This book reveals how five distinct African civilizations have shaped the specific cultures of their New World descendants.

    Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture,' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen,' in which new knowledge is visually recorded."—George Steiner, Sunday Times"There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books

    Finding inspiration as much in the forces of nature as in ancient epics and legends, and using the simplest of media--pencils, ballpoint pens, crayons, wall paint--he creates poetic and archaic worlds, usually in series and often as collages. The 84 drawings in this retrospective, organized by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, in 2003 to mark Twombly's 75th birthday, were collected from the artist's studio, and many had not been previously exhibited. Dating between 1953 and 2002, the works embrace the entire career of one of the most important American artists alive today, from the early monotypes to the major mythological cycles of later years, revealing the many nuances of his aesthetic approach. This revised and expanded edition of the catalogue, created on the occasion of the presentation of Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, includes an essay by Simon Schama, as well as a new text by curator Julie Sylvester. Roland Barthes's classic 1976 essay Non Multa Sed Multum and a foreword by the Whitney's director, Adam D. Weinberg. Comprehensive biographical notes and a selected exhibition history and bibliography have also been added to this edition.Julie Sylvester is Associate Curator of Contemporary Art of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, and is the Hermitage's first non-Russian curator. She is the author of John Chamberlain A Catalogue Raisonne of the Sculpture. Cy Twombly at the Hermitage was the second major contemporary exhibition in the history of the State Hermitage Museum.British historian Simon Schama has written numerous award-winning books on the cultural histories of countries including Holland and France, and is the author of the three-volume History of Britain. He is currently a professor at Columbia University, New York.

    After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility. Steinberg's evidence resides in the imagery of the overtly sexed Christ, in Infancy and again after death. Steinberg argues that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition. Christ's lifelong virginity, understood as potency under check, and the first offer of blood in the circumcision, both required acknowledgment of the genital organ. More than exercises in realism, these unabashed images underscore the crucial theological import of the Incarnation. This revised and greatly expanded edition not only adduces new visual evidence, but deepens the theological argument and engages the controversy aroused by the book's first publication.

    To this day it remains the authority in the field, and this revised edition has been completely rewritten, reorganized, and expanded with beautiful new photography. Morris expert Linda Parry provides new insight into the embroideries, printed and woven textiles, carpets, and tapestries produced by Morris & Co., giving in-depth information about their design and manufacture. The varied, often highly specialized processes involved are discussed in detail, as are Morris’s working methods. Lavishly illustrated throughout, this is the unparalleled study of the subject.

    She painted well-known figures in art, literature, music, politics as well as her family and friends - depicting them clothed and sometimes naked, thus exposing their vulnerability. Never compromising, she kept to one goal: to paint people as she saw them. By painting individuals with all their idiosyncrasies, Neel also recorded universal constants - pregnancy, motherhood, death, and mourning. Included in this book are figure paintings from every period, as well as landscapes, still lifes, and interiors.

    Published in conjunction with the exhibition William Morris, 1834-1896 held at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 9 May - 1 September 1996.

    He trained initially as a typographer and his early interest in graphics became a central part of his later photographic work. Winner of numerous medals and prizes, he was intimately involved with the preparation of this volume, which was the last major project he undertook.

    

    Jean Bony, whose reputation as a medievalist is worldwide, presents its development as an adventure of the imagination allied with radical technical advances—the result of a continuining quest for new ways of handling space and light as well as experimenting with the mechanics of stone construction. He shows how the new architecture came unexpectedly to be invented in the Paris region around 1140 and follows its history—in the great cathedrals of northern France and dozens of other key buildings—to the end of the thirteenth century, when profound changes occurred in the whole fabric of medieval civilization. Rich illustrations, including comprehensive maps, enhance the text and themselves constitute an exceptionally valuable documenation. Despite its evident scholarly intention, this book is not meant for specialists alone, but is conceived as a progressive infiltration into the complexities of history at work, revealing its unpredictable vitality to the uninitiated curious mind.

    an exceptionally rich source for all those interested insymbolic, religious or social studies." -- Tribus..".an excellent book... fascinating to read." -- Research in AfricanLiteratures..". a volume that establishes the standards bywhich future works on the masked festivals of the Yoruba and other Sub-SaharanAfrican peoples will be judged." -- African Arts..".the most sophisticated art historical analysis of a single African aesthetictradition." -- Tribal Arts Review

    

    The guide describes the museum's vast collections and its buildings, including the Cloisters, and includes nearly 900 works of art from the museum's 18 curatorial departments, selected by the director of the museum, Philippe de Montebello.

