Encounters: New Art from Old Book

This book accompanies the exhibition "Encounters: New Art from Old" at the National Gallery in London.

To celebrate the millennium, the National Gallery, London, has commissioned twenty-five of the world's leading contemporary artists to create an entirely new work in response to the Gallery's collection of the greatest European painters of the past. These new works—paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, and video—are presented here alongside the paintings that inspired them.

Substantial essays on each modern artist, based on in-depth interviews as their works took shape, offer a vivid and privileged understanding of the origin and meaning of the new work, describing how it was made and its relation to other works by the same artist, and the influence, direct or indirect, of the National Gallery's collection.

Whether it be Howard Hodgkin drawing inspiration from Seurat's Bathers or Richard Hamilton employing the latest advances in computer graphics to explore perspective in a church interior by Saenredam, this book offers a thrilling corpus of new work that derives energy and ideas from the art of the past and demonstrates to a wide public its continuing relevance to our own time.

In his introductory essay, Robert Rosenblum surveys the uses made of the past by living artists from the eighteenth century to today's emerging generation. Richard Morphet gives an overview of the new works created for this publication.

The contributing artists are: Frank Auerbach, Balthus, Louise Bourgeois, Anthony Caro, Patrick Caulfield, Francesco Clemente, Stephen Cox, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Lucian Freud, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Kitaj, Leon Kossoff, Christopher Le Brun, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Paula Rego, Antoni Tàpies, Cy Twombly, Euan Uglow, Bill Viola, and Jeff Wall.