WORDS FOR ART

WORDS FOR ART PUBLISHING

Words For Art publishes scholarly works focusing on the history of art, culture and society, as well as artworks produced as limited editions.

2023

Promise Unfulfilled: The Life of Mary Barkas, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

Author: Dr Robert Kaplan

Paperback

ISBN: 978-0-9875155-3-7

Mary Barkas is a forgotten psychiatric pioneer whose life and work deserves to be more widely known and recognised.

Mary Barkas (1889-1959) was a pioneering psychiatrist, physician and author from New Zealand whose career and association with such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Julius Wagner-Juarreg and Ernest Jones are now largely forgotten. Trained as a doctor in London, she worked as house physician at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, being the first woman doctor to occupy the role in the institution’s 600-year history. At the height of her career, Barkas was one of the first four psychiatrists appointed when the Maudsley Hospital opened in 1923. There her work demonstrated her versatility, showing expertise in general psychiatry, child psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

 The account of her three months in Vienna, being analysed by Rank and meeting Freud and other luminaries, in 1922, is quite unique. She translated The Therapeutic Value of Artistic Activity, authored by the avant-garde artist and Jewish refugee Arthur Segal, who taught painting as a form of psychotherapy at his Painting School for Professionals and Non-Professionals founded in London in 1937. Her five-years working at the Lawn Hospital for the Insane proved exhausting. Returning to New Zealand in 1933, Barkas spent her later years in relative seclusion, living on a rural property on the Coromandel Peninsula, ‘breeding schnauzers’ and studying Chinese philosophy.

About the author

Clinical Associate Professor Robert Kaplan is a Forensic Psychiatrist, Lecturer and highly sought-after guest speaker. He has been a qualified Psychiatrist for several decades and holds positions at the University of New South Wales, Western Sydney University, Wollongong University and Stellenbosch University.

Dr Kaplan’s expertise includes sleep and pain disorders, neuropsychiatry and psychological aspects of physical disorders and gives regular talks on forensic topics.

Other book titles by Robert Kaplan include:

The King who Strangled his Psychiatrist, in press

The Prophet of Psychiatry: In Search of Reginald Ellery, 2014

The Exceptional Brain And How it Changed The World, 2011

Medical Murder: Disturbing Cases of Doctors Who Murder, 2009

2018

The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art

Editor: Damian Smith

Contributors: Damian Smith, Geoff Raby, John McDonald, Nicolas Jose, Mario Valencia, Xu Zhongmin

Hard cover, 304 pages, full colour illustrations, English / Mandarin

ISBN: 978-0-9875155-2-0

First edition published by Words For Art, 2018

Second Edition published by Western Sydney University, 2018

Third Edition published by La Trobe University Press (LTUP) a joint imprint of Black Inc., 2022

A fascinating journey through contemporary Chinese art

The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art surveys the art collection amassed by Dr Geoff Raby AO, Australia’s Ambassador to China between 2007 and 2011. Raby arrived in Beijing in the 1980s where he first encountered the emerging contemporary art scene. Recognising that China’s new vanguard of artists were uniquely placed to reflect the unprecedented transformation of China following the Reform and Opening Up period, Raby became a collector, advocate and friend to artists who would go on to attain international recognition.

The collection charts a fascinating journey through the contemporary art of China – from a single early work made in Hotan in the far west of China and dated to 1942, through the early 1980s to the post-1989 period of the Tiananmen uprising and the arrival of the Cynical Realism and Political Pop art movements, and on to the exuberant years surrounding the Beijing Olympics of 2008.

This book is highly illustrated with works from the collection by avant garde artists such as Xiao Lu, Guan Wei, Ah Xian, Chen Wenling and Li Jin. Also featured are artists hailing from distant locations in Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Thematically, the collection embraces such themes as sex, power and politics. Surprisingly, in a country where subjects such as these are routinely sanctioned, it is truly fascinating to see just how frequently these topics appear in the products of both radical art practitioners and in state sanctioned propaganda.

With essays by Damian Smith, Geoff Raby, Nicholas Jose, John McDonald and others, The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art is an indispensable reference guide for anyone seeking cultural insight into China in the 21st century. The text is bi-lingual, in English and Chinese.

2015

Mia Salsjö: Love Which I Experience 21st Century Tarot

Author: Mia Salsjö

92 cards, 89 full colour illustrations

Dimensions: 12.1 x 7 x 3.25 cm

ISBN: 978-0-9875155-1-3

Love Which I Experience 21st Century Tarot is a conceptual tarot deck produced by Melbourne-based artist Mia Salsjö. For more information visit: www.miasalsjo.com

2013

Process Presence - Processo Presenza

Full-colour exhibition catalogue

Museo Italiano, Melbourne, Australia, February -March 2013

Curator: Damian Smith

Artists: Xiao Yu Bai, Hannah Bertram, Anna Caione, Karen Casey, Ian de Gruchy, Susan Hase, Luciana Perin and Joyce Spiller.

English / Italian (translator, Cristina Marras)

ISBN: 978-0-9875155-0-6

2011

Sidney Nolan: Drought Photographs

Words For Art Fine Art Publishing

60 photographs published in an edition of 10

Available through Australian Galleries, Melbourne & Sydney

For more information visit: https://australiangalleries.com.au

First edition acquired by the National Library of Australia