    He was entranced by the sparkling world of fashion and high society. With his camera, he chronicled half a century of people, places and fashions with skill and a deceptive lightness of touch.The photographs in this book show Beaton as capable of making shining portraits, but they also show his sensitivity to a very different subject - war.The author, Philippe Garner, a director of Sotheby's (home for much of Beaton's archive of prints and negatives), explores the world and work of this remarkable photographer.

    Preface. Biographical Notes. List of Plates. Critic's Comments. Selected Bibliography. Concordance.

    This text traces the life and career of the great English landscape painter and discusses the influence of his background and literature of the period on his work.

    Travel to distant lands was easier, and artists brought back voluptuous images filled with sun and colour. This title studies almost 150 painters, from Delacroix to Ziem. It features many lesser known masters and is suitable for collectors.

    Not merely a catalogue of works and artists, this is a true history presented in chronological order. Written by the most authoritative art historians in the field, the comprehensive text reveals much about the culture that produced the works appearing throughout the book. Gallery Studies is a special feature that compares and contrasts specific works produced within one genre or changes in the genre itself (e.g., "The Sphinx in Ancient Egypt," "Chinese Landscape Painting," "Renaissance Armor," or "The Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright"). Close Studies examines individual works as illustrative of a particular period or style. Fully indexed and packed with more than 1,300 illustrations, 854 in color.

    Although he was an outstanding sculptor and draftsman, he is most widely known and loved for his painting. And his paintings—vibrant, colorful, and diverse—are the focus of this book.Matisse’s intended career was the law. But in 1890, while recovering from an illness, he took up painting as a diversion, and, against his parents’ wishes, never went back to the l aw. He came to Paris to pursue his art studies in the fall of 1891, at the age of twenty-two. When he died in 1954 at the age of eighty-five, he had created a body of work that has established him as one of the two foremost artists of the modern period, the other being Picasso.The inventive genius of Matisse could not be confined within the limits of any one school of art. He studied the old masters; he explored expressionism and Post-Impressionism; he was a leader of the Fauves (literally “Wild Beasts”—so named because of their shockingly vivid use of color); he ventured into various modes of expressive abstraction. The opening years of the century were the years of struggle for Matisse, but by 1909 he was world famous. His renown and influence grew as he continued to produce, in addition to work in such other mediums as sculpture, a wide range of paintings. All of these—from delicate, intimate still lifes and portraits to monumental figure compositions—were marked by his delight in vivid, pure color, bold pattern, and striking ornament.

    The possibility of a spatial fourth dimension suggested that our world might be merely a shadow or section of a higher dimensional existence. That iconoclastic idea encouraged radical innovation by a variety of early twentieth-century artists, ranging from French Cubists, Italian Futurists, and Marcel Duchamp, to Max Weber, Kazimir Malevich, and the artists of De Stijl and Surrealism.In an extensive new Reintroduction, Henderson surveys the impact of interest in higher dimensions of space in art and culture from the 1950s to 2000. Although largely eclipsed by relativity theory beginning in the 1920s, the spatial fourth dimension experienced a resurgence during the later 1950s and 1960s. In a remarkable turn of events, it has returned as an important theme in contemporary culture in the wake of the emergence in the 1980s of both string theory in physics (with its ten- or eleven-dimensional universes) and computer graphics. Henderson demonstrates the importance of this new conception of space for figures ranging from Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery group in the 1960s to Tony Robbin and digital architect Marcos Novak.