Best of
Art-History

2007

Michelangelo


Frank Zöllner - 2007
    Before reaching the tender age of thirty, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) had already sculpted David and Pieta, two of the most famous sculptures in the entire history of art. Like fellow Florentine Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo was a shining star of the Renaissance and a genius of consummate virtuosity. His achievements as a sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and architect are unique- no artist before or after him has ever produced such a vast, multi-faceted, and wideranging oeuvre. Only a handful of other painters and sculptors have attained a comparable social status and enjoyed a similar artistic freedom. This is demonstrated not only by the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel but also by Michelangelo's monumental sculptures and his unconventional architectural designs, whose forms went far beyond the accepted vocabulary of his day. Such was his talent that Michelangelo was considered a demigod by his contemporaries and was the subject of two biographies during his lifetime. Adoration of this remarkable man's work has only increased on the intervening centuries. Following the success of our XL title Leonardo da Vinci, TASCHEN brings you this massive tome that explores Michelangelo's life and work in more depth and detail then ever before. The first part concentrates on the life of Michelangelo via an extensive and copiously illustrated biographical essay; the main body of the book presents his owrk in four parts providing a complete analytical inventory of Michelangelo's paintings, sculptures, buildings and drawings. Grorgeous, full page reproductions and enlarged details bring readers up close to the works. This sumptuous tome also takes account, to a previously unseen extent, of Michelangelo's more personal traits and circumstances, such as his solitary nature, his thirst for money and commissions, his miserliness, his immense wealth, and his skill as a property investor. In addition, the book tackles the controversial issue of the attribution of Michelangelo drawings, an area in which decisions continue to be steered by the interests of the art market and the major collections. This is the definitive volume about Michelangelo for generations to come.

Alphonse Mucha: Masterworks


Rosalind Ormiston - 2007
    From his early family life in Ivancice right through to his final days in Prague, it delves into every aspect of his career as it developed. Next, beginning with his earliest Parisian posters for the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the second half of the book focuses on Mucha's most intense period of productivity in Paris, and documents his success as an avant-garde artist. Exploring his many decorative panels and commercial posters as well as his illustrations for books and magazines, it takes an in-depth look at his changing artistic styles of the period and reveals his sources of inspiration. The informative text goes hand-in-hand with stunning reproductions of Mucha's most stirring and iconic works, from his "Gismonda" poster of 1894 to his "The Moon and the Stars" series of decorative panels of 1902.Featuring over 150 of his most important graphic works, Alphonse Mucha: Masterworks is the perfect gateway to learning more about this versatile artist - one who was truly successful in producing both commercial pieces and 'high art'. It is an ideal read for those with little knowledge of Mucha as well as those looking to learn more.

30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity across Time and Space


Phaidon Press - 2007
    Unlike The Art Book, it organises the work in chronological order (rather than alphabetical), it covers all cultures (not only western) and, as the title suggests, it covers 30,000 years of art (rather than art since the Renaissance). The book contains over 1000 works of art from all periods and regions in the world and breaks through the usual geographical and cultural boundaries of art history to celebrate the vast range of human artistry across time and space. Each work is accompanied by key caption information (date, title, place of origin, style or culture, medium, dimensions etc.), and a text that provides more information on the work and its art historical context. The book presents art in a way very different from other art history compendia, revealing the huge diversity, or in many cases, similarity, of man's artistic achievements through time and around the globe. Ordered chronologically, the resulting timeline of works will lead to compelling browsing: surprising juxtapositions will offer intellectual pleasure and a sense of wonder and discovery.

Introduction to Manuscript Studies


Raymond Clemens - 2007
    It will be of immeasurable help to students in history, art history, literature, and religious studies who are encountering medieval manuscripts for the first time, while also appealing to advanced scholars and general readers interested in the history of the book before the age of print.Introduction to Manuscript Studies features three sections:- Part 1, Making the Medieval Manuscript, offers an in-depth examination of the process of manuscript production, from the preparation of the writing surface through the stages of copying the text, rubrication, decoration, glossing, and annotation to the binding and storage of the completed codex.- Part 2, Reading the Medieval Manuscript, focuses on the skills necessary for the successful study of manuscripts, with chapters on transcribing and editing; reading texts damaged by fire, water, insects, and other factors; assessing evidence for origin and provenance; and describing and cataloguing manuscripts. This part ends with a survey of sixteen medieval scripts dating from the eighth to the fifteenth century.- Part 3, Some Manuscript Genres, provides an analysis of several of the most frequently encountered types of medieval manuscripts, including Bibles and biblical concordances, liturgical service books, Books of Hours, charters and cartularies, maps, and rolls and scrolls. The book concludes with an extensive glossary, a guide to dictionaries of medieval Latin, and a bibliography subdivided and keyed to the subsections of the volume's chapters.Every chapter in this magisterial guidebook features numerous color plates that exemplify each aspect described in the text and are drawn primarily from the collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Takashi Murakami


Takashi Murakami - 2007
    Drawing from street culture, high art, and traditional Japanese painting, Murakami takes the contemporary art trend of mixing high and low to an unprecedented level (critics call him the new Warhol), producing original paintings and sculptures as well as mass-produced consumer objects such as toys, books, and most famously, a line of handbags for Louis Vuitton. A committed supporter and spokesperson for Japanese artists and a powerful commentator on postwar culture and society, Murakami has organized influential exhibitions of Japanese art as well as a biannual art fair in Tokyo. Murakami has positioned himself as a new type of artist for the twenty-first century: a hybrid of creator, entrepreneur, and cultural ambassador.In conjunction with the first major retrospective of his work, Murakami traces Murakami’s global impact socially, culturally, and art historically. Essays focus on Murakami’s early works, which were based on a social critique of Japan’s rampant consumerism; the development of his characters; his work with anime, fantasy; otaku culture; and his engagement with global pop culture. Representing output from original works of art to mass-produced multiples, the catalogue also considers the implications of Murakami’s working methods within the tradition of the Western avant-garde.

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love


Kara Walker - 2007
    Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution


Lisa Gabrielle Mark - 2007
    WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others, as well as important works made in those years by artists whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video, arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics, including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism, provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.Essays by: Cornelia Butler, Judith Russi Kirshner, Catherine Lord, Marsha Meskimmon, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Peggy Phelan, Nelly Richard, Valerie Smith, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jenni SorkinArtists include: Marina Abramovic, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Jay DeFeo, Mary Beth Edelson, Valie Export, Barbara Hammer, Susan Hiller, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Maria Lassnig, Linda Montano, Alice Neel, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Orlan, Howardena Pindell, Yvonne Rainer, Faith Ringgold, Ketty La Rocca, Ulrike Rosenbach, Martha Rosler, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke

Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick


Jenny Uglow - 2007
    Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds marked the moment, the first "field guide" for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. But his work was far more than a mere guide, for in the vivid vignettes scattered through the book, Bewick captured the vanishing world of rural English life.In this superb biography, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild -- a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.

Edward Hopper


Carol Troyen - 2007
    Accompanying an exhibition touring the States throughout 2007 and 2008, this work reassesses Edward Hopper and examines the dynamics of his creative process and discusses his work within the cultural currents of his day, looking at the influence not only of other painters, but also of such media as literature and film.

Frida Kahlo


Elizabeth Carpenter - 2007
    During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.

Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper


Walter Wells - 2007
    These elements of the dream world and the subconscious - psychological states that are intrinsic to all people, however little we understand them - may be what make Hopper's works so universally compelling. The paintings embody a particularly American sensibility; Hopper's evocative depictions of both urban and rural settings, including theatre interiors, railways, restaurants, gas stations, hotels, street scenes and coastal landscapes, have become iconic images of early twentieth-century American culture. Edward Hopper studied illustration and painting in New York City, where he was taught by the artist Robert Henri. Travelling in Europe after completing his education, Hopper gained inspiration from the simple paintings of the realist school and his early works are testimony to this influence.'House by a Railroad', completed in 1925, marked a turning point in Hopper's artistic development; he went on to hone his mature painting style, which included the use of stark contrasts of sunlight and shadow, the juxtaposed verticals and horizontals of architectural forms, large, bold shapes and often the presence of silent, emotionally detached figures. Walter Wells' informative yet eminently readable monograph explores the many facets of Hopper's art, discussing from various perspectives his etchings, watercolours and oil paintings, which represent a wide range of subjects. Particular attention is paid to the literary works from which Hopper took inspiration, as well as the ways in which the artist's own psychology and emotional states influenced his output.

Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy


Deborah Rothschild - 2007
    The glitterati who inhabited this legendary world—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, Man Ray, Dorothy Parker, and a host of others—were members of an intimate circle centered around Sara and Gerald Murphy. Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy is a captivating and absorbing collection of essays examining through images and text the Murphys' influence on a remarkable constellation of artists. The book also explores Gerald Murphy's abbreviated career as a painter, his artistic legacy, and the complex nature of his motivation and vision. This beautifully illustrated volume features essays by art historian Deborah Rothschild and such Murphy scholars as Calvin Tomkins, Amanda Vaill, Linda Patterson Miller, Kenneth Silver; curators Dorothy Kosinski and Kenneth Wayne; artist/writer Trevor Winkfield; musicologist Olivia Mattis; and poet and author William Jay Smith.

After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art


Eleanor Heartney - 2007
    Today her insightful critique serves as a benchmark against which the progress of women artists may be measured. In this book, four prominent critics and curators describe the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement. Following a comprehensive essay assessing the changes in the situation of women artists, the authors examine in depth the careers of twelve outstanding artists: Marina Abramowicz, Louise Bourgeois, Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Elizabeth Murray, Shirin Neshat, Judy Pfaff, Dana Schutz, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Nancy Spero. Each artist's accomplishments and her influence on contemporaries including younger male and female artists is explored. A preface by Nochlin and a concluding essay with extensive statistical documentation frame this essential volume.

African Masks: The Barbier-Mueller Collection


Iris Hahner - 2007
    Now available in paperback, this beautiful volume presents nearly 250 of the finest African masks from the incomparable Barbier-Mueller Collection, which is unique in its vast number of artifacts and wide geographic scope.The book includes one hundred color plates accompanied by in-depth descriptions, as well as numerous black-and-white photographs of the masks as they are used in religious and secular celebrations. Introductory texts from renowned scholars describe how the masks are constructed, examine their significance in African culture, and offer insight into the universal practice of masquerading. A unique contribution to literature on African art, this book is also a wonderful introduction to countless fascinating, ages-old spiritual traditions still being practiced today.

Franklin Booth


John Fleskes - 2007
    180 B&W pen and ink illustrations of Booth's work for books and magazines. The majority of these works have never, till now, been reprinted, from majestic landscapes to fantasy worlds of wonder.

Building: 3,000 Years of Design, Engineering and Construction


Bill Addis - 2007
    This comprehensive and heavily illustrated volume, aimed at students and young professionals as well as general readers, explores the materials, classic texts, instruments, and theories that have propelled modern engineering, and the famous and not-so-famous buildings designed through the ages, from the Parthenon to Chartres Cathedral and the dome of St. Peter's, from eighteenth-century silk mills in England to the Crystal Palace, and on to the first Chicago high-rises, the Sydney Opera House, and the latest "green" skyscrapers.The book concentrates on developments since the industrial and scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Incorporated within the continuous narrative are sidebars with short biographies of eminent engineers, excerpts from classic texts, stories of individual projects of major importance, and brief histories of key concepts such as calculus. Also included are extensive reference materials: appendices, a glossary, bibliography, and index.

Impressionism


Karin H. Grimme - 2007
    This date has gone down in the annals of art history because it marks the birth of the Impressionism. Impressionistic paintings now rank among the most popular works of art and are the pride of any museum or collection worldwide. However, in 1874 the public response to the exhibition, and to Impressionist painting, was not adoration but rather shock and even outrage. The Impressionists and the succeeding Neo-Impressionists were avant-gardist and revolutionary, paving the way for modern art. Present-day viewers, hardly realizing this revolutionary potential, can be content to enjoy the aesthetic of light and color. Artists featured in detail include: Frederic Bazille, Marie Braquemond, Gustave Caillebotte, Mary Cassat, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Armand Guillaumin, Max Liebermann, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Guiseppe de Nittis, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Medardo Rosso, Giovanni Segantini, John Singer Sargent, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Walter Richard Sickert, Alfred Sisley, Max Slevogt, Fritz von Uhde, and Federico Zandomeneghi. Each book in TASCHEN's "Basic Genre" series features: a detailed introduction with approximately 35 photographs, plus a timeline of the most important events (political, cultural, scientific, etc.) that took place during the time period; and a selection of the most important works of the epoch; each is presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and, on the facing page, a description/interpretation of the work and brief biography of the artist as well as additional information such as a reference work, portrait of the artist, and/or citations.

Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory


Andrea Lauterwein - 2007
    This work traces Anselm Kiefer's use of themes from 20th century German history, and shows how the poet Paul Celan's writings have haunted his work for over 25 years - an alliance that was recently cemented by Kiefer when he dedicated a series of works to the poet.

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity


Michael Camille - 2007
    The first comprehensive history of these world-famous monsters, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument.Michael Camille begins his long-awaited study by recounting architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration of the structure from 1843 to 1864, when the gargoyles were designed, sculpted by the little-known Victor Pyanet, and installed. These gargoyles, Camille contends, were not mere avatars of the Middle Ages, but rather fresh creations—symbolizing an imagined past—whose modernity lay precisely in their nostalgia. He goes on to map the critical reception and many-layered afterlives of these chimeras, notably in the works of such artists and writers as Charles Méryon, Victor Hugo, and photographer Henri Le Secq. Tracing their eventual evolution into icons of high kitsch, Camille ultimately locates the gargoyles’ place in the twentieth-century imagination, exploring interpretations by everyone from Winslow Homer to the Walt Disney Company.Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred images of its monumental yet whimsical subjects, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is a must-read for historians of art and architecture and anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the lovable monsters gazing out over Paris from one of the world’s most renowned vantage points.

Sculpture Today


Judith Collins - 2007
    This beautifully illustrated book is a comprehensive overview of developments in the world of sculpture during the past fifty years, and follows the successful, highly illustrated formula of Phaidon's best-selling volumes Art Today and Architecture Today. Sculpture was felt to be more socially engaging because it occupied actual space rather than creating an illusionistic realm using perspective and other techniques. It encompasses installations, environments, staged video displays and even choreographed humans.

AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion


Andrew Bolton - 2007
    Anglomania, the craze for all things English, gripped Europe during the mid-to-late 18th century.  As perceived by Anglophiles such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, England was a land of reason, freedom, and tolerance, a place where the Enlightenment found its greatest expression.  What began as an intellectual phenomenon, however, became and has remained a matter of style.  Through the lens of fashion, AngloMania examines aspects of English culture, such as class, sport, royalty, pageantry, eccentricity, the gentleman, and the country garden, which have fuelled the European and American imagination.This beautiful book presents historical costumes juxtaposed with late 20th- and early 21st-century fashions by Hussein Chalayan, John Galliano, Stephen Jones, Shaun Leane, Alexander McQueen, Philip Treacy, and Vivienne Westwood.  As with the hugely successful exhibition “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century” at the Metropolitan Museum, the clothing is styled as a series of thematic vignettes in the Museum’s English Period Rooms.  This book comprises photographs of the installations along with text written by Andrew Bolton.From AngloMania, we learn that Englishness is a romantic construct based on fictive and imaginary narratives.  In terms of fashion, these narratives emerge as ones that are satirical, nostalgic, theatrical, and like the English weather, at once indomitable and unpredictable.

Ottoman Architecture


Doğan Kuban - 2007
    It extends to over 700 pages & is illustrated with over 1000 fabulous illustrations, plans of buildings, maps & drawings. The author is a leading authority on the subject having taught throughout the United States, in Paris & in Istanbul.

Andre Kertesz: The Polaroids


André Kertész - 2007
    As with earlier equipment, he mastered the camera and produced a provocative body of work that both honored his wife and lifted him out of depression.Here Kertész dips into his reserves one last time, tapping new people, ideas, and tools to generate a whole new body of work through which he transforms from a broken man into a youthful artist. Taken in his apartment just north of New York City’s Washington Square, many of these photographs were shot either from his window or in the windowsill. We see a fertile mind at work, combining personal objects into striking still lifes set against cityscape backgrounds, reflected and transformed in glass surfaces. Almost entirely unpublished work, these photographs are a testament to the genius of the photographer’s eye as manifested in the simple Polaroid.

