Simon Baker Books

The definitive monograph of the outrageous, unorthodox New York painter George Condo With his arresting, unsettling style, George Condo emerged from the dynamism of the New York art scene in the early 1980s, and he has been restlessly painting, drawing, and sculpting—bringing forms into the world in one way or another—ever since. Reliably inconsistent, Condo’s references and inspirations, in both style and content, ricochet deliriously around the canon of Western art history. Somewhere between his fake Tiepolos, reconfigured Manets, impossibly intricate paintings that seem to be abstract until you get up close, and his perpetually screaming cubist hags, Condo has invented, mastered, and expanded not just one painterly language but the whole lexicon. Working closely with the artist, writer and art historian Simon Baker has combined biographical, chronological, and thematic approaches to survey George Condo’s work and career to date. An introductory essay on Condo’s contradictory nature and a chapter exploring his early career are followed by three thematic chapters that look at the years from 1980s to the present, tracing Condo’s different systematic approaches to the language of painting, exploring his relationship to the concept of abstraction, and probing the darker side of his psychological iconography.

The work of Issei Suda (1940-2019) is distinct in contemporary avant-garde Japanese photography for its celebration of the beauty of theeveryday. His black-and-white pictures reflect on the apparent banality ofurban life, capturing "the little surprises usually ignored in our world": theshadow of a figure, the shapes of the street, the expressions on strangers' faces. Suda's practice revealed the tensions between old and new Japan,juxtaposing the ingrained visual traditions of Japanese culture with theprevailing western vocabulary of fashion, advertising, and leisure, as seenthrough his observant and tender lens.

This book is a new account of the surrealist movement in France between the two world wars. It examines the uses that surrealist artists and writers made of ideas and images associated with the French Revolution, describing a complex relationship between surrealism’s avant-garde revolt and its powerful sense of history and heritage. Focusing on both texts and images by key figures such as Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, Max Morise, and Man Ray, this book situates surrealist material in the wider context of the literary and visual arts of the period through the theme of revolution. It raises important questions about the politics of representing French history, literary and political memorial spaces, monumental representations of the past and critical responses to them, imaginary portraiture and revolutionary spectatorship. The study shows that a full understanding of surrealism requires a detailed account of its attitude to revolution, and that understanding this surrealist concept of revolution means accounting for the complex historical imagination at its heart.

Rev. ed. of: Microbiology / S. Baker ... [et al.]. 3rd ed. 2007.

This is the story of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Simon Baker charts the rise and fall of the world's first superpower, focusing on six momentous turning points that shaped Roman history. Welcome to Rome as you've never seen it before - awesome and splendid, gritty and squalid. From the conquest of the Mediterranean beginning in the third century BC to the destruction of the Roman Empire at the hands of barbarian invaders some seven centuries later, we discover the most critical episodes in Roman history- the spectacular collapse of the 'free' republic, the birth of the age of the 'Caesars', the violent suppression of the strongest rebellion against Roman power, and the bloody civil war that launched Christianity as a world religion. At the heart of this account are the dynamic, complex but flawed characters of some of the most powerful rulers in history- men such as Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero and Constantine. Putting flesh on the bones of these distant, legendary figures, Simon Baker looks beyond the dusty, toga-clad caricatures and explores their real motivations and ambitions, intrigues and rivalries. The superb narrative, full of energy and imagination, is a brilliant distillation of the latest scholarship and a wonderfully evocative account of Ancient Rome.