From his earliest youth, Michelangelo never ceased to suffer, and thereby to create. He attempted to reconcile the apparently conflicting forces that inhibited him: earthly passions and fear of God. Hence the edifice devoted to beauty, celestial and infernal alike, that Michelangelo raised to the glory of God. It has no equivalent nor descendants. His predecessors aspired to Heaven through faith alone; Miichelangelo sought to rise through the contemplative exaltation of beauty.

    Destruction of the Father; the title comes from the name of a sculpture she did following the death of her husband in1973;contains both formal texts and what the artist calls "pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings and sculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images. Writing is a means of expression that has gained increasing importance for Bourgeois, particularly during periods of insomnia. The writing is compulsive, but it can also be perfectly controlled, informed by her intellectual background, knowledge of art history, and sense of literary form (she has frequently published articles on artists, exhibitions, and art events). Bourgeois, a private woman "without secrets," has given numerous interviews to journalists, artists, and writers, expressing her views on her oeuvre, revealing its hidden meanings, and relating the connection of certain works to the traumas of her childhood. This book collects both her writings and her spoken remarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and her biography and offering new insights into her creative process.

    Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last.Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers--magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty--an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite. But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam--and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family--have been erased from memory until now.It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Picasso.In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.From the Hardcover edition.

    Beginning with the self-portraits of nuns in medieval illuminated manuscripts, Borzello reconstructs an overlooked genre and provides essential contextual information. She moves on to sixteenth-century Italy, where Sofonisba Anguissola painted one of the longest known series of self-portraits, recording her features from adolescence to old age. In 1630, Artemisia Gentileschi depicted herself as the personification of painting, and at the same time in the Netherlands Judith Leyster portrayed herself at her easel, as a relaxed, self-assured professional. In the 1700s, women from Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun to Angelica Kauffman conveyed, each in her own way, ideas of femininity and the artist's passion for her chosen field. And in the nineteenth century, as the doors to art schools began to open to women, self-portraits by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Marie Bashkirtseff, and photographers such as Alice Austen resonated with a newfound self-confidence. Seeing Ourselves concludes with the breaking of taboos in the twentieth century. Paula Modersohn-Becker imagines herself pregnant in her fantasy nude of 1906; Alice Neel paints herself naked at the age of eighty; and Frida Kahlo explicitly renders her own physical pain in a self-portrait complete with nails piercing her skin. And in recent decades, Cindy Sherman explores identity by transforming herself over and over into a cast of different characters, posing the questions that all the women in this enthralling book have faced when "seeing" themselves.

    In a rich weave of images and text, each chapter offers an intimate look at the artist's expression in a different medium. This volume includes beautiful photographs of Micheangelo's works but here also are never before seen details of his sculpture and architecture that invite us to linger. The black-and-white photographs printed in lush doutones that add depth, show in the marks of the chisel, the hand of Michangelo at work - the rough but deliberate strokes of a man struggling to express himself in an unyielding and unforgiving medium.

    For what Ingo Walther and his international team have done is to make sense of this most explosive of artistic centuries. Who could possibly have forecast on New Year's Eve 1899 that, one hundred years later, painting and sculpture would be only options, not prerequisite disciplines for modern artists, constantly questioning both the technical and thematic definitions of their work? The infinite laboratory of experiment that the visual arts have become over the last decades highlights not only the inherent potential for human creativity and representation, but also shows the way individuals and groups have responded to the huge social, political and technological changes of this most turbulent of times. Ranging across the full spectrum of disciplines available, including photography and new media, and thematically chaptered to highlight relationships between works and movements, this readable and encyclopaedic masterwork does just what it says on the cover. Whether you want Surrealism or Land Art, Fluxus or Bauhaus, your art book purchases can stop once you buy this. Warning: it will not fit on your coffee table!

    This volume catalogues portraits by Sargent from 1874, when he began his training in Paris, and covers pictures painted while he was establishing his reputation in Paris, during his early years in England, and on his first professional visit to America in 1887. The entire catalogue raisonne will bring together nearly 600 portraits, some 1,600 subject pictures and landscapes, and three mural cycles.The early portraits in this book range from private images of Sargent's family and friends to studies of writers and fellow artists and formal portraits of Parisian celebrities and patrons in France, England and America. These include his most controversial work, Madame Gautreau, and studies of some of the major artistic figures of the day: Claude Monet, Robert Louis Stevenson and Ellen Terry in her role as Lady Macbeth.Each work is catalogued in depth, with a biographical account of the sitter, a discussion of the contemporary context of the painting, and a detailed provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography. Almost all of the paintings are shown, mostly in color, including some that have never been reproduced before. The fruit of some sixteen years of research, this valuable reference provides a broad and comprehensive view of Sargent's art.

    After he was diagnosed with AIDS in the late 1980's, Wojnarowicz's art took on a sharply political edge, and from then until his death in 1992, he became entangled in highly public debates about medical research and funding, censorship in the arts, and politically sanctioned homophobia. Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz is the first book to explore the extraordinary breadth of his work in film, installation, sculpture, photography, performance, and writing, as well as his considerable influence on artists and writers working today. It features essays by leading art scholars, including New Museum senior curator Dan Cameron, along with excerpts from Wojnarowicz's own writings and previously unpublished material from the archives of the Wojnarowicz estate-works that cross literary lines, from memoir and fiction to political commentary and cultural critique.Dan Cameron, John Carlin, C. Carr, and Mysoon Rizk

    Alchemy provides a magical language to explore what it is a painter really does in her or his studio - the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colours will mix, and how they will look.Written from the perspective of a painter-turned-art historian, What Painting Is is like nothing you have ever read about art.

    It can take many forms: photographs, videos, posters, billboards, charts, plans and, in particular, language itself. Tony Godfrey has written the first ever clear, extensive, concise and informative account of this fascinating phenomenon.

    Examining 30 works by Velazquez that span his entire career, the authors show how his technical achievement developed over time.

    With all works reproduced in color, the book includes the images for which Rothko is most famous—the large, hypnotic, poignant fields of color—along with almost 400 additional paintings that are far less well known and reveal an artist who was attuned by turns to realism, expressionism, surrealism, and the avant-garde issues of his era. "Far and away the best monograph ever written on Rothko."—Yve-Alain Bois, Artforum

    After trying his hand at painting and acting, the native of Libourne turned to photography and moved to Paris. He supplied studies for painters, architects, and stage designers, but became enraptured by what he called documents of the city and its environs. His scenes rarely included people, but rather the architecture, landscape, and artifacts that made up the societal and cultural stage. Atget was not particularly renowned during his lifetime but in the 1920s came to the attention of the Dada and Surrealist avant-garde through Man Ray. Four of his images, with their particular fusion of mimesis and mystery, appeared in the surrealist journal, La Revolution Surrealiste, while Ray and much of his artistic circle purchased Atget prints. His fame grew after his death, with several articles and a monograph by Berenice Abbott. Several leading photographers, including Walker Evans and Bill Brandt, have since acknowledged their debt to Atget. This fresh TASCHEN edition gathers some 500 photographs from the Atget archives to celebrate his oustanding eye for the urban environment and evocation of a Paris gone by. Down main streets and side streets, past shops and churches, through courtyards and arcades and the 20 arrondissements, we find a unique portrait of a beloved city and the making of a modern photographic master. About the series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite!Text in English, French, and German"

    Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants-perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown. This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

    Rescued from neglect, he has become a cultural icon in the late twentieth century, not only for his art but also because of his violent and tragic life. Catherine Puglisi's highly praised monograph, now available for the first time in paperback, supersedes all previous studies of the artist. Making full use of new research and dramatic recent discoveries, she has produced a precise, clear-headed and comprehensive work of scholarship that also provides a moving biography of the artist and a penetrating analysis of the genius with which he absorbed and transformed the artistic tradition of his time. All Caravaggio's works are discussed and illustrated in colour, and the book has an appendix of documents, full notes and bibliography, checklist of works and full indexes. This authoritative and beautifully produced monograph is the standard work on Caravaggio.

    This book, which accompanies a major centenary exhibition on Beardsley, tells the story of his brief, hectic life and uncovers the roots of his genius in the racy artistic and literary culture of 1890s London.Beardsley's startling drawings, prints, bookbindings, and posters are reproduced here from original drawings and from rare early editions of his work. Portraits and photographs of his friends and contemporaries, among them Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, Max Beerbohm, and W. B. Yeats, bring his story to life. The authoritative text is the first to fully explore Beardsley's diverse influences, which range from ancient Greek vase paintings to erotic Japanese ukiyo-e prints.The book concludes with a look at Beardsley's artistic legacy and the legend that has grown around him. It demonstrates why his drawings, with their subtle symbolism, highly charged eroticism, sensuous ornamentalism, and self-conscious decadence, have a renewed resonance in our own turn-of-the-century world.

    Edited by Miche Frizot (researcher at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique in Paris) and published on the initiative of the Arts Council of the Centre National du Livre, this volume brings together conrtributions by the most reputed international specialists.

    Art in Theory, 1815–1900 provides the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents ever assembled on nineteenth-century theories of art.

    Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his landscape work -- work which stretches the boundaries of one of painting's most cliche-ridden traditions. Since the late 1960s Richter's landscape paintings have formed an integral part of the artist's overall body of work, and one which this book documents in depth. Presented here in lush reproductions, these works are given the separate consideration they have always warranted, and the result is a book that can be counted among the most important on this seminal artist.

    The collection is based on works acquired directly from the artist by his brother. Among the treasures reproduced here are Potato Eaters, The Bedroom Self Portrait as an Artist, Wheatfield with Crows, and Harvest.

    150 photos, many in color.

    He retells the stories of classical antiquity from which so many of Boticelli's motifs derive, equipping the reader with tools to appreciate the narrative quality of the artist's works. Descriptions of Botticelli's artistic virtuosity and explanations as to the important role the artist played in Renaissance painting are accompanied by reproductions of the highest quality.

    Traditionally known as The Hunt of the Unicorn, this set of seven exquisite and enigmatic tapestries was likely completed between 1495 and 1505. The imaginatively conceived scenes—displaying individualized faces of the hunters and naturalistically depicting the flora and fauna of the landscape—are beautifully captured in silk, wool, and metal yarns.Written by one of the world’s leading authorities on medieval textiles and illustrated with many lovely color reproductions, The Unicorn Tapestries traces the origins of the tapestries as well as possible interpretations of their symbolic meaning. This is an essential book for any lover of medieval art and textiles.

    Through his lifelong association with William Morris he was also a prolific designer of stained glass, tapestries, tiles, mosaics, books and furniture. In this authoritative new book, in which five of Burne-Jones's series of pictures and tapestries are reproduced in full for the first time (other than in catalogs), the true glory of the artist's vision and range are made accessible. His personal charm, conveyed whimsically in the caricatures with which he illustrated his voluminous correspondence, together with his relationships with his family and also with his beautiful mistress, Maria Zambaco, are revealed, and his position in the context not only of the Pre-Raphaelites, but also of the wider European stage and the symbolist movement, is thoroughly analyzed.

    Explores the historical perception of woman as the seductress whose influence undermines the power of the white male.

    Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp...in resonance publishes for the first time the Duchamp Dossier (c. 1942-53) - a hitherto publicly unknown collection compiled by Cornell and discovered in the artist's estate following his death in 1972. The small objects, typed and handwritten notes, and ephemera found within the Duchamp Dossier provide an absorbing record of the interchange between these two artists, which included Cornell's assisting Duchamp on the assembly of his edition de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy (commonly referred to as the Boite-en-valise). Both artists were intrigued by the connection between art and the found object, and they shared a fascination with replicated images and the processes of reproduction. They had parallel interests in optical devices, ephemeral mediums (such as glass, dust, and paper), filmmaking, and graphic design. The book focuses in depth on Duchamp's box editions and Cornell's often neglected "explorations, " arranged files of printed matter, notes, and ephemera related to individuals or specific themes.

    Paolo Baldacci's long-awaited monograph follows de Chirico and his work from his birth through his student years in Paris to his return to Italy. Baldacci details the development of de Chirico's mature style and reveals the many biographical elements of his paintings. 250 color and 150 b&w illustrations.

    In Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, author Tim Barringer draws on an imaginative selection of paintings, drawings, and photographs to suggest that the dynamic energy of Pre-Raphaelitism arose out of the paradoxes at its heart. Past and present, historicism and modernity, symbolism and realism, as well as the tensions between city and country, men and women, worker and capitalist, colonizer and colonized all make appearances within Pre-Raphaelite art. By focusing on these issues, Barringer draws together the strands of revisionist thought on the Pre-Raphaelites and provides a range of stimulating new interpretations of their work.Beautifully illustrated, the revised edition of this authoritative survey traces the history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and includes new sections on photography as well as a revised introduction and bibliography.

    An impressive list of contributors explores the byways, bringing this tragic, funny, and engrossing story up to recent times." -- Lucy Lippard, author of "The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art" During the 1930s and 1940s, women artists associated with the Surrealist movement produced a significant body of self-images that have no equivalent among the works of their male colleagues. While male artists exalted Woman's otherness in fetishized images, women artists explored their own subjective worlds. The self-images of Claude Cahun, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage, and others both internalize and challenge conventions for representing femininity, the female body, and female subjectivity. Many of the representational strategies employed by these pioneers continue to resonate in the work of contemporary women artists. The words "Surrealist" and "surrealism" appear frequently in discussions of such contemporary artists as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman, Kiki Smith, Dorothy Cross, Michiko Kon, and Paula Santiago. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, explores specific aspects of the relationship between historic and contemporary work in the context of Surrealism. The contributors reexamine art historical assumptions about gender, identity, and intergenerational legacies within modernist and postmodernist frameworks. Questions raised include: how did womenin both groups draw from their experiences of gender and sexuality? What do contemporary artistic practices involving the use of body images owe to the earlier examples of both female and male Surrealists? What is the relationship between self-image and self- knowledge?Contributors: Dawn Ades, Whitney Chadwick, Salomon Grimberg, Katy Kline, Helaine Posner, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Dickran Tashjian.

    All of Abramovic's performance works from 1969 to the present time are documented in this volume by means of numerous photographs, illustrations, descriptions, and transcriptions. Comments by audience members during performances have been recorded, discussions with the artist are included, and a substantial text by a host of critics has been assembled. The artist's chronological trajectory from formal art studies in Yugoslavia to work in sound environments, video installation, and performance based around the body is followed with scrutiny. The book is a major event for this provocative performer-artist, and features essays from such notables as the curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Chrissie lles, the critics Thomas McEvilley and Bojana Pejic, and many others.

    African American quilts are of particular interest because -- unlike European-American quilts that focus on pattern and technique -- they are often emotionally expressive and graced with narrative imagery.Spirits of the Cloth celebrates this artistic tradition by showcasing 150 of the most stunning contemporary African American quilts in full-color photographs and by allowing their creators to expand upon the story that stands behind each piece.African Americans who are looking for beautiful books featuring black collectibles, and everyone interested in the quilting tradition, will welcome this as one of the most important and gorgeous quilting books ever published.

    In this book, Sarah Whitfield and John Elderfield bring a new understanding to his deeply serious, complex paintings. Published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, and at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bonnard features two important essays based on much fresh research. Sarah Whitfield, curator of the exhibition, discusses the legacy of the symbolism of Bonnard's early years and the way in which his acceptance of nature's surrender to time finds expression in the grand elegiac paintings of the later period. John Elderfield, curator of the exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, writes about Bonnard's awareness of the complexities of visual perception, and how crucial an understanding of this is to fully comprehending his stature as a painter.

    Long known but little understood, Maya writing has now largely been deciphered, leading to a new understanding of the Maya scribes and the society in which they lived. This volume is the first to make full use of the latest research and the first to consider Maya writing both aesthetically and in terms of its meaning. Michael D. Coe begins by examining the origins and character of the script. He then explores the world of the scribes and "keepers of the holy books, " decoding their depiction in Maya art and describing the mediums in which they worked, their tools, and techniques.

    Although the current surge of interest in Cuba has extended to that country's architecture, few know that the most outstanding architectural achievement of the Cuban Revolution stands neglected just outside Havana.The Escuelas Nacionales de Arte (National Art Schools), constructed from 1961 to 1965, were the result of an educational program initiated by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara soon after the Revolution of 1959. The architects they commissioned created an organic complex of brick and terra-cotta Catalan vaulted structures that reflected the optimism and exuberance of the period. The schools attempted to reinvent architecture, just as the Revolution hoped to reinvent society. However, even before construction was completed, the schools fell out of official favor and were subjected to an attack that resulted in their subsequent "disappearance." An ideological campaign branded them politically incorrect, a bourgeois luxury that was not in keeping with the Revolution. The buildings fell into disuse and, abandoned to the jungle, were literally overgrown. Now, almost 40 years later, Cuba is beginning to recognize and reclaim these significant works of architecture.Revolution of Forms investigates the history and politics surrounding the creation of these structures as well as their subsequent abandonment. The text is accompanied by archival photographs, plans, and images of the present condition of these structures.

    Among its residential clients were many of the most powerful figures of the Gilded Age-Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Pulitzers-for whom the firm built splendid summer cottages in Newport and throughout Long Island and the Hudson valley and sumptuous town houses in Boston, Washington, Baltimore and New York. More than thirty houses are presented here, their exteriors and interiors elegantly recorded in lush new color photographs. The book also provides the first look at the recent restoration of the Isaac Bell house in Newport and newly reinstalled Venetian room at the Payne Whitney house, now the French Cultural Services, in New York City.

    Now legendary, these men have emerged as the most prominent figures of the famed Mexican mural movement, which lasted from the '20s through the early '70s and was hailed as the most significant achievement in public art of the 20th century. The dramatic story of the movement is told here in a fascinating history of the artists, accompanied by over 100 spectacular color reproductions of the murals. Showcasing popular as well as lesser-known works from around the US and Mexico, this is the first high-quality paperback to do justice to a subject that will captivate every lover of Mexican art and culture, Rivera fan, and art historian, as well as anyone who appreciates a beautiful, intelligent art book.

    The catalogue for an exhibition that received wide acclaim at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and that opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in June 1998, this handsome book presents 80 of Hammershoi's distinctive and intimate portraits, landscapes, and interiors.Hammershoi exhibited extensively throughout Europe and was recognized by his peers as the premier Danish painter; critics often included him among the French Impressionists. His reputation diminished after his death, however, and he remained relatively unknown until his recent rediscovery.Today's art lovers will immediately respond to Hammershoi's extraordinary use of line, light, and shadow, and to his interiors and landscapes punctuated with a mood of concentrated absence. His portraits, too, are compelling psychological studies, often reflecting the isolation of the long Scandinavian winter. This book restores Hammershoi's rightful place in the history of art.

    This new edition reflects changes in the antiques market since 2008. Clearly and logically organized by period and a type, it is packed with practical and useful information and hundreds of photographs. It explains materials, marks and techniques; provides clues to identification and dating; and offers hints on what to consider when examining antiques. The huge breadth of material covers everything from 18th century chairs to 20th century Barbie dolls, Art Deco sculpture to ancient Chinese ceramics, and toy robots to the ever popular Mid-Century Modern. Indispensable to industry professionals and collectors, it is also accessible to beginners and a useful resource for eBay users.First published in 1998, Miller's Antiques Encyclopedia has gone to sell more than 130,000 copies and remains an invaluable aid to collecting.

    Here are the best-loved paintings by the Renaissance immortals: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and the complex, often extravagant tours-de-force of the Baroque and Rococo masters -- Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Vermeer. The 19th century, the age of transformation, witnessed artists from Constable and Courbet to the inimitable Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. This treasure tome concludes with modern and contemporary selections, including works by Matisse, Picasso, Dali, and Hopper, as well as Hockney, Motherwell, Stella, and more.Accompanying this magnificent art is a concise, penetrating text that presents each painting in its historical, social, and artistic perspective. From Giotto to Gauguin, from Whistler to Warhol, Great Paintings of the Western World is a private guided tour of some of the most remarkable creations on Earth.

    Inspired by the profound spiritual power of great art, this is an invaluable guidebook on the journey to self-discovery.

    African-American Art provides a major reassessment of the subject, setting the art in the context of the African-American experience. Here, Patton discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art, sculptures, paintings, and photography during the 1800s. She also examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism during the 1960s and 70s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 90s. New evidence suggests different ways of looking at African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Here, Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums, the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.

    His sexually provocative nude figures and his dramatic religious paintings have a psychological power and an undiminished capacity to shock and disturb after almost four centuries. Timothy Wilson-Smith provides a lively and readable biography of an artist who has become an iconic figure in the late twentieth century, and presents a memorable selection of his works, from his early genre pictures to the dark and intense religious paintings of his years in exile.

    Includes his work for the Talking Heads, Restaurant Florent, Interview, and Colors.

    Following the chronological layout of the Museum, the book tours the collections held in each hall, with accompanying text by international Egyptologists. Highlights include the 4000-year-old jewels of a princess from Dahshur, shown for the first time to a non-specialist audience, the funerary treasure of Queen Ahhotep, the tombs of the kings and queens at Tanis on the Nile Delta, and statues from the Temple of AmenRe at Karnak.

    But from 1900 he turned back toward Impressionism, and his art recreates moments of heightened subjectivity, color and space. This new account shows how these beautiful and lyrical pictures sometimes emerged from terrible circumstances; as Bonnard himself wrote shortly before his death in 1947, "one does not always sing out of happiness." Bonnard's reassessment over the past thirty years has centered on the extraordinary late pictures that were inspired by Mallarme and Symbolism, by Jarry and anarchism, and by the philosophy of Bergson. These works are among some of the most enduring images of the twentieth century. 169 illus., 50 in color.

    Here you can discover that courtly world through its exquisite paintings and illuminations, richly hued tapestries, and gilded jewels. The Medieval Art of Love is a delightful guide through the delicate expression of affection and passion that is the hallmark of the Middle Ages. A book to charm and intrigue every lover, this volume is also a thoughtful examination of the symbolism of love in medieval European art. Michael Camille explores the metaphoric and social settings of love and its myths and paradoxes.

    In this vividly written biography, William E. Wallace offers a substantially new view of the artist. Not only a supremely gifted sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo was also an aristocrat who firmly believed in the ancient and noble origins of his family. The belief in his patrician status fueled his lifelong ambition to improve his family's financial situation and to raise the social standing of artists. Michelangelo's ambitions are evident in his writing, dress, and comportment, as well as in his ability to befriend, influence, and occasionally say "no" to popes, kings, and princes. Written from the words of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, this biography not only tells his own stories but also brings to life the culture and society of Renaissance Florence and Rome. Not since Irving Stone's novel The Agony and the Ecstasy has there been such a compelling and human portrayal of this remarkable yet credible human individual.Subscribe to William Wallace's podcast on individual works of the master! Click here!Episodes every week, right from this bookmark or your feed reader.

    She was inspired by the work of Eugène Atget, whom she had come to know and admire during her years in Paris during the 1920s. Atget devoted himself in the first two decades of the 20th century to capturing the "other" Paris, the one that tourists seldom experienced, the Paris that he saw disappearing before his eyes.

    A tribute to Queen Elizabeth I, the poem celebrates holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, and other virtues in verse tales of knightly adventure, courtly love, and acts of gallantry. Crane created these 352 magnificent illustrations and decorations in the rich nineteenth-century style of neo-medievalism made famous by William Morris and his Kelmscott Press, with which Crane was associated.Crane's designs have been meticulously reproduced here, including striking images of gallant knights in armor, demure maidens, fearsome dragons, unicorns, angels, and a host of decorative elements — all displayed in a rich variety of full-page plates, finely detailed borders, and exquisite vignettes. Also included are charming headpieces, tailpieces, decorative initials, and the exquisite typography that originally appeared within the borders and other areas.Sure to delight any admirer of Crane's dazzling style, this splendid archive, skillfully arranged by Carol Belanger Grafton, will also provide a wealth of inspiration and immediately usable graphics for artists and illustrators alike.

    Essential reading for both art enthusiasts and anyone concerned with the environment, the book is the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated book on the subject.The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by the vast uncultivated spaces of the desert and mountain as well as post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved the earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo's Running Fence or Walter de Maria's Lightning Field. Journeys became works of art for Richard Long while Dennis Oppenheim and Ana Mendieta immersed their bodies in the contours of the land.This book traces early developments to the present day, as artists are exploring eco-systems and the interface between industrial, urban and rural cultures. Survey Brian Wallis discusses the key artists, works and issues that define Land Art historically, as well as its later ramifications.Works This book fully documents the 1960s Land Art movement and surveys examples of Environmental Art to the present day. Earthworks, environments, performances and actions by artists ranging from Ana Mendieta in the 1970s and 80s to Peter Fend in the 1990s are illustrated with breathtaking photographs, sketches and project notes. Documents Jeffrey Kastner has compiled an invaluable archive of statements by all the featured artists alongside related texts by art historians, critics, philosophers and cultural theorists including Jean Baudrillard, Edmund Burke, Guy Debord, Michael Fried, Dave Hickey, Rosalind Krauss, Lucy R Lippard, Thomas McEvilley and Simon Schama.

    It's for readers who want easy access to information and who are turned off by art-world jargon.With cutting-edge tone and text, these innovative, richly illustrated, compact books (6" x 6" gift size) are targeted at busy people who've heard of these much-discussed artists -- and who know that many people, for some reason, think these artists are important -- but honestly don't get what the big fuss is all about.Abrams produces fine illustrated books with such major art institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Louvre.

    It explores the challenges that unconventional attitudes and ways of life presented to architectural thinking - and to the architects themselves. Among the houses examined are Hollyhock House, the Farnsworth House, the Schroeder House and the villa, Les Terrasses.

    He was a successful businessman who ran an efficient studio, and was also a classical scholar, an enthusiastic collector of art and antiquities, and a respected diplomat on intimate terms with European royalty. Contemporaries admired his extraordinary artistic versatility. His paintings include portraits, altarpieces, allegories and landscapes; he also designed tapestries, book illustrations, silverware and his own home.

    Indigo tells the compelling and comprehensive story of the world's oldest, most magical, and best-loved dye. Produced from plants by a process akin to alchemy, indigo has a unique chemistry that renders it compatible with all natural fibre. From the time of the ancient Pharaohs it made an incredible impact worldwide as the world's only source of blue of every hue, being the mark both of 'blue-collar workers' and of aristocrats wearing 'royal blue'. It was also indispensable for creating a glorious range of colours in combination with other natural dyes, it provided paint and medicine, and it featured in many rituals. Its fascinating history continued after the invention of synthetic indigo, used to dye the world's most popular garment, denim jeans. For environmental reasons, indigo from nature is making a comeback today in many countries.

    Each of the chapters presents a comprehensive account of a particular period of world art with detailed timelines as visual reference guides. "Art: A World History" enables you to look at a work of art, understand its construction, and distinguish between different techniques, styles, and critical viewpoints. If you own only one book on the history of art - this should be the one. Over 2,000 color illustrations .Glossary of terms .Guide to the world's museums.

    Calder took it off the plinth, gave it to the wind, and left us kinetic playgrounds of the spirit. He operated at the point where Modernity and nature Fused, developing an environmental art that changed the medium Forever. Visiting his Paris atelier in 1932, Duchamp coined the term "Mobiles" For Calder's delicate wire and disc pieces, constructions that would soon become immensely popular. But he didn't rest on his innovations. Friends with Miro, Mondrian and Leger, Calder also turned his hand to painting, drawing, gouaches, toys, textiles and utensil design. A graphic master who sketched as much in air as in ink, the Sixties and Seventies saw Calder take on the monumental, translating the dynamics of cities into both his Mobiles and "Stabiles". At a time when sculpture was perceived to be the antithesis of movement, Calder unmade gravity and freed the elements in a body of work that is still sending a wind of change through the art world today.

    This gorgeously illustrated book displays more than 150 works of art that celebrate the cross-cultural richness of Poland’s creative output during this period. From the dramatic uniform of the winged Hussar complete with feathers and leopard skin to traditional portraits of royalty to a Turkish-style beverage service, these splendid objects represent Poland’s diversity and breadth at a time when it was the largest land empire in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The book addresses five areas of Polish culture in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The first section on the monarchy features objects relating to the kings who ruled during the period. The second section of the book is devoted to the magnate class and the objects that were typically seen in a nobleman’s home. The third part presents religious artworks, highlighted by an important seventeenth-century painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The section on the military, focusing on the cavalry, offers highly decorated battle regalia, weapons, and a Turkish tent. With gilded cups, clocks, decanters, and more, the decorative arts section of the book provides outstanding examples of the cross-cultural tenor of the Baroque era. The volume includes essays that set the art of Poland in the context of its history, geography, and culture; a timeline of major events; a map of the Polish Commonwealth; a glossary; a useful bibliography; and an index of exhibited works.This book is the catalogue for a major exhibition that will be shown at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore March 2– May 9, 1999. The exhibit then travels to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Philbrook Museum of Art, and concludes at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland, in the summer of 2000.The exhibition is organized and circulated by Art Services International in cooperation with the Walters Art Gallery.

    Born in Armenia, he survived the Turkish genocide begun in 1915 and arrived in America in 1920. One of the first abstract expressionists, he was a major influence on the New York art scene, which included de Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, and others. After a devastating series of illnesses, injuries, and personal setbacks, he committed suicide at the age of 46.In Black Angel, Nouritza Matossian uses for the first time Gorky's original letters in Armenian and other new source material, writing with authority and insight about the powerful influence Gorky's Armenian heritage had upon his painting. She also provides an informed and important critique of the entire body of Gorky's major work.

    explores three periods in Western history that exploded with creativity: Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence, and America's founding. What enabled these societies to make staggering jumps in scientific knowledge, develop new political structures, or create timeless works of art?

    His interest, unique at the time, was twofold: to assess the art as creative work, and to use it as a way of studying mental illness. Prinzhorn's Collection attracted the attention of many artists, including Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, but by the 1930s, when the Nazis declared such work "degenerate," the Collection fell into disrepair. Only in recent decades has it been properly restored and made available for a wider public.This catalog accompanied the first exhibition in Britain to foreground the Prinzhorn Collection as a whole. The works represented in these pages defy simple categorization: The range is extraordinary and the art's startling sophistication, inventiveness, and beauty inevitably prompt comparison with such artists as Max Ernst and the Surrealists and with Jean Dubuffet.Three texts are immensely helpful in providing an understanding of the Collection's importance: Bettina Brand-Claussen deals with the Collection's origins within the changing culture of postwar Europe; Inge Jádi offers a meditation on the ethical, interpretative, and aesthetic questions in presenting the Collection; and Caroline Douglas sets Prinzhorn's endeavor within a broader historical and intellectual context.Questions surrounding art and madness are endlessly fascinating, no more so than today, as science moves to unlock the mysteries of the mind. The Prinzhorn Collection will do much to inspire continuing debate on the links between creativity, rationality, and illness.

    Items from Imperial China once filled the porcelain cabinets of European courts, and Japanese painting and wood-carving made their way to Europe in the nineteenth century. The impressive illustrations in this volume present the reader with the unique wealth of art forms in China and Japan, forms which have also exerted tremendous influence on Western art: artful ceramics, woodcarvings, small sculptures and bronzes, porcelains and ink drawings from China; and from Japan, temple districts, imperial villas and Zen gardens, ukiyo paintings of the Edo period, the famed No masques, as well as precious textiles and costumes. These are only a few of the many aspects selected by the authors to convey the wealth and unbelievable variety of artistic forms of East Asia. An illustrated glossary and extensive bibliography complete the book.

    This Tiny Folio draws on one of the greatest collections in the world to illustrate the angels, demons, and everyday denizens of the medieval world.

    In 1924 she became the first graduate of Howard University's newly organized art department, and in 1972 she became the first African American woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

    Extensively illustrated with paintings, prints and pastels spanning Cassatt's whole career, this volume, published to accompany a travelling exhibition in the USA, contains essays which trace the artist's development from her early influences to her critical role in bringing Old Master and Impressionist art to the United States.

    One hallmark of Edo art is the lack of distinction between "high art" and "craft": an artist was as likely to paint on lacquer, ceramic, or textile as on paper or silk. This gorgeous book presents examples of Edo art in all media and across social boundaries -- from paintings of nature and city life on gold-leaf screens to wood-block images of Kabuki actors and courtesans, from Zen paintings and calligraphy to spectacular helmets and armor for the samurai, from brilliantly colored porcelains to textiles made for Noh theater, Kyogen comedy, and affluent women of the merchant class.Works are grouped thematically into such areas as festivals, warrior arts, religious beliefs, travel, play, and courtly traditions, and essays written by experts in the field address these various themes, placing the works in the context of the times. The book also provides entries on the individual objects reproduced.

    Embossed in high relief, richly gilt, and damascened in gold and silver, these lavish parade armors all'antica were worn by Renaissance kings and captains who wished to project an aura of power and virtue by arraying themselves like the heroes of ancient Roman history and mythology. The re-creation of classically inspired armor is invariably associated with Filippo Negroli, the most innovative and celebrated of the renowned armorers of Milan. Within the Negroli family of armorers, Filippo was the best known of his extremely successful generation, which included his brother Francesco, a skilled damascener in the service of Emperor Charles V, and his cousin Giovan Paolo, a talented master who provided armor to the French court. From large numbers of recently uncovered documents in the state, civic, and ecclesiastical archives of Milan, details have been gleaned of Negroli family members, their workshops and employees, marriages and deaths, property and testamentary arrangements, and business dealings with clients and fellow armorers. A digest of the documents is included, and a brief, cogent discussion of the manufacture and commerce of arms in sixteenth-century Milan provides a context for the work of these talented artists. The core of the book is a thorough reexamination of all the armors signed by Filippo Negroli. Additional works are attributed to him, and lost works are identified. The authors confirm the attribution of two magnificently damascened armors to Francesco Negroli, and they present Giovan Paolo Negroli's single signed work along with pieces they consider to be his. Each armor is described, illustrated, and placed in the context of the maker's oeuvre; its history of ownership is discussed; and its treatment in the critical literature is assessed.Around these superlative examples of Renaissance armor all'antica are grouped works that demonstrate the strong influence of the Negroli on contemporary Italian armorers as well as the variety and originality of armor design during the years 1535–55. The authors also touch on the sources of Renaissance armor through Greek and Roman prototypes, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century versions of classical-style armor, and sixteenth-century albums of designs. In the hands of a master like Filippo Negroli, whose virtuoso skill at modeling in high relief is unrivaled in the history of metalworking, traditional military costume was transformed into sculpture in steel. The extraordinary technical abilities of the Milanese armorers, combined with their imaginative adaptation of decorative motifs from the antique, such as lion and Medusa heads, fantastic creatures, and abundant foliate ornament, gave rise to an original art form that evokes the pomp and pageantry of the Renaissance courts. These treasured objects, many of which are still part of the royal collections they have been in since the sixteenth century, are generously illustrated in this book, which serves as the catalogue of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    It considers his mythological, erotic and religious paintings and examines the attribution, physical appearance and subject matter of these works.

    It illustrates its progress through the work of almost every major master in the genre, with works of the highest quality. This book provides an introduction to the history of portrait miniatures, a glossary, and a bibliography; ninety-six items from the collection are described, and each item is illustrated in full color, to bring out the subtlety and intimacy of this delicate art form.

    The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a Bride in the upper panel hovers over a Bachelor Apparatus in the panel below, stimulating the Bachelors with love gasoline for an electrical stripping.In preparation for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote hundreds of notes, which he considered just as important as the work itself. He published 178 during his lifetime, but over 100 more notes relating to the Glass were discovered and published following his death. In this landmark book, Linda Henderson provides the first systematic study of the Large Glass in relation to the entire corpus of Duchamp's notes for the project. Since Duchamp declared his interest in creating a Playful Physics, she focuses on the scientific and technological themes that pervade the notes and the imagery of the Large Glass. In doing so, Henderson provides an unprecedented history of science as popularly known at the turn of the century, centered on late Victorian physics. In addition to electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy, the areas of science to which Duchamp responded so creatively ranged from chemistry and classical mechanics to thermodynamics, Brownian movement, radioactivity, and atomic theory. Restored to its context and amplified by the information in the posthumously published notes, the Large Glass appears far richer and more multifaceted and witty than had ever been suspected.Henderson also includes a close examination of Duchamp's literary and artistic models for creative invention based on science, including Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Frantisek Kupka, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The book will not only redefine scholarship on Duchamp and the Large Glass, but will be a crucial resource for historians of literature, science, and modernism.

    In ten essays embracing the history of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns.Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central, if controversial, place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, especially the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of a general history of medieval art and spirituality.The Visual and the Visionary was awarded the 1999 Charles Rufus Prize by the College Art Association and the 1999 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Art and Music History by the Sixteenth Century Conference.

    It opens with the stark realism of early nineteenth-century documentary art by Francisco Goya, then presents paintings from the late nineteenth-century impressionist revolution. Pages that follow explore the many experimental schools of the present century, including cubism, surrealism, dada, and abstract expressionism. Faithful reproductions of 500 artworks illustrate paintings of 100 different masters, including Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Picasso, Braque, Dali, Mondrian, deKooning, Rothko, Pollack, and many others. Here is a large and handsome book that will delight all art lovers and museum-goers. It makes a magnificent addition to the home library, as well as a great item for holiday gift-giving. Modern Painting is a delight to the eye and an enlightening history of two centuries of European and American art

    In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a vivid and magical tour of the Paris of 1900-1930, a hotbed of artistic creation where we encounter the likes of Apollinaire, Modigliani, Cocteau, Matisse, Picasso, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, working, loving, and struggling to stay afloat. 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations are also featured.

    Engaging and authoritative, Inuit Art: An Introduction explores Inuit art from historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives.The engrossing story begins with an outline of the roots of Inuit art in prehistoric times and through the historical period that began with the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. The emergence of Inuit art as we know it came about in the late 1940s, partly through the encouragement of writer and artist James Houston, who also introduced printmaking to Inuit artists. Inspired by his support, Inuit artists quickly brought their art to life, attracting a wide audience almost overnight, and they have continued to develop and refine their work over the past fifty years. To enrich our understanding of the art, Ingo Hessel also provides descriptions of techniques and materials.

    His landscapes are perhaps the least well known of his masterpieces, although they were the closest to his heart. Indeed, in his later years, Parrish dedicated himself almost entirely to landscape scenes, sometimes reworking earlier pieces to remove human figures. In this witty and illuminating book, Parrish expert Alma Gilbert argues persuasively that Parrish’s better-known illustration career was a thirty-five-year detour on his path to achieving his true goal, a dedication to reproducing nature in all its splendor. The 50-plus color plates in this book show how masterfully he achieved that goal, while the text provides fascinating insight into the stories behind these glorious images. Also featured are lovely photos of Parrish’s estate, The Oaks, where he found refuge and inspiration, shots of the artist and his family, and hitherto unpublished correspondence. Together, these elements help sketch in the context surrounding this remarkable man and his extraordinary art. A feast for the senses, this is truly a book for any art lover, whether familiar with Parrish’s marvelous landscapes, or on the brink of a wonderful discovery.

    In the first book devoted solely to Thompson, the life and work of this pivotal figure in modern American art history and African American culture receive the attention they deserve.Judith Wilson situates Bob Thompson within the context of both contemporary artistic production and cultural trends of the fifties and sixties. She uses interviews, Thompson's diary entries and letters to his family, and his work to give a thoughtful and thorough interpretation of his art and persona. She traces Thompson's development—psychologically, socially, and artistically—effectively portraying his first encounters with art and bohemian culture and his intensely active period in Europe shortly before his death in Rome at the age of 29.Bob Thompson's life intersects several important currents in recent American culture, and his work reveals an unfinished quest for communal identity, says Wilson. His use of postmodern techniques of appropriation and pastiche embraced both the Western tradition and cultural resources specific to the African American experience. The publication of Bob Thompson recognizes the important role of the artist in the vanguard of twentieth-century American art.

    The contributors offer a range of approaches, including technical studies of his paintings, iconological studies of his images, archival studies of his surroundings, and historical studies of the reception of his art.

    Clarke investigates a rich assortment of Roman erotic art to answer this question—and along the way, he reveals a society quite different from our own. Clarke reevaluates our understanding of Roman art and society in a study informed by recent gender and cultural studies, and focusing for the first time on attitudes toward the erotic among both the Roman non-elite and women. This splendid volume is the first study of erotic art and sexuality to set these works—many newly discovered and previously unpublished—in their ancient context and the first to define the differences between modern and ancient concepts of sexuality using clear visual evidence.Roman artists pictured a great range of human sexual activities—far beyond those mentioned in classical literature—including sex between men and women, men and men, women and women, men and boys, threesomes, foursomes, and more. Roman citizens paid artists to decorate expensive objects, such as silver and cameo glass, with scenes of lovemaking. Erotic works were created for and sold to a broad range of consumers, from the elite to the very poor, during a period spanning the first century B.C. through the mid-third century of our era. This erotic art was not hidden away, but was displayed proudly in homes as signs of wealth and luxury. In public spaces, artists often depicted outrageous sexual acrobatics to make people laugh.Looking at Lovemaking depicts a sophisticated, pre-Christian society that placed a high value on sexual pleasure and the art that represented it. Clarke shows how this culture evolved within religious, social, and legal frameworks that were vastly different from our own and contributes an original and controversial chapter to the history of human sexuality.

    1240-1302) represented the transition from medieval to early Renaissance art; his legacy is revealed in this authoritative volume, the first new monograph in 30 years. Cimabue is credited with bringing a naturalistic style to the stiff Byzantine forms of 13th-century art. The appeal of his work is undeniable: his trademark elements -- gilt thrones for the Madonna and angels with great multicolored wings -- were echoed by generations of artists, and even today his pieces speak with immediacy and power.In the absence of surviving documentation, many elegant, classical works are convincingly attributed to Cimabue, works in the collections of the Uffizi, the Louvre, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Other of his saints and Madonnas still decorate the churches for which they were created: paintings in Arezzo, Bologna, Florence, and Pisa, as well as the frescoes in the church of St. Francis in Assisi that were severely damaged in the earthquakes of 1997 (the frescoes are reproduced here as they looked just before the tremors). Luciano Bellosi's text examines the written and painted documentary evidence -- not only of Cimabue's work but that of the artists he influenced -- to create a vivid portrait of the artist in the historical, political, and cultural context of Tuscany and central Italy.

    This comprehensive survey includes the seductive illustrations to Lysistrata and works that were originally suppressed or had limited circulation. Today, Beardsley's art seems as modern as ever, even a hundred years after his death.

