the Cousteau Society, tells you all you need to know about the basics of sailing.

An obsession that has spanned almost 30 years, Dylan Thomas''s seminal mid-century ''play for voices'', ''Under Milk Wood'', has long been present in the imagination of Peter Blake. From trips during his Brotherhood of Ruralists'' days to Thomas''s creative refuge at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, to repeated playing of the recorded versions in his treasure trove of a studio, the ''dismays and rainbows'' of these sequences of 110 watercolours, pencil portraits and etchings will form one of Blake''s most substantial single bodies of work.

In this book, Peter Blake articulates his clinical practice of child and adolescent psychotherapy. A clear conceptual framework and historical context is provided for the work. The book is then structured to follow the therapeutic process, from assessment (referral and initial interview, individual assessment, developmental considerations, assessment for therapy, working with parents) to therapy (physical and mental settings, interpretation, the role and challenges of play, transference and countertransference, termination). Drawing on the Winnicottian tradition, in which fun and humour have a place in child and adolescent work, Blake demonstrates how a therapist can be playful and less directly interpretative. How psychodynamic thinking can be applied in an effective yet time-limited manner is also demonstrated. The text is enlivened by many case studies and clinical anecdotes. For therapists who are new to child and adolescent psychotherapy, and who wish to take a psychodynamic approach, the book will provide a valuable introduction.

In his study of the journalist George Augustus Sala, Peter Blake discusses the way Sala’s personal style, along with his innovations in form, influenced the New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Blake places Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals and examines his prolific contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the context of contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. Sala’s journalistic style, Blake argues, was a product of the very different mediums in which he worked, whether it was the visual arts, bohemian journalism, novels, pornographic plays, or travel writing. Harkening back to a time when journalism and fiction were closely connected, Blake’s book not only expands our understanding of one of the more prominent and interesting journalists and personalities of the nineteenth century, but also sheds light on prominent nineteenth-century writers and artists such as Charles Dickens, Mathew Arnold, William Powell Frith, Henry Vizetelly, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Peter Blake, founding father of British Pop Art, has been producing quirky and inventive collages since the mid-1950s, when he was in his early twenties. His Venice Fantasies, made in his mid-seventies with the same lightness of touch and fresh eye that has distinguished all his work, are marked by his characteristic wry humor and unerring sense of the absurd. Fifty years after his first trip to the most magical of Italian cities, he made his first return visit in 2007, just as he was embarking on this series of affectionate and often frankly preposterous tributes to the city as reconfigured in his imagination. Taking as his cue the Surrealist collages of Max Ernst and others, he engages in the same sort of time travel and unlikely alliances that marked his celebrated cover design for the Beatles LP Sgt. Pepper''s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Each of the 21 images takes as its starting-point a photographic view of Venice from the early 1900s, part of a concertina set of tourist postcards, but then subverts it to consistently surprising ends. The city is invaded by penguins and engulfed in icebergs, used as a stage set by dance companies and as a camp site by scout troops, its tranquillity shattered by plane crashes, madly overcrowded regattas, fishermen, motorboat racers and "magic crowds." On the Piazza San Marco, citizens from ancient times rub shoulders at a café with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, quintessential American tourists happily consuming their own picnic. Teeming with detail, these humorous and highly entertaining pictures show Blake at his imaginative best.

Contains many black and white photos of the desecration of the U.S. landscape in the late 50''s/early 60''s.

"For more than half a century, Peter Blake has lived in the mainstream of contemporary architecture and art. As writer, magazine editor, critic, and practicing architect, he has numbered among his friends and acquaintances (and occasionally enemies) virtually all of the major figures of modern architecture, and a good many famous artists as well. In this crisp and lively memoir, he brings them - and the time he shared with them - vividly and memorably to life." "The anecdotes are memorable. Here is Frank Lloyd Wright (regarded by Blake as a perfect example of "the Artist as Ham," though he greatly admired his buildings) exploding at the discovery of young Blake''s savage review of his Autobiography ... Bertrand Russell trying to escape visitors by hiding up a tree in Pennsylvania, as he calmly puffs away on his pipe ... Buckminster Fuller tap-dancing on a drafting table to demonstrate the metrical affinity between bebop and a new mathematical system he is working on ... Mies van der Rohe at work, stolidly gazing at a model of an ITT building while assistants scurry around making alterations ... Marcel Breuer telling how he invented his famous chair ... Philip Johnson delightedly answering a solemn question about heat loss from a visitor to his glass house: "The heat loss is absolutely tremendous" - and beaming from ear to ear." "But No Place Like Utopia also has a deeper theme: how modern architecture, born and raised between the wars and after with a strong sense of social and political idealism, in the 1960s gradually fell back into its ancient role as an elitist pursuit dedicated to flattering the rich and powerful. Only now, as Blake makes clear, can we see the beginnings of a return to its original principles." "From the push-and-pull of politics, culminating in the witch-hunts of the McCarthy period, to heady days in the magazine business, first with Architectural Forum and then with the brilliant but ultimately doomed Architecture Plus, Peter Blake has always been energetically involved with his art and with his era. No Place Like Utopia is thus doubly valuable, as a wonderfully readable historical and personal document, and a pungent commentary on where modern architecture went wrong and right."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved