Leonardo was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer, and this captivating book provides the reader with a unique insight into the life and work of one of history's most intriguing figures. All of Leonardo Da Vinci's work is presented in this compact volume - from his paintings and frescos, to detailed reproductions of his remarkable encrypted notebooks. As well as featuring each individual artwork, sections of each are shown in isolation to reveal incredible details - for example, the different levels of perspective between the background sections of the Mona Lisa, and the disembodied hand in The Last Supper. 640 pages of colour artworks and photographs of Da Vinci's original notebooks, accompanied by fascinating biographical and historical details are here.

    In many of them he described, in painstaking detail and beautiful prose, the progress of his work. Van Gogh's Letters presents more than 150 of these stirring letters, excerpted and newly translated, and set side-by-side with the art it describes, including sketches, drawings, and paintings. The result is an elegantly rendered collection that allows us to see the world through the eyes of one of the greatest artists of all time. Previously published in hardcover as Vincent van Gogh: A Self-Portrait in Art and Letters

    He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in "Art and Illusion," another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

    This book includes their heroics and exploits in rescuing and safeguarding the world's great artworks.

    Spanning from 3,500 B.C.E. to the present, this unique guide is written by an all-star team of architectural experts in their fields who emphasize the connections, contrasts, and influences of architectural movements throughout history. The architectural history of the world comes to life through a unified framework for interpreting and understanding architecture, supplemented by rich drawings from the renowned Frank Ching as well as brilliant photographs. Architecture and art history enthusiasts will find A Global History of Architecture perpetually at their fingertips.

    A visually arresting reference for art lovers and students, it provides a truly comprehensive worldwide gazeteer of paintings organized chronologically by date of completion. Each entry includes the history of the painting, information about the artist or artistic movement, the current location of the painting (all are on view to the public), as well as other details. The works are also indexed by artist and by title, making for easy cross-referencing. Included are popular paintings, key works that are the most breathtaking for their extraordinary power and beauty, paintings that were turning points in the history of art, and rediscovered masterpieces, making 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die an art museum in its own right.

    Curiously, as this important book shows, these years of upheaval were also a time of creative ferment and innovative accomplishment in literature, theater, film, and art.Glitter and Doom is the first publication to focus exclusively on portraits dating from the short-lived Weimar Republic. It features forty paintings and sixty drawings by key artists, including Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz. Their works epitomize Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), in particular the branch of that new form of realism called Verism, which took as its subject contemporary phenomena such as war, social problems, and moral decay. Subjects of their incisive portraits are the artists’ own contemporaries: actors, poets, prostitutes, and profiteers, as well as doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and other respectable citizens. The accompanying texts reveal how these portraits hold up a mirror to the glittering, vital, doomed society that was obliterated when Hitler came to power.

    From powerful studies of models in Paris in the mid-1870s to compelling paintings set in Venice in the early 1880s, the works published in this volume of the catalogue raisonné show the variety of his aesthetic responses. He worked in the studio and en plein air, travelling widely during the eight years covered in this volume and painting in Paris, Brittany, Capri, Spain, North Africa, and Venice.This is the first time that Sargent’s early work has been mapped so comprehensively. With very few exceptions, this beautifully produced book illustrates all the pictures under discussion in color. Each painting, including several which have never been published before, is documented in depth with full provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, and in many cases new information is provided. The volume also reproduces a wealth of Sargent’s preliminary and related drawings and of comparative works by other artists.

    His practice remains one of the most unique, unequalled, and hugely influential of the past decades.He is most famous for his "building-cuts", actions that translate in the cutting-up of façades, walls, and floors of derelict buildings. Because of the ephemeral and often unauthorized nature of these interventions, Matta-Clark started using photography and film as means of documentation. His social and political convictions, and subsequent involvement in artistic communities, also led to various projects such as the opening of a restaurant in the middle of the then neglected district of Soho (Food), the purchase at auction of fractions of unusable urban land in New York (Fake Estate), and other various visionary urban proposals (with the New York based Anarchitecture group).The three texts commissioned for this book include Professor Thomas Crow’s long survey, that will become a major reference on the work of the artist; Judith Russi Kirshner's essay on the concept of community and how it translates in his work; and Christian Kravagna's analysis of the role of photography and film in Matta-Clark's work.Apart from these essays, the book also contains a rich "Documents" section, composed of interviews, articles and various other historical and hard-to-find documents.

    D?rer's importance in the German High Renaissance was such that he can be considered to embody the movement entirely. His visits to Italy (where he studied most notably with Giovanni Bellini) had a profound effect on his artistic development and enabled him to combine both German and Italian influences in his work. In his later life, D?rer's passion for knowledge and progress led him to research and write on the subjects of art theory and mathematics, making him not only the greatest Northern European artist of his time, but also one of its leading thinkers. This overview of D?rer's entire oeuvre?covering his oil, tempera, and watercolor paintings, copper and wood engravings, and his drawings and sketches?is the perfect introduction to his work.

    The young artist asked a selection of his heroes, Is it possible to maintain one's integrity and freedom of thought and still participate in the art world? Responding artists--including Gregory Amenoff, Jo Baer, John Baldessari, Jimmie Durham, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, William Pope Lawrence Weiner and Richard Tuttle wrote back with advice (Gregory Amenoff: Keep away from art fairs.); encouragement (Joan Jonas: The answer is the Work. To Work. To care about the Work.); and cautionary tales (Adrian Piper: Young artist, it is highly unlikely that you will be rewarded professionally for reaching this point. Nor will it make you popular. On the contrary: you will develop a reputation for being 'difficult, ' 'uncooperative, ' 'inflexible, ' or even 'self-destructive;' and treated [or mistreated, or ostracized, or blacklisted] accordingly.). Twelve of these letters were originally published in Art on Paper. This book expands considerably upon that proje

    Text both in English and French.

    Organized by era, the reader is taken from Giotto, through Monet, to Pollock to reveal the development of art over the centuries. Supplemented with sections on Art Movements and Painting Techniques, this is the definitive reference for art enthusiasts of any level of knowledge and understanding.

    Rejecting the Nazis' Aryan ideals, the artist spent the years after 1933 creating disturbing dolls out of wax, wood, flax, plaster and glue--equipped with wigs and glass eyes. Photographs of these fetishistic simulacra were published in Minotaure, the Surrealists' magazine, and eagerly supported by members of Andre Breton's circle. After immigrating to Paris, Bellmer continued to develop his erotic obsessions through his art, now influenced by the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, and began to collaborate with his companion, the German artist Unica Zurn. Deeply involved in Freudian discourse, his drawings, lithographs and photographs investigate psychoanalytic theories around hysteria and transference and reveal a singular exploration into the relationship between language and the body.

    Theo acted as patron, agent, and sounding board to the artist whose life was fraught with poverty, a struggle for recognition, and alternating fits of madness and lucidity. Van Gogh also corresponded with other family members and fellow artists, including his dear friends Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard. His letters, originally collected by Theo’s wife, Johanna, exhibit Van Gogh’s genius, his depth of observation, and his feelings in their most naked form. In Vincent Van Gogh these letters have been excerpted, newly translated, and set side-by-side with more than 250 of his drawings and paintings. Van Gogh’s words and art illuminate each other and reveal a portrait of the artist as never seen before. The commentary of H. Anna Suh frames Van Gogh’s work and puts his art, letters, life, and struggles into rich context. The result is this timeless jewel of a collection, unlike any other Van Gogh book that has gone before.

    Whether portraits of older women, buxom girls, nudes with elongated bodies, or group scenes of domestic life, his works are characterized by baroque gestures, loose brushstrokes, unorthodox palettes, and detailed backgrounds that startle the viewer into a reconsideration of the tradition of painting. His "old master" techniques and individual style have earned him accolades from critics and collectors worldwide.

    Developing out of the graffiti-writing tradition of the 1980s through the work of artists such as Banksy and Futura 2000, it has long since reached the mainstream. Street Art is the first measured, critical account of the development of this global phenomenon.  Tracing street art’s origins in cave painting through the Paris walls photographed by Brassai in the ’20s through the witty, sophisticated imagery found on city streets today, the book also features new and exclusive interviews with key figures associated with street art of the last 35 years, including Lady Pink, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairy, Futura 2000, Malcolm McLaren, Miss Van, and Os Gemeos. Street Art reveals the extent to which the walls and streets of cities around the world have become the birthplace of some of the most dynamic and inspirational art being made today.

    It is an artistic, cultural and educational resource as well as an essential tourist guide that will make readers want to visit the museums that house the various masterpieces.These are the most admired and significant paintings from around the world and will surely delight both the general public and art specialists.

    The accompanying essays analyze the complex relationships between Rodin's drawings and his sculptures, the problems of attribution, and the role of sensuality in his work.Rodin's rich graphic oeuvre has until now been a little-known aspect of his art, yet it is crucial to a full understanding of his work. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the great sculptor's achievements.

    BOOKS

    They communicate the textures of the lives of ordinary Russians during the collapse of the Soviet Union, they highlight alternatives to factory design and disposable goods, and they speak volumes about what goes on in other people's homes--how they spend and scrimp, how they make do. Home-Made highlights the best of the everyday objects made by ordinary Russians during and around the time of the Soviet Union's decline. Many were inspired by a lack of access to manufactured goods. Among the hundreds of idiosyncratic constructions for inside and outside the home are a back massager from a wooden abacus, a television antenna from unwanted forks, and a tiny bathtub plug from a boot heel. The author is himself a self-taught artist: he began exhibiting his own objects and installations in 1990, and collecting and cataloging these everyday, utilitarian objects handmade from modern materials a dozen years ago, in 1994. He accompanies each invaluable artifact with a photograph of the maker and his or her story. Foreward by Susan B. Glasser of the Washington Post Foreign Service.

    Its 78 etchings recapture the incomparable grandeur of Goya's art as well as the major themes of his works — the Bible, human folly, and the brutal pageantry of bullfighting.Savage yet sympathetic, the nightmare visions of The Proverbs are among Goya's most enigmatic works. The realism of La Tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux is similarly striking, with remarkably accurate images of bulls and fighters. Each etching appears with the original caption and an English translation. Additional text sheds light on the life and times of the great Spanish master. Students, collectors, and other art lovers will prize this magnificently reproduced edition, which is also the lowest-priced collection of Goya's etchings.

    Speaking to the Heart: 100 Favorite Poems includes her thoughts and meditations on the different themes that organize the book, and her comments illuminate the poetry and describe the lives of the poets.

    And, with this thorough resource, anyone can take advantage of these techniques in their own home studio—even those with no printmaking background. The simple processes don’t require fancy equipment. Use silk-screen decals with light-sensitive emulsions to create a master image: then cover with glazes, and voilá! Use colored slips for unique monoprints. Work with stencils, relief blocks, or stamps, trying a variety of materials to mark the clay surface. Each method is carefully laid out in numerous photos, and shown on a finished piece. More than 100 images by leading contemporary artists showcase the techniques and provide a wealth of inspiration.

    Beloved by the general public for signature photographs of his troupe of Weimaraners, Wegman is also an immensely important figure in the contemporary art world.A pioneer video-maker, conceptualist, performer, photographer, painter, draftsman, and writer, Wegman moves fluidly among various media: from conceptual works to commissioned magazine shots; from videos shown in museums to television segments made for Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live; from artist’s books parodying nineteenth-century naturalist studies to children’s books revealing tongue-in-cheek portraits of town and country life;  from photographic “landscapes” employing his canine muses to his most recent cycle of landscapes combining found scenic souvenir postcards with drawing, collage, and painting. Underlying all his creations is the light humor of “funny” mediating the darker human comedy of “strange.” Speaking to the absurdities of daily life, Wegman’s work is universally appealing.William Wegman: Funney—Strange is illustrated with some 250 images. It is the first retrospective volume to consider the artist’s entire career from the 1960s to the 2000s and is an essential book for any fan of Wegman’s work.

    The Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine at Sinai holds the most important collection of Byzantine icons remaining today. This catalogue, published in conjuction with the exhibition Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from November 14, 2006, to March 4, 2007, features forty-three of the monastery's extremely rare--and rarely exhibited--icons and six manuscripts still little-known to the world at large. The exhibition and catalogue bring to life the central role of the icon in Byzantine religious practices. Themes include the icon's status as holy object, the ways in which the icon sanctified the place of worship, and the monks' quest for the holy. The Greek Orthodox monastery at Mount Sinai not only functioned as a major pilgrimage site for centuries but was also a cultural crossroads at the center of the shifting sands of ecclesiastical and secular politics. The accompanying essays explore how the monastery's contact with the outside world, through pilgrimage, resulted in aesthetic exchanges between the monastery and Coptic, Crusader, and Islamic art; and between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities in Europe.

    Cast your eye over flame worked goblets, cast vases, blown cups plus much more. The magnificent techniques, unique shapes and eye-catching designs will amaze any art or craft lover.

    Portraits, both literary and visual, were an important part of the cultural production of the court, reflecting the spirit of the age as much as the characteristics of the individuals portrayed. The magnificent oil paintings of court women are some of the most sumptuous of all works of art.The first new study of Restoration portraiture in nearly twenty years, this book looks at some of the most beautiful and fascinating portraits of court women of the period, from royal brides and daughters to mistresses and actresses. By studying the context in which their portraits were produced against the biographies and reputations of the women themselves, this book sheds new light on one of the most complex and intriguing areas of British art history. Essays by international scholars explore the cultural context of the Restoration court, sexual politics and the role of women at court, the making and meaning of women's portraits and the critical history of Restoration portraiture. These are supplemented by a lavishly illustrated catalogue of 120 portraits by some of the most important artists of the time, including Lely and Kneller, together with biographies of the sitters themselves.

    Pygmalion’s mythical sculpture, which magnanimous gods endowed with life after he fell in love with it, marks perhaps the first such instance in Western art history of an image that exists on its own terms, rather than simply imitating something (or someone) else. In The Pygmalion Effect, Victor I. Stoichita delivers this living image—as well as its many avatars over the centuries—from the long shadow cast by art that merely replicates reality. Stoichita traces the reverberations of Ovid’s founding myth from ancient times through the advent of cinema. Emphasizing its erotic origins, he locates echoes of this famous fable in everything from legendary incarnations of Helen of Troy to surrealist painting to photographs of both sculpture and people artfully posed to simulate statues. But it was only with the invention of moving pictures, Stoichita argues, that the modern age found a fitting embodiment of the Pygmalion story’s influence. Concluding with an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock films that focuses on Kim Novak’s double persona in Vertigo, The Pygmalion Effect illuminates the fluctuating connections that link aesthetics, magic, and technical skill. In the process, it sheds new light on a mysterious world of living artifacts that, until now, has occupied a dark and little-understood realm in the history of Western image making.

    This book presents 40 Chola bronzes, exploring how and why these objects came to be made and the role they played within Hinduism and Chola culture.

    Most famous for such works as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci was more than a painter of extraordinary skill. In fact, he frequently regarded himself principally as a civil and military engineer.The Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci tells the story of this artist/engineer's life and times, and looks at the major themes that dominated Leonardo's work. Beautifully illustrated, the book also contains 30 items of rare memorabilia, including:the record of Leonardo's birth made by his grandfather in 1452Leonardo's copy of his letter to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan from 1483the passport given to Leonardo by Cesare BorgiaLeonardo's map of Imolaan extract from Leonardo's notes on machines that polish mirrorspages from Antonio de Beatis's diary mentioning the Mona LisaThe Treasures of Leonardo da Vinci is a unique guide to this most gifted of men.

    In The Matrixial Borderspace Ettinger works through Lacan's late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition.Edited and with an afterword by Brian Massumi

    J. Clark addresses these questions—and many more—in ways that steer art writing into new territory.In early 2000 two extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark’s meditations—sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world—track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.

    Until now there was almost no written insight into this vast subculture, which inspires fascination across America and around the world. As dazzling as the art it celebrates, the book is packed with 1,000 full-color illustrations and features in-depth interviews with more than 125 train artists and "writers." Hundreds of never-before-seen photographs span the style's evolution, while the authoritative text from an all-star team of authors provides unprecedented perspective, including the first-ever written history of "monikers," the precursors of graffiti, developed by hobos and rail workers to communicate en route. Bound to surprise graffiti artists, graphic designers, and urban culture buffs alike, this book will inspire anyone who has ever been interested in graffiti.

    This information is based on the ancient sculptural texts and the long ancestral tradition and actual experience of the Sthapatis. Divided into three parts, the first section deals with the philosophy and spiritual thought that is the basis of all Indian art forms. The second section deals with coiffures, ornaments, weapons, the use of symbols as accessories, the sculptural representations of flora, animals and birds, the fashioning of images in metal and katusarkara. The last section presents the basic rhythms and measurements used in traditional sculptural practices. This book is detailed enough to also serve as a guide book for the practicing sculptor.

    Their work--at once conceptual art, typological study, and topological documentation--has influenced German photographers of a younger generation, including Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky. This compelling, exhaustively documented biography describes the Bechers' life and work and offers a critical assessment of their place in the history of photography.Becher scholar Susanne Lange, granted access to the photographers' archives and quoting extensively from interviews with them, writes the first sustained analysis and biography of the Bechers' extraordinary partnership. She discusses, among other topics, both the functionalist and aesthetic dimensions of the Bechers' subject matter, their typologizing (which she finds reminiscent of nineteenth-century naturalists' classificatory schemes), and the anonymous industrial building style favored by German architects. She argues that industrial building types impose themselves on our consciousness as the cathedral did on that of the Middle Ages, and that the Bechers' photographs--which seem at first glance only to record a vanishing landscape--serve to examine this shaping of our perceptions. Their work provides us with a rare opportunity to see how we see.Bernd & Hilla Becher: Life and Work, with 53 duotone plates and more than 200 additional illustrations, is the first book to delve deeply into the sources and vision behind the evocative and melancholy beauty of the Bechers' work. It will be indispensable both as a reference for students of postwar German photography and as a guide for readers who want to know how to approach the Bechers' monumental project."

    From the debated origins of the temple in the Greek dark ages to its transformation at the end of antiquity, this book summarizes the latest thinking, bringing to light new discoveries, and placing emphasis on the architecture and its cultural, historical context.

    In Sensorium, contemporary artists and writers explore the implications of the techno-human interface. Ten artists, chosen by an international team of curators, offer their own edgy investigations of embodied technology and the technologized body. These range from Matthieu Briand's experiment in controlled schizophrenia and Janet Cardiff and Georges Bures Miller's uneasy psychological soundscapes to Bruce Nauman's uncanny night visions and Fran�ois Roche's destabilized architecture. The art in Sensorium--which accompanies an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center--captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment, when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way to dramatic multisensory mixes or transpositions. Artwork by each artist appears with an analytical essay by a curator, all of it prefaced by an anchoring essay on The Mediated Sensorium by Caroline Jones. In the second half of Sensorium, scholars, scientists, and writers contribute entries to an Abecedarius of the New Sensorium. These short, playful pieces include Bruno Latour on Air, Barbara Maria Stafford on Hedonics, Michel Foucault (from a little-known 1966 radio lecture) on the Utopian Body, Donna Haraway on Compoundings, and Neal Stephenson on the Viral. Sensorium is both forensic and diagnostic, viewing the culture of the technologized body from the inside, by means of contemporary artists' provocations, and from a distance, in essays that situate it historically and intellectually. Copublished with The MIT List Visual Arts Center.

    Repin, who lived from 1844 to 1930, was the finest and most celebrated painter of his generation, and an important influence in shaping a distinctly Russian school within nineteenth-century Realism. His often-controversial works addressed subjects including the hard lives of the peasants, the fates of revolutionary activists, loaded episodes of Russian history and some of the nation's greatest cultural figures, many of whom he counted as personal friends, including Tolstoy, Musorgsky and Gorky. His vibrant, colorful and topical canvases offer a fascinating panorama of the issues that were swirling in the minds of his contemporaries, and an unusual view of all strata of life during this crucial period of historical change.

    Their extraordinarily detailed arts are rich in cultural symbolism; they are always breathtakingly beautiful—and they are typically made by women. Like other Amazigh (Berber) groups (but in contrast to the Arab societies of North Africa), the Ait Khabbash have entrusted their artistic responsibilities to women. Cynthia Becker spent years in Morocco living among these women and, through family connections and female fellowship, achieved unprecedented access to the artistic rituals of the Ait Khabbash. The result is more than a stunning examination of the arts themselves, it is also an illumination of women's roles in Islamic North Africa and the many ways in which women negotiate complex social and religious issues. One of the reasons Amazigh women are artists is that the arts are expressions of ethnic identity, and it follows that the guardians of Amazigh identity ought to be those who literally ensure its continuation from generation to generation, the Amazigh women. Not surprisingly, the arts are visual expressions of womanhood, and fertility symbols are prevalent. Controlling the visual symbols of Amazigh identity has given these women power and prestige. Their clothing, tattoos, and jewelry are public identity statements; such public artistic expressions contrast with the stereotype that women in the Islamic world are secluded and veiled. But their role as public identity symbols can also be restrictive, and history (French colonialism, the subsequent rise of an Arab-dominated government in Morocco, and the recent emergence of a transnational Berber movement) has forced Ait Khabbash women to adapt their arts as their people adapt to the contemporary world. By framing Amazigh arts with historical and cultural context, Cynthia Becker allows the reader to see the full measure of these fascinating artworks.

    Acting out diverse identities in scenes ranging from severely simple to elaborately staged, Cahun was a pioneer of the gender-bending role-playing now seen in works by artists such as Cindy Sherman (born the year Cahun died), Nikki S. Lee, and many others. Don't Kiss Me, the first comprehensive volume on Cahun, features many previously unpublished photographs and drawings, illuminating not only Cahun's work but also that of partner, Marcel Moore (1892-1972), and their intense forty-year collaboration. In Don't Kiss Me, seven authors examine Cahun and Moore's lives and art-making; their relationship with the Surrealist movement; and give the first thorough account of the Resistance operations, trial, imprisonment, and attempted suicides of the two artists during the German Occupation of Jersey, in the Channel Islands, during World War II. The wealth of new material in this compelling survey makes it essential for all those with an interest in Cahun and Moore, photography, gender studies, or Surrealism.Born in France, Lucy Schwob (pseudonym Claude Cahun) and Suzanne Malherbe (pseudonym Marcel Moore) met at school in their teens and became both lovers and collaborators, inseparable until Lucy’s death in 1954. Cahun is by far the better known of the two; this book establishes for the first time the extent of Moore’s contributions to the self-portraits. Their photographs, books, and documents were acquired by The Jersey Heritage Trust acquired the largest collection of their work in the world in the 1990s; this book is the first catalog of the collection.

    Barcelona and Modernity examines this remarkable seventy-one-year period, when Barcelona also reigned as one of the most dynamic centers of modernist art and architecture in Europe. Focusing on the Catalan Renaixença, Modernisme, Noucentisme, avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, and artistic reactions to the Spanish Civil War, essays by an extraordinary international team of scholars offer new insights into the work of such Catalan artists as Antoni Gaudí, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí, among others, by setting them in context with the art of their teachers, colleagues, and rivals.With approximately 350 works in a variety of media—painting, sculpture, photography, furniture, decorative arts, and architectural design—this intriguing book also explores how Catalan artists derived inspiration from local traditions while contributing their own innovations to international modernism. Broader in scope than any previous treatment of the subject, this book is sure to alter popular perceptions of Catalonia and become a fundamental text for years to come.

    This collection of beautiful paintings celebrates the centuries-old iconography of women engaged in needlework, an activity that has always united women from all countries and in all stations of life, whether taken up for practical or artistic purposes.

    Katz was an independent figure during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and Pop when he first emerged -- and remains a unique, though highly influential figure to this day. irresistible women, masterfully painted using precise, broad areas of colour. Alongside these unmistakably 'Katzian' female portraits are portraits of men, group portraits, landscapes and interiors rendered in painting, drawing, collage and metal cut-outs. All attest to the artist's attention to detail, economy of means and consummate technique. Bigger-than-life paintings such as The Black Dress (1960), Blue Umbrella (1972), Red Coat (1982) and White Visor (2003) have entered the collective conscience as the epitome of a particular, late 20th century feminine ideal: icons of fashion, yet miraculously resilient to the prevailing fashions of contemporary art. originating at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art was held in 1986. Alex Katz's work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., The Tate Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, among many others.

    Created over more than five decades, from 1951 to 2005, they range from portraits of family members and friends to vibrant depictions of objects, landscapes, and buildings in and around the artist's homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. These works reflect the insight, emotion, and technique that are uniquely his. They demonstrate Wyeth's extraordinary skill as a draftsman and the accuracy with which he sees light and dark, enabling him to model forms while suggesting the very substance and texture of what he sees.

    By Hand features an international collection of the most noteworthy artists and shows their work in detailed photography and insightful texts.From books to pillows to T-shirts to toys, the pieces in this volume define an alternative view of contemporary design. Personal craft is emphasized over perfection and the personality of the artist is put forth as a key element of the finished product. From Kiki Smith's lovingly etched birds to Barb Hunt's knitted land mines to dynamo-ville's one-of-a-kind puppets to Evil Twin's hand-stitched publications, today's art revels in the care and consideration of craft.

    Rembrandt was an esteemed artist in his own time as well as in the present, yet there is much debate over how many paintings and drawings can really be attributed to him, and popular scholastic opinion varies widely. In his lively text, accompanied by 700 full-color illustrations, Gary Schwartz addresses the central controversies, providing art historians, students, and art lovers with essential new insights to help clarify the mysteries surrounding the great painter.

    Focusing primarily on painting and sculpture, it places these two art forms within the larger context of visual culture;including photography, graphic design, architecture, and decorative arts. In turn, all are treated within a broad historical framework to show the connections between visual cultural production and the political, social, and economic order of the time. Topics covered include The Classical Paradigm, Art and Revolutionary Propaganda In France, The Arts under Napoleon and Francisco Goya and Spanish Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century. For art enthusiasts, or anyone who wants to learn more about Art History.

    He takes us with him on his own journey of discovery, making us see the astonishing sophistication and power of the paintings, telling us what is known about their creators, the Cro-Magnon people who settled the area some 40,000 years ago.Beginning in 1879 with Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who found the astonishing paintings on the ceiling of a cave at Altamira, Curtis takes us among the scholars of prehistory, the archaeologists, the art historians who devoted their lives to studying and writing about the paintings. Among them: the famous Abbé Henri Breuil, who lay on his back in damp caves lit only by a lantern held patiently aloft by his faithful—and silent—female assistant, to produce the exquisite tracings that are the most reproduced renderings of the art; Max Raphael, the art historian who first understood that the animals on the walls were not single portraits but part of larger compositions; the beautiful Annette Lamming-Emperaire, resistance fighter turned archaeologist, whose doctoral thesis was so important that all theory since has flowed from her work; Jean Clottes and others still working as new caves and information come to light. In his own search for the caves’ meaning, Curtis takes us through the major theories—that the art was part of fertility or hunting rituals, or used for religious or shamanistic purposes, or was clan mythology—examining the ways in which ethnography, archaeology, and religion have influenced the thinking about the cave paintings over time.The Cave Painters is rich in detail, personalities, and history—and permeated with the mystery at the core of this art created so many thousands of years ago by human beings who had developed, perhaps for the first time, both the ability for abstract thought and a profound and beautiful way to express it.

    In the brief years between the twentieth centurys two cataclysmic world wars, the modern metropolis was invented in Berlin. Life in Berlin was a cabaret, and Marlene Dietrich, Thomas Mann, Alfred Einstein, or Joseph Goebbels might be seated at the next table. The avant-garde thrived there. The mass media magnified the impact of everything from fads to political ideas. Subcultures and club cultures nurtured gender-bending fashions and lifestyles. Architects and designers struggled to free themselves from the past. In the background beat the new rhythms of urban experience: the coming and going of the latest planes and trains and automobiles, the clacking of typewriters in vast offices, the jazz band that never sleeps. Berlin: The Twenties is a book for history buffs, travelers, and lovers of modern art and design.

    Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms--a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best--the friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.

    Encountering Eva Hesse presents new writing on the work of Eva Hesse (1936-70) by international artists, curators, and art historians who examine the varied framings of exhibition, studio, and writing for their encounters with these still challenging works of art.

    This is the first comprehensive survey of the remarkable work of the19th-century biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel for whom nature and art were inseparable.

    Catherine has remained an oasis of peace for centuries. Today, it is a place of international pilgrimage, housing the most extensive collection of Greek Orthodox icons in the world. Granted unprecedented access to this holy site, photographer Araldo De Luca and author Corinna Rossi take readers inside the walls of this sacred place, revealing its peerless artistic, historical, and religious legacy through superb photographs and an authoritative text that incorporates the most recent research and discoveries. Presented in a handsome slipcase and featuring a preface by Archbishop Damianos of Sinai, the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, this is a book to be cherished by art lovers and anyone interested in our historical and religious heritage.

    From first thoughts to finely wrought, elaborate artworks, from the lightest sketch in pencil to bold, gallery-wall installations, the medium is shown as an essential vehicle for creativity.The recent prominence of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Chris Ofili, Rachel Whiteread, Ellen Gallagher, and a host of others who use drawing as a final means of expression, is addressed in both theworks shown and essays by curators Kate Macfarlane and Katharine Stout, and art historian Charles Darwent.The Drawing Book takes us on a journey through five themes — measurement, nature, the city, dreams, and the body. Each is richly illustrated with a diverse range of images, from the old masters — Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Dürer — through great Modernist pieces by Rodin, Picasso, Matisse, and on to the contemporary artists who are reviving drawing today. A new and unique approach to an age old medium.

    To others, they embody a whole tradition of masculine mastery and feminine display. Yet others find in the bathers a feminine fantasy of bodily liberation. The points of view are many, various, occasionally startling--and through them, Linda Nochlin explores the contradictions and dissonances that mark experience as well as art. Her book--about art, the body, beauty, and ways of viewing--confronts the issues posed in representations particularly of the female body in the art of impressionists, modern masters, and contemporary realists and post-modernists.Nochlin begins by focusing on the painterly preoccupation with bathing, whether at the beach, in lakes and rivers, in public swimming pools, or in bathtubs. In discussions of Renoir, Manet, Cezanne, Bonnard, and Picasso, of late-twentieth-century and contemporary artists such as Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, and Jenny Saville, of grotesque imagery, the concept of beauty, and the body in realism, she develops an interpretive collage incorporating the readings of differing, strong-willed, female viewpoints. Among these is, of course, Nochlin's own, a vantage point subtly charted here through a longtime engagement with art, art history, and artists.In many ways a personal book, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty brings to bear a lifetime of looking at, teaching, talking about, wrestling with, loving, and hating art to reveal and complicate the lived and felt--the visceral--experience of art.

    Art star Tracey Emin (b. 1963) first came to public attention in the 1990s with her provocative and confrontational works. After the inclusion of the controversial "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With" in the Royal Academy's notorious Sensation exhibition and "My Bed" in the Turner Prize exhibition in 1999, she achieved a level of fame and notoriety unparalleled for an artist in recent times. Emin's use of intensely personal, everyday materials gives her work an intimate quality, combining avant-garde ideas with feminine traditions of craft. This book presents Emin's art in clear, accessible language, with full-color reproductions throughout. It provides a highly informed key to understanding one of the most hotly discussed artists at work today, responsible for some of the most iconic works of recent times.

    For while Boucher's art charmed nouveau riche buyers and titled patrons, this was not always the case with critics, and modern scholarship has done little to challenge Diderot's eventual judgment that to admire Boucher's work is to be a stranger to "real taste, to the truth, to just ideas, and to the seriousness of art." This engaging study examines the motives behind the contemporaneous critical response to Boucher's picturesque repertoire of amorous peasants, blithe aristocrats, and fanciful mythological scenes, and to the rococo style in general. The vision of t rococo (feminine, aristocratic, decadent) and of Boucher (facile, libertine, debauched) that lingers in modern art history was invented by eighteenth-century critics bent on reform, both aesthetic and political. Exploring how the discrediting of Boucher and his school intersected with cultural debates about gender and class, this account of Boucher's art should persuade critics and admirers alike to take another, more considered look.

    All aspects of Roman art and architecture are treated, including private art and domestic architecture, the art of the Eastern and Western provinces, the art of freedmen, and the so-called minor arts, including cameos, silverware, and coins. The book is divided into four parts-Monarchy and Republic, Early Empire, High Empire, and Late Empire-and traces the development of Roman art from its beginnings in the 8th century BCE to the mid fourth century CE, with special chapters devoted to Pompeii and Herculaneum, Ostia, funerary and provincial art and architecture, and the earliest Christian art.

    Contains over 30 original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays by renowned and emergent scholars. Covers the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Features an international and ambitious range - from reception, Gregory the Great, collecting, and pilgrimage art, to gender, patronage, the marginal, spolia, and manuscript illumination.

    He was without a doubt the most prolific, and for that reason was often referred to as "The Jack Kirby of humor comics." But he might have been likewise compared to pinup artist Gill Elvgren for his ability to render the female form in a way that was at once funny, charming, and unbelievably sexy. DeCarlo worked mostly on wholesome all-American features like Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica and My Friend Irma, but he populated these innocent stories with his irresistibly attractive women. This unique blend of hilarious homespun humor and libido-sparking art made DeCarlo's work outshine the competition.For nearly six decades, DeCarlo entertained the world with his special talents. Though best known as the definitive Archie Comics artist and creator of Josie and the Pussycats, DeCarlo also brought his unique style to dozens of other characters including Millie The Model, Willie Lumpkin, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Big Boy, Batman and even The Simpsons.In 2005, Fantagraphics published The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo, a beautiful two-color knock-out of a collection featuring his best pin-ups from the 1950s/'60s Humorama digest. With Innocence and Seduction: The Art of Dan DeCarlo, Fantagraphics Books presents a fitting tribute to the life and art of one of the world's all-time best cartoonists in a wider-ranging career retrospective. DeCarlo fan, friend, and fellow cartoonist Bill Morrison has written and produced the ultimate book on this remarkable artist, lavishly designed with over 300 illustrations. Included are rare World War II-era cartoons, original Humorama pinups, seldom-seen newspaper strips, examples of his justly famous commercial comics work, and of course, lots and lots of those fabulous DeCarlo girls!

    Created by artists and craftsmen, most ehon also feature essays, poems, or other texts written in beautiful, distinctive calligraphy. They are by nature collaborations: visual artists, calligraphers, writers, and designers join forces with papermakers, binders, block cutters, and printers. The books they create are strikingly beautiful, highly charged microcosms of deep feeling, sharp intensity, and extraordinary intelligence. In the elegant, richly illustrated Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan, renowned scholar Roger S. Keyes traces the history and evolution of these remarkable books through seventy key works, including many great rarities and unique masterpieces, from the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library, one of the foremost collections of Japanese illustrated books in the West.The earliest ehon were made as religious offerings or talismans, but their great flowering began in the early modern period (1600-1868) and has continued, with new media and new styles and subjects, to the present. Shiohi no tsuto (Gifts of the Ebb Tide, 1789; often called The Shell Book) by Kitagawa Utamaro, one of the supreme achievements of the ehon tradition, is reproduced in full. Michimori (ca. 1604), a luxuriously produced libretto for a No play is also featured, as are Saito- Shu-ho's cheerful Kishi empu (Mr. Ginger's Book of Love, 1803), Kamisaka Sekka's brilliant Momoyogusa (Flowers of a Hundred Worlds, 1910), and many more.Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan ends with ehon by some of the most innovative practitioners of the twentieth century. Among these are Chizu (The Map, 1965), Kawada Kikuji's profound photographic requiem for Hiroshima; Yoko Tawada's and Stephan Kohler's affecting Ein Gedicht fur ein Buch (A Poem for a Book, 1996); and Vija Celmins's and Eliot Weinberger's Hoshi (The Stars, 2005).The magnificent ehon tradition originated in Japan and developed there under very specific conditions, but it has long since burst its bounds, like any living tradition. Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan suggests that when artists meet readers in these contrived, protected, focused, sacred book "worlds," the possibilities for pleasure, insight, and inspiration are limitless.Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan was praised as "illuminating" in The New York Times' review of the New York Public Library's exhibit.http: //travel2.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/arts/d...

    It's also an excellent image with which to begin a serious discussion about the meaning(s) of representation. While many books and exhibitions have undertaken to survey the work of Magritte, and while many have acknowledged his profound impact upon other artists of his generation, none has yet studied the precise connections between Magritte's work and today's top contemporary artists. In "The Treachery of Images, " the Los Angeles County Museum of Art brings together more than 50 of the most important Magrittes with an equal number of very significant works by contemporary artists, both cool and edgy, including Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Vija Celmins, Joseph Kosuth, Sherrie Levine, Richard Artschwager, Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger, Jim Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Robert Gober and Marcel Broodthaers. Among the distinguished contributors are the internationally renowned art writer Thierry de Duve, co-curator Michel Draguet (director of the Musees Royaux de Bruxelles), critic Pepe Karmel and art historian Dickran Tashjian. Chapters and interviews are devoted to Ruscha, Celmins, Gober and Artschwager, among others.

    Yet the portraits he painted more than a century ago captivate us today, and he is now widely acclaimed as the finest portrait painter our nation has ever produced. This book recounts the artist’s life in fascinating detail, drawing on a treasure trove of Eakins family correspondence and papers that have only recently been discovered. Never before has Thomas Eakins’s story been told with such drama, clarity, and accuracy. Sidney Kirkpatrick sets the painter’s life and art in the wider context of the changing world he devoted himself to portraying, and he also addresses the artist’s private life—the contradictory impulses, obsessions, and possible psychological illness that fired his work. Kirkpatrick underscores Eakins’s unflinching integrity as an artist and discloses how his profound appreciation of the beauty of the human form was both the source of his greatness and ultimately of his undoing. Nevertheless, the author observes, Eakins has had his “revenge,” inspiring a new generation of realist painters and gaining the recognition that eluded him in life.

    Seen through Sexton's eyes, his subjects are transformed into images of tranquility, wonder, and mystery. From the purity of a fresh snowfall in Yosemite Valley to the enigmatic rock forms of the Colorado Plateau, Sexton explores the subtle nuances of details rather than grand vistas. Scheduled for publication by Ventana Editions in October 2006, every detail of the project has been supervised by Sexton. The book has been elegantly designed by Cliff Rusch, and the large-format, black and white images have been magnificently reproduced on luxurious heavyweight paper by Dual Graphics. The fifty-five images included in Recollectionsnone of which have appeared in Sexton's previous booksprovide moving testimony to his love of light and his dedication to revealing the beauty of the planet.In addition to the stunning reproductions, Recollections includes an illuminating foreword by well-known curator, writer, and photographer Arthur Ollman, as well as an engaging personal afterword by respected photographer Ray McSavaney. In his photographer's notes, John Sexton relates adventures and challenges encountered while working in the field and in the darkroom. Marked by the same excellence in printing and design as Sexton's three previous award-winning books, Quiet Light, Listen to the Trees, and Places of Power, Recollections promises an equally memorable experience.

    With the variety and quantity of magnificent paintings and sculptures in her likeness, it is apparent that the Magdalene has long been guiding the brushstrokes of our greatest artists, all of whom have rendered her unlike any other woman in the bible. Unlike Mary the mother--who is often expressed as an archetype, an ideal--the Magdalene is virtually always drawn as an individual, a woman of flesh and blood with feelings and emotions. Even in the earliest depictions she is seen at the foot of the cross, in deep crisis at the loss of her Beloved. It is as if these painters carried her in their hearts and rendered her honestly and compassionately. Even when the clerics devalued her, the artists continued to champion her. Editor Jane Lahr takes us on a visual and literary journey through the history and the lore, the facts and the myth, that surround Mary Magdalene. Beginning with the biblical cannon, continuing through Gnostic texts and ending with myths and literary works surrounding the Magdalene, Lahr presents a complete picture of her life, allowing the reader to decide for themselves who the true Magdalene was. Illustrated with images from the worlds greatest artists like Michelangelo, Rubens, Chagall, and Georges De La Tour, this lavish anthology is the most comprehensive and stunning look at the Magdalene ever published. Lahr begins each of the five chapters with an insightful and lucid introductive that provides the reader with guidance and context for the stories, texts, and images that follow. The Indisputable Mary Magdalene: With texts from the biblical canon including Mark, and Luke, discover each specific and indisputable reference to Mary Magdalene, with artworks from Fra Angelico to Jan van Eyck. Mary & the Traditional Associations: A woman, a sinner, and dryer of tears, these associations are found from John and Matthew to Luke and Mark. The paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner, D. Bouts, Duccio, and Pieter Paul Rubens highlight the text. Mary of the Apocrypha: The ancient texts of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the Dialogue of the Savior alongside the works of Georges De La Tour, Marc Chagall, and Massaccio. Mary Magdalene in Myth & Legend: Revel in literary wonders that celebrate the Magdalene from Christina Georgina Rossetti, Ranier Maria Rilke, and John Donne. Mary & The Mystery of the Holy Grail: Explore the Magdalene's possible connection to the mysterious Holy Grail through a variety of modern and ancient texts paired with the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Leonardo.

    Each full-color section emphasizes repetition, seriality and the persistence of themes, and together they offer a view of the practice of drawing based exclusively on the selected works themselves, without the traditional dependence on interpretation through artistic movements, tendencies and influences. The flexibility of the accordion format conceptually and visually conveys the book's shifting chronologies, allowing the viewer to experience more works juxtaposed with one another than a traditional binding would. It also creates an ersatz work in itself, ideal for display. Along with one bound booklet including an essay by Perez-Oramas and a slipcase that unifies them all, its unusual format makes An Atlas of Drawings a notable object in itself, ideal for collecting or gift-giving.

    Towards the end of his life, embittered by the appalling cruelty of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, Goya decorated the walls of his house outside Madrid with a series of 14 terrifying murals that depicted the underbelly of life and the remorselessness of human existence. Known as the Black Paintings, this series of murals is recognized as one of Goya's greatest masterpieces and now hangs in the Prado. Fully illustrated, this is the only book on the Black Paintings currently in print in English. A controversial narrative gives new interpretations of the artist's intention behind these grotesque works and shows how this period of Goya's work anticipated Surrealism and other aspects of 20th century artistic vision.

    With a Foreword written by Ozzy Osbourne, it includes a gallery of over 136 paintings plus numerous projects for celebrities and rock stars. Depicted are many of his closest friends and fans; Chris Angel, Gloria Estafan, Arnold Schwartznegger, among others. Oversized, coffee-table. Paper and Cloth available.

    * His second attempt also failed: a deep slash across his throat left a large pool of blood at the entrance to his studio, but he was still able to reach his easel on the opposite side of the room. *Only his third attempt, another cut to the throat which sprayed blood across his unfinished canvas, was successful. He died face-down before the bespattered 'Alfred and the First British Jury', his final bid 'to improve the taste of the English people' through the High Art of historical painting.* Such intensity, struggle and near-comic inability to succeed encapsulate Haydon's career. Thirty years before his death his huge, iconic paintings had made him the toast of early 19th-century London, drawing paying crowds to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for months and leading to nationwide tours. * However, his attempt to repeat such success three months before his death was to destroy him: barely a soul turned up, leaving the desperate painter alone, humiliated, and facing financial ruin. * In A Genius for Failure Paul O'Keeffe makes clear that the real tragedy of Haydon lay in the extent to which his failures were unwittingly engineered by his own actions - his refusal to resort to the painting of fashionable portraits, for example, and his self-destructively acrimonious relationship with the RA.* The company he kept - Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, among many others - and the momentous events he lived through - The Battle of Waterloo, the Coronation of George IV, and the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill - make A Genius for Failure not only the definitive biography of this fascinating and tragic painter, but a stirring portrayal of an age.

    His prolific output, embracing a wide range of styles and themes, is characterized by uncompromising realism and a strong sense of graphic design, a legacy of his early years as a magazine illustrator. He first came to prominence as a painter with his depictions of the Civil war, and his scenes of rural American youth, Adirondack hunters, and north-Atlantic fishermen have become iconic American images.Randall Griffin’s thoroughly researched yet very readable study not only presents a full account of Homer’s life and work, but also a fresh and provocative reassessment of his place in the history of American art. Homer’s work is popular and accessible, and Griffin’s text aims to be the same. His solid documentation, original research and fresh interpretation will satisfy the needs of scholars and general readers alike.

    Filled with pictures of paintings, sculptures, museum artifacts, and architectural standouts, and a cross-cultural approach that encompasses European, American, Asian, and Islamic masterpieces, it proceeds on a thrilling visual tour. Carol Strickland—author of the bestselling Annotated Mona Lisa (300,000 copies sold)—serves as guide, and delivers superb background that sets the stage for each era’s timeline, as well as informative sidebars that reveal the broader implications of new styles and movements.

    In 1926, Halpert, just twenty-six years old, opened one of the first art galleries in Greenwich Village and set about turning the art world upside down. Her Downtown Gallery, which she ran for forty-four years, laid the groundwork for the art market's modern era, and its aggressive promotion and sales tactics. Halpert cultivated the most illustrious art collectors of the day, invented the market for folk art, and pushed the first group of American artists working in a modern vernacular into the history books, including Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Dove. Despite all this, Edith Halpert herself has been lost to history. Until now. In The Girl with the Gallery, journalist Lindsay Pollock brings Halpert and her era vividly back to life, tracing the story of how this remarkable woman, who started out a penniless Jewish immigrant, made it her mission to fight for American art and artists. Illlustrated with eight pages of full color photographs, this is biography at its finest, an unforgettable story of class, money, vanity, jealousy, and tragic loss.

    As he visits the spectacular lakes and fashionable cities of the north and passes through the hills of Tuscany before heading south towards Rome, Naples, and Palermo, he celebrates the country's art and culture—its cathedrals, churches, palaces, opera houses, paintings, sculpture, music, and cuisine. Introducing us to many of the figures who populate the country's rich and vibrant history, his journey also takes in Italian society as it is today. Splendidly illustrated with John Parker's breathtaking color photos and enlivened with marvelous anecdotes about his family and the fascinating characters he meets along the way, Francesco's Italy is the story of both the country we all know and love and the secret Italy only an insider can reveal.

    Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of propaganda to establish legitimacy and prestige for the new sixteenth-century Florentine court.In this engaging and original study, Gabrielle Langdon analyses selected portraits of women by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and other masters. She defines their function as works of art, as dynastic declarations, and as encoded documents of court culture and propaganda, illuminating Cosimo's conscious fashioning of his court portraiture in imitation of the great courts of Europe. Langdon explores the use of portraiture as a vehicle to express Medici political policy, such as with Cosimo's Hapsburg and Papal alliances in his bid to be made Grand Duke with hegemony over rival Italian princes.Stories from archives, letters, diaries, chronicles, and secret ambassadorial briefs, open up a world of fascinating, personalities, personal triumphs, human frailty, rumour, intrigue, and appalling tragedies. Lavishly illustrated, "Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I" is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.

    Its author has carefully judged it to meet the demands not only of anyone interested in Arabic writing, but also of specialists. The Judges Panel agreed that this is a work of profound erudition and insight.'Now available in paperback, this stunning book is an important contribution to a key area of non-western art, being the first reference work on art of beautiful writing in Arabic script.The extensive use of writing is a hallmark of Islamic civilization. Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing, became one of the main methods of artistic expression from the seventh century to the present in almost all regions from the far Maghrib, or Islamic West, to India and beyond. Arabic script was adopted for other languages from Persian and Turkish to Kanembu and Malay. Sheila Blair's groundbreaking book explains this art form to modern readers and shows them how to identify, understand and appreciate its varied styles and modes. The book is designed to offer a standardized terminology for identifying and describing various styles of Islamic calligraphy, and to help Westerners appreciate why calligraphy has long been so important in Islamic civilization.The argument is enhanced by the inclusion of more than 150 colour illustrations, as well as over 100 black-and-white details that highlight the salient features of the individual scripts and hands. Examples are chosen from dated or datable examples with secure provenance, for the problem of forgeries and copies (both medieval and modern) is rampant. The illustrations are accompanied by detailed analyses telling the reader what to look for in determining both style and quality of script.This beautiful book is an ideal reference for anyone with an interest in Islamic art.

    In Radical Gestures, Jayne Wark situates feminist performance art in the US and Canada in the social context of the feminist movement and avant-garde art from the 1970s to 2000. She shows that artists drew from feminist politics to create works that, after a long period of modernist aesthetic detachment, made a unique contribution to the re-politicization of art. Wark brings together a wide range of artists, including Lisa Steele, Martha Rosler, Lynda Benglis, Gillian Collyer, Margaret Dragu, and Sylvie Tourangeau, and provides detailed readings and viewings of individual pieces, many of which have not been studied in detail before. She reassesses assumptions about the generational and thematic characteristics of feminist art, placing feminist performance within the wider context of minimalism, conceptualism, land art, and happenings.

    Kate Retford probes this much-loved genre to trace the values and meanings behind these compositions.While early images by artists such as Arthur Devis depicted sitters stiffly posed, later in the century scenes of affection and intimacy were created by portraitists like Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. In the country-house collections, portraits first emphasized ancestry and inherited virtue, but later emphasized the domestic merits of the family. The Art of Domestic Life contributes a wealth of visual evidence to the history of the family. It offers important insights into both the innovations and traditions in family portraiture of this period, drawing on in-depth research into paintings, the lives of the sitters depicted, and the domestic spaces in which portraits were hung.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

    The original eleven-volume Latin edition, containing 594 maps, put Blaeu ahead of his staunch competitor, mapmaker Joanes Janssonius, whose rivalry inspired Blaeu to produce a grandiose edition of the largest and most complete atlas to date. Covering Arctica, Europe, Africa, Asia, and America, Blaeu's Atlas Maior was a remarkable achievement and remains to this day one of history's finest examples of mapmaking. This reprint, including all 58 maps of England and 55 maps of Scotland and Ireland, is made from the National Library of Vienna's colored, gold-heightened copy, thus assuring the best possible detail and quality. Alongside original quotes from Joan Blaeu relating to the individual maps, the new text by Peter van der Krogt explains the historical and cultural associations and introduces the reader into the fascinating world of early modern cartography. The text is in English, French and German. The author: Peter van der Krogt, the leading expert in the field of Dutch atlases, is a collaborator on the Explokart Research Program for the History of Cartography at the University of Utrecht's Faculty of Geosciences. Since 1990 he has been working on Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici, the carto-bibliography of atlases published in the Netherlands. His second project is the compilation, in co-operation with the Nijmegen University, of an illustrated and annotated catalogue of the Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem, the most important multi-volume atlas preserved in the Austrian National Library, which wasadded to Unesco's ?Memory of the World? register in 2004.

    With recent major exhibitions in San Francisco, London, and Wiesbaden, Hesse’s tremendous contribution to the art world of the 1960s and '70s is now recognized by scholars and the general public alike.These two lavishly produced volumes are the first in a major new publishing initiative: a four-volume catalogue raisonné of Hesse’s known artwork in all media: painting, sculpture, and works on paper. During her career, Hesse created 135 paintings and 176 sculptures, objects, and test pieces. As her paintings are less well known than her sculptures, Volume I will be a revelation to many. Revealed here are 28 previously unknown paintings, including works that date from her time as an art student at Yale University.Hesse’s sculpture is more widely known but is presented here anew with many recently commissioned photographs and fascinating archival images. Twenty-one previously unknown sculptures are presented in Volume II, including two painted wooden boxes presumably made in New York in 1964, in which the first signs of Hesse’s shift from painting to sculpture occurred, and numerous previously unknown test pieces.

    The 350 rare and antique photos in this book, most of them published here for the first time, chronicle the introduction of photography in Japan and early Japanese photography. The images are more than just a history of photography in Japan; they are vital in helping to understand the dramatic changes that occurred in Japan during the mid-nineteenth century.These rare Japanese photographs—whether sensational or everyday, intimate or panoramic—document a nation about to abandon its traditional ways and enter the modern era. Taken between 1853 and 1912 by the most important Japanese and foreign photographers working in Japan, this is the first book to document the history of early photography in Japan a comprehensive and systematic way.

    Long the seat of great dynasties, whose rulers and descendants both amassed and patronized works of art, Cairo's status as one of the wealthiest and most populous cities of the medieval world is reflected in the exiquisite arts and crafts that make up its collections, which expanded in the twentieth century through the purchase of private collections so that they now include not just the arts of the dynasties that made Cairo their capital, such as the Fatimids, Ayyubids, and Mamluks, but material from other important areas of the Islamic world, such as Iran and Turkey. Masterpieces of every medium are represented, including the decorative arts of ceramics, metalwork, textiles, woodwork, glass, carved stone and ivory, and the art of the book. The objects vary from pieces made for purely secular purposes, many of them with blazons showing that they were the property of the great amirs of the time, to some of the choicest examples recovered from the architectural masterpieces that permeate Cairo's landscape. An introductory chapter guides the reader into the world of Islam and its art, while subsequent chapters unfold and describe the riches of the works of art that were crafted and amassed throughout the ages. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout with specially commissioned color photographs. Contributors: Mohamed Abbas, Noha Abou-Khatwa, Farouk Askar, Mohamed Hamza, Bernard O'Kane.

    This important book explores the removal and the return of cultural objects from occupied communities from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century and explores the concurrent evolution of international cultural heritage law. Examining the responses of governments and of museums to the question of restitution, this book is essential reading for archaeologists, international lawyers and all those involved in cultural resource management.

    Tattoo art has emerged from the garage to the parlor, from the local bar to the board room. With interest in tattoos at an all-time high, the time is right for a detailed look at the art and artists who create the elaborate designs. Advanced Tattoo Art takes the reader inside the shops of ten well-known and very experienced artists spread across the country. Detailed photo sequences follow each artist through one project, from the customer's concept to the finished and colorful design. Both a how-to book and a photo-intense look at the world or tattoos, Advanced Tattoo Art includes interviews with the artists that explain not only how they do what they do, but why they create the designs.

    Offering a radically different view of these supposedly savage soldiers, Mekong Diaries presents never-before-published drawings, poems, letters, and oral histories by ten of the most celebrated Viet Cong war artists. These guerrilla artists—some military officers and some civilians—lived clandestinely with the fighters, moving camp alongside them, going on reconnaissance missions, and carrying their sketchbooks, ink, and watercolors into combat. Trained by professors from the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts who journeyed down the perilous Ho Chi Minh Trail to ensure a pictorial history of the war, they recorded battles and events from Operation Junction City to Khe Sanh to the Tet Offensive. They also sketched as the spirit moved them, rendering breathtaking landscapes, hut and bunker interiors, activities at base camps, troops on the move, portraits for the families of fallen soldiers, and the unimaginable devastation that the conflict left in its wake. Their collective record—which Sherry Buchanan skillfully compiles here—is an extraordinary historical and artistic document of people at war. As such, it serves as a powerful response to the self-centeredness of American accounts of Vietnam, filling a profound gap in our national memory by taking us into the misunderstood worlds of those whom we once counted among our worst enemies.

    This scrutiny of little known, yet uncannily familiar, racialized imagery by contemporary artists has created a renewed interest in the politics of nineteenth-century American art and the role of race in the visual discourse. Portraits of a People looks critically at images made of and by African Americans, extending back to the late 1700s when a portrait of African-born poet Phillis Wheatley was drawn by her friend, the slave Scipio Moorhead.From the American Revolution through the Civil War and on into the Gilded Age, American artists created dynamic images of black sitters. In their effort to create enduring symbols of self-possessed identity, many of these portraits provide a window into cultural stereotypes and practices. For example, while some of these pictures were undoubtedly of distinct, named individuals, many are now known by titles that reference only generalized types, such as Joshua Johnston's painting Portrait of a Man, c. 1805-10, or the silhouette inscribed "Mr. Shaw's blackman," cut around 1802 by the manumitted slave Moses Williams. By the middle of the nineteenth century, photography began to offer black sitters an affordable and accessible way to fashion an individual identity and sometimes obtain financial support, as in the case of the numerous cartes-de-visites produced during the 1860s and '70s that bear the image of the feminist activist Sojourner Truth above the text, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance."Portraits of a People features color reproductions of over 100 important portraits in various media, ranging from paintings, photographs, and silhouettes to book frontispieces and popular prints. Essays by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw consider silhouettes and African American identity in the early republic, photography and the black presence in the public sphere after the Civil War, and portrait painting and social fluidity among middle-class African American artists and sitters. This landmark publication will change the way that we view the images ofblacks in the nineteenth century.

    Initially donned in France for liturgical purposes and later for masked balls and as a sun- and windscreen at the seashore, face-covering veils were adopted for fashionable urban use during the reign of Napoleon III. In Sheer Presence, Marni Reva Kessler demonstrates how this ubiquitous garment and its visual representations knot together many of the precepts of Parisian life. Considering the period from the beginning of Napoleon III’s rule in 1852 to 1889, when the Paris Universal Exhibition displayed veiled North African Muslims and other indigenous colonial peoples, Kessler deftly connects the increased presence of the veil on the streets and on canvas to Haussmann’s massive renovation of Paris. The fashion of veil wearing, she argues, was imbricated with broader concerns: fears of dust and disease fueled by Haussmannization and class mixing on the city streets, changes in ideals of youth and beauty, attempts to increase popular support for imperialism, and the development of modernist art practices. A veil was protection for the proper woman from the vices associated with the modern city, preserving—at least on the surface—her femininity and class superiority. Kessler explores these themes with close readings of paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet—including Manet’s perplexing portraits of artist Berthe Morisot—as well as photographs, images from the popular press, engravings, lithographs, and academic paintings. She also mines French fashion journals, etiquette books, novels, and medical publications for clues to the veil’s complex meanings during the period.Positioning the veil directly at the intersection of feminist, formalist, and social art history, Kessler offers a fresh perspective on period discourses of public health, seduction and sexuality, colonial stereotypes, and, ultimately, an emerging modernity.Marni Reva Kessler is assistant professor of art history at the University of Kansas.

    These hidden messages—which ranged from the esoteric to the political to the religious—could be communicated in everything from the position of a hand to the placement of the sun and moon. The Secret Language of the Renaissance helps us discover them anew, as lecturer, author, and director Richard Stemp teaches you the art of reading these paintings. Magnificently illustrated throughout, and with a six-color gold-foil cover, this remarkable book has three distinct parts. The first surveys the literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and decorative arts of this remarkable period. Section two reviews the essential elements of symbolic language in Renaissance art, including the use of color, geometry, light and shade, composition, proportion, perspective, and body language; the explanatory examples reach from Crivelli’s Annunciation to Donatello’s Mary Magdalene. And the final part features themes including Mythology, War and Peace, and Death and Eternity.

    Offering fresh insights into the development of modern cities and modern art in America, Rebecca Zurier considers what it meant to live in a city where strangers habitually watched each other and public life seemed to consist of continual display, as new classes of immigrants and working women claimed their places in the metropolis. Through her study of six artists—George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan—Zurier illuminates the quest for new forms of realism to describe changes in urban life, commercial culture, and codes of social conduct in the early 1900s. Synthesizing visual and literary analysis with urban cultural history, Picturing the City focuses new attention on the materiality and design process of pictures. The author scrutinizes all manner of visual activity, from the pandemonium of comics to the mise-en-scene of early movies, from the mark of an individual pen stroke to a glance on the street, from illustrators’ manuals to ambitious paintings that became icons of American art. By situating the Ashcan School within its proper visual culture, Zurier opens up the question of what the artists’ “realism” meant at a time when many other forms of representation, including journalism and cinema, were competing to define “real life” in New York City.

    This book illustrates paintings, sculpture, photography, and folk art, and is useful for the entire family.

    Best in Show is the most up-to-date, comprehensive survey of the dog as shown in painting, sculpture, works on paper, and photography from the end of the sixteenth century to today.This beautifully produced book features sixty works by such illustrious artists as Francis Bacon, Gustave Courbet, Salvador Dalí, Lucian Freud, Thomas Gainsborough, Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. Four fascinating essays by distinguished scholars discuss the dog in the context of the art of the 16th through the 21st centuries; examine the purebred and how breeds have developed and changed over the years; and outline the results of scientific inquiry over the centuries regarding the nature of dogs.Best in Show brilliantly illuminates the captivating and intriguing history of the dog in art––offering myriad interpretations and irrefutable reasons for celebrating “the artist’s best friend.”

    These manuscript illustrations combine vibrant color with exquisite delicacy, offering immediate impact while also rewarding lengthy examination. Alone on the market, this beautiful volume presents the art form for non-specialists, surveying the most notable styles and periods of Indian painting and offering an introduction to the legends and historic personalities that inspire its entertaining subjects. The text covers such diverse topics as scriptures written on palm leaves, likenesses of favorite animals, images inspired by music, techniques and materials, and Indian reactions to European art. The Boston Museum of Fine Art's collection of Indian paintings, assembled by the esteemed scholar A. K. Coomaraswamy, is justly renowned as one of the finest in the world, and Indian Painting, one of the only readily available comprehensive histories of the subject, is the first book since Coomaraswamy's seminal catalogues of the 1920s to draw so extensively on the MFA's collection. It includes 120 of the most remarkable pieces, many of which are reproduced here in color for the first time.

    The only guide that features art from tribes and cultural groups from all around the world, not just one region, Tribal Art features historical, cultural, and price guide information on the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas and is the definitive collector's guide for tribal art enthusiasts.

    From this vast collection, curators have handpicked more than 150 of the Museum's most valued and amazing treasures—from the hat Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated to Jacqueline Kennedy's inaugural gown and Dorothy's ruby slippers; from Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to Edison's light bulb and Albert Einstein's pipe; from an early box of Crayolas to one of the oldest pairs of Levi's. Four separate sections devoted to "Creativity and Innovation," "American Biography," "National Challenges," and "American Identity" reveal fascinating juxtapositions and startling connections on every page. This visual cornucopia of the material culture of American history reveals the familiar, the famous, and the unexpected at every turn.

    Written especially for this work in lively and accessible language, the essays illuminate what visual forms—including traditional crafts, sculpture, painting and graphic arts, even domestic and museum interiors—can tell us about social conditions, how visual culture has contributed to social values, and how concepts of high and low art have developed. The only work on visual culture to span American history from the early republic to the present and to delve into issues from ethnicity to geography, Seeing High and Low allows readers to follow the evolution of concepts of “high” and “low” art as well as to gain new insight into American history. Arranged roughly chronologically, these generously illustrated essays explore topics including the formative role of visual images in the process of class stratification in the Early Republic; the contribution of media images and paintings to debates on environmental crises, race relations, and urbanization in the late nineteenth century; and the difficulties of engaging with social issues while employing a modernist vocabulary.

    Acclaimed writer and translator Phyllis Birnbaum not only explores Foujita's fascinating, tumultuous life but also assesses the appeal of his paintings, which, in their mixture of Eastern and Western traditions, are memorable for their vibrancy of form and purity of line.

    Incorporating the region's social history with the observations of anthropologists, historians of art, and Native peoples, this groundbreaking volume examines how the upheavals of European contact affected the development of a powerful traditional art. By exploring the distinct origins of each of the area's linguistic groups and their histories, mythologies, and art forms, art historian Aldona Jonaitis reveals how a complex web of factors informed these groups' varied responses to the changes and challenges brought about by contact with Europeans.The post-contact period has often been considered a time of decline for Native artistic traditions and techniques, but Jonaitis convincingly argues against this assumption. The traditions were not lost, she asserts, but rather were expressed in different ways. Forms such as tourist art - made expressly for sale rather than for community use - were for some the only outlets available in the trying, repressive years when Natives were deprived of their land, rights, and essential cultural expressions. While art made for community use was often judged "inferior" in quality to nineteenth-century creations, it still expressed the strong aesthetics of a surviving Native culture.Since the 1960s, Native artistic activity has flourished and is increasingly recognized as fine art rather than anthropological artifact. Repatriation of Native works of art from museums, a strong market for collectors and dealers, and a reaffirmation of traditional culture and heritage among Native communities all contribute to a vibrant field in which Native artists reflect their enduring cultures in works that explore many contemporary directions.Compellingly written and beautifully illustrated, Art of the Northwest Coast is a cornerstone addition to any library and essential reading for anyone interested in the art of Native cultures.

    He now focuses on an unusual and stirring art form in this stunning album of handcrafted shrines found throughout the Italian countryside. Rothfeld turns his lens on a fascinating aspect of Italian culture, the age-old, popular art of building shrines in honor of the Virgin Mary and other saints. Created by average people as an expression of religious devotion, the shrines appear along ordinary roads in villages and cities, in the fields of farmers, and in the yards of simple cottages and homes. In "Shrines," the full-color photographs of these ubiquitous, delicately crafted structures form a spiritual journey, bringing to life an ancient religious tradition that continues to thrive today. With a charming introduction and text by Frances Mayes, this visual tour of the surprising and graceful ways the divine touches and enriches everyday lives is perfect for admirers of sacred art, history buffs, those millions of Americans who travel to Italy, and everyone who dreams of going there.

    There are 50 authentic projects such as a kabbalah prayer in Hebrew, a fabric bag with Bedouin motif, an illuminated Celtic prayer, and a "hope, love and joy" talisman in Chinese.Whether for learning this ancient skill or for crafting personalized cards and gifts, this book celebrates the sage advice of calligraphers worldwide: "The joy of calligraphy lies in its practical aspect."

    Before his premature death at 28, he managed to be thrown in prison on a morals charge and also to create a strongly erotic body of work, both deeply expressive drawings and sublimely beautiful paintings. This enfant terrible of pre-WWI Vienna worked in the shadows of Klimt and Freud, but he found his own voice, and his own nude body was his best model. Egon Schiele delves into both his controversial sexual themes and neglected aspects of Schiele's art, notably his formal experiments and his later expressionistic portraits and allegorical paintings -- works that reveal much about the importance of his short career.