    What unfolds is a complicated story of an aging artist determined to create a new art. This book is the catalogue of a Monet exhibition that opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on September 23, 1998, before opening at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on January 21, 1999.

    His engaging, informal profiles of Balthus, Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, Wayne Thiebaud, Brice Marden, Kiki Smith, and others record not only what they said about the art they chose to look at in various museums, but also what they revealed about themselves and their work in the process. Lucian Freud goes on a midnight visit to see the Rembrandts in London's National Gallery (because that's when he likes to go them, and can, so the lights are left on for him). Francis Bacon, famous for his nighmarish pictures, is drawn to the pastoral Constables at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Leon Golub and Nancy Spero show their affinity for the art of ancient Mexico and Egypt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred and thirty photographs, Portraits gives powerful visual accompaniment to lively, fluent prose. So when Henri Cartier-Bresson talks at the Pompidou Center in Paris about his admiration for Matisse, we see not only the Matisse portrait he particularly likes, but also the sketch he did while he and Kimmelman stood in front of it."Good artists, of different sorts, can talk straight about art, " Michael Kimmelman writes. As Elizabeth Murray puts it, "You look at this Courbet and you can relate to it even though his world is so distant from ours. What this Courbet or that Cezanne does is invite you into their worlds, and when you pop out again you've got something in your life you didn't have before." Asthese artists describe what is relevant to the present in the past, they restore a sense of immediacy to art. Portraits will make you look at art with fresh eyes.

    Book by

    In a career spanning 70 years during which he produced many hundreds of paintings, there can be found a number which are among the most famous in the history of modern European art.Monet rejected the brushwork technique used by the academic traditionalists to create dramatically fresh images of nature in its various forms and moods. His later home in Giverny, on the bank of the Seine near Paris, where he lived for three decades of his life, became the focal point for some of the most celebrated of these works and includes the waterlilies series known as the Nymphéas.A notable feature of his work was the treatment of single subjects in extended series, such as Poplars and Grain Stacks as well as views of the façade of Rouen Cathedral, seen in various stages as the light changed throughout the day. His influence on painting in this century can hardly be over-emphasized.

    Between these years Picasso produced some of the most intensely personal and expressive work of his career. With the outbreak of the Civil War in Spain, political crisis became personal crisis and the formerly autobiographical, even hermetic outlook in Picasso's art expanded to embrace a new political and social consciousness. He responded first to the horrors of war and then to the dangers and privations of life in occupied Paris, where he chose to remain until the liberation.

    This period, now called the High Renaissance, is generally considered to be one of the high points of Western civilisation. How did it come about, and what were the forces that converged to spark such an explosion of creative activity? In this study, Ingrid Rowland examines the culture, society, and intellectual norms that generated the High Renaissance. This interdisciplinary 2001 study assesses the intellectual paradigm shift that occurred at the turn of the fifteenth century. It also finds and explains the connections between ideas, people, and the art works they created by looking at economics, art, contemporary understanding of classical antiquity, and social conventions.

    

    Yet, for more than 15 years Paris was the focus of Beckmann's life and career. Already renowned artist in Germany, Beckmann set out to match his ambitions against the greatest artistic masters of the time. This book presents for the first time the details of Beckmann's life in Paris. Original materials such as his wife's personal scrapbook previously unpublished letters and recently discovered filmstrips shed new light on this important period.

    Reevaluating the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Bronzino and their followers in the light of recent research, Marcia Hall offers a new interpretation for the stylistic shifts that occurred after 1520. By taking into account the social, cultural, political, theological, and patronage issues that affected taste and stylistic developments, she demonstrates how the revival of interest in antique Roman sculpture relief affected Mannerist painters. She also examines the repercussions of the Reformation, which changed forever the Church's view of the function of images.

    

    He was the first Surrealist photographer, a gifted rebel with an incisive eye and a passion for freedom and pleasure.This outstanding monograph sheds new light on Man Ray's photographic genius -- incredibly, around one third of these images have never before been published. Visually spectacular and intellectually stimulating it shatters the myth -- cultivated by Man Ray himself -- that his photographic creativity resulted from timely mistakes and chance occurrences. Featured are many of his solarizations, rayographs, unconventional portraits and sensual nudes.

    David Cottington examines the cubist movement and sets it within the complex political, economic, and cultural forces of pre-World War I France. Cubism, as a part of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, played an integral role in the turbulent Belle Epoque. The author focuses on cubism`s relation to the particular discourses—of nationalism, aestheticism, gender, the social purpose of art—that gave meaning to the experience of modernity in Paris in the decade before the war.In Part I of the book, the author discusses the "cubist conjuncture," the years that followed the collapse of the Bloc des Gauches. The Bloc, more than a parliamentary alliance, represented an effort of collaboration between the liberal middle class and sectors of the working class led by Parisian intellectuals and artists (future cubists among them). In the wake of the Bloc`s failure, workers withdrew into trade unionism and artists into aesthetic avant-gardism. Cottington analyzes this consolidation of the artistic avant-garde, its relation to the expanding dealer-centered art market, and the dominant and counter discourses of the day. In Part II, he considers specific aspects of cubist art and the cubist movement—from the conservative modernism of the paintings of Le Fauconnier and Gleizes to the aestheticism of Picasso`s papiers-collés to the collective architectural and interior design project of the "cubist house." These examples and others, Cottington concludes, reveal cubism as a contradictory and unstable constellation of interests and practices, sometimes complicit with dominant social and political forces, sometimes opposed to them, but in every case shaped by them.

    Over 430 varied, eye-catching cuts — available in a rich assortment of styles and sizes — depict coats of arms emblazoned with chevrons, florals, foliates, helmets, birds, mythical creatures, and scores of other devices. Illustrators and graphic artists will find these authentic images ideal for lending an aristocratic touch to magazine and catalog copy. The royalty-free cuts are ready for immediate use as well as in newsletters and brochures, as book illustrations, and in countless other graphic undertakings.

    The result is a wonderful and permissive space in which the viewer...can wander"...-Moira Roth, Trefethen professor of art history, Mills College.

    Unencumbered by global flashbacks and confusing concurrent narratives, "Art across Time" presents a manageable survey that emphasizes art in its cultural and social context.