Wolfgang Paalen was a central figure in internationalist surrealist circles in the late 1930s. Artist and intellectual, he was a European whose fascination with archaic cultures led him finally to Mexico, where he founded the influential magazine DYN in 1941. In the bold texts from DYN that make up Form and Sense, we encounter a unique artistic mind and an oracular voice. Paalen’s book is an intellectual delight with essays on cubism, surrealism, the universality of forms in architecture, and the relationships that exist between art and science. He weaves together the new ideas and archaic inspirations in twentieth-century painting and sculpture. His nuanced and original considerations of some key figures—Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso—marked Paalen in turn as a significant thinker in the world of modern art. This painter’s book, illustrated with carefully chosen examples of the art he examines, makes us not only understand but also experience the rich interplay between idea and image that informs the art of our own time. A new introduction by the scholar Martica Sawin examines Paalen’s career, particularly his influential writing on surrealism and abstraction.

The late Frantsa Belsky, who was born in Brno in what was then Czechoslovakia, modelled four generations of the Royal Family. His first link with the Royal Family was a model of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1962, and he created a bronze head of the Queen in 1981 for the National Portrait Gallery. His other works include the Shell Fountain on the South Bank in London and the Triga in Knightsbridge. He completed a series of sculptures of mothers with children, one of which, The Lesson, stands at Bethnal Green. Belsky was selected by a government panel to create a memorial to Lord Mountbatten of Burma in 1982, three years after he was killed by the IRA. The 9ft statue depicted Mountbatten, the Queen's cousin, in naval uniform as though on the bridge of a ship. Belsky had also already produced sculptures or portraits of the Duke of Edinburgh and Sir Winston Churchill. His statues of Churchill and President Truman stand in Missouri in the United States.