Overcoming the Problems of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein


Yves Klein - 2007
    Klein was an artist with a keen philosophical mind, yet deeply spiritual. Inspired by his study of the Japanese Kata (the abstract movements in Judo), Rosicrucian cosmogony, alchemy, and the phenomenological and psychological philosophies that emerged during his lifetime (particularly the writings of Gaston Bachelard), he constructed his vision of a future art that would purify the soul and society from the ashes of painting.

Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography


Todd Brandow - 2007
    He was admired by many for his achievements as a fine-art photographer, while impressing countless others with the force of his commercial accomplishments. The influence of his legendary exhibition, The Family of Man, is still felt. This volume traces Steichen’s career trajectory from his Pictoralist beginnings to his time with Condé Nast through his directorship of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Hundreds of his photographs are reproduced in stunning four-color to reveal the complexities and nuances of these black-and-white images. Essays from a range of scholars explore his most important subjects and weigh his legacy. Contributors include A. D. Coleman, Joanna T. Steichen, and Ronald Gedrim. With a full bibliography and chronology, this is the most complete and wide-ranging volume on Steichen ever published.

The Acrylic Flower Painter's A-Z: An Illustrated Directory of Techniques for Painting 40 Popular Flowers


Lexi Sundell - 2007
    From alcea to zinnia, 40 of the most popular floral subjects are presented with information about each flower and their distinguishing characteristics. Furnishing plant-specific step-by-step instructions and a complete color palette, this guide allows artists to capture the unique beauty of each species.

Tamara de Lempicka: The Artist, The Woman, The Legend


Emmanuel Bréon - 2007
    Born in 1898 in Warsaw, Lempicka fled during the Bolshevik Revolution, arriving in Paris in 1918 where she began painting under André Lhote. Influenced by a trip to Italy, she combined neo-cubism and Renaissance influences, reducing the harmony of her colors to the essential and tightly framing her portraits in order to give the figures energy and stature. In 1933 she married her best client, Baron Raoul Kuffner de Dioszegh, and in 1939 they left for America where Tamara conquered New York and Los Angeles exhibiting in important galleries.Divided into three sections, the book focuses on her distinctive artistic style, and on her fascination with the female form, which she glorified in paintings such as her famous Beautiful Rafaela, Portrait of a Young Girl in a Green Dress, and Portrait of Suzi Solidor. In the third section, author Emmanuel Bréon and the artist's granddaughter unveil the legend of Lempicka, illustrated with rare and sultry archival photographs of the artist. The appendixes include a detailed illustrated chronology and a catalog of works. The book's modern design reflects the Art Deco style and makes Tamara de Lempicka an attractive addition to the library of Lempicka and Art Deco fans.

Van Gogh (The World's Greatest Art)


Tamsin Pickeral - 2007
    This title, part of the compact 'World's Greatest Art' series, covers the artist's life, times and work, with sections on his techniques and influences. It includes the reproductions of his intense and vibrant paintings. It is suitable as a gift for any art lover.

Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella


Robert Rauschenberg - 2007
    That work, interrelated but not collaborative, resulted in an astonishing number of almost monochromatic black paintings, which today are considered treasures of many major collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art's. For the first time, Black Paintings gathers all of the best of the title artist's black works together: textured black, striped black, blue-black, brown-black, black-black. In thorough illustration and thoughtful analysis, it sheds light on the differences between these postwar works as well as their commonalities. For Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, black was a way to disappear into something new, a way to a new artistic vocabulary. For Mark Rothko, it stood for emptiness and nothingness; it asked the spectator to reflect back on it. For Ad Reinhardt, it offered denial and invisibility. Each artist's black portfolio reflects a breakthrough or transition in his own work, and, combined, they represent a larger moment of transition. The Black Paintings marked both a beginning and an end: the end of painting as illusion, as a window onto the world, and the beginning of painting as the mode for the creation of self-sufficient perceptual objects--a change that granted new roles to both artist and viewer.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981, the Studio of the Street


Jeffrey Deitch - 2007
    He had attracted considerable attention with his Times Square Show the summer before, and reinforced that nascent notoriety with a wall of phenomenal works in Diego Cortez's New York/New Wave at P.S. 1, which opened the following winter. A few months later, the dealer Annina Nosei offered Basquiat an independent space in which to prepare work for her September group show, Public Address. He was only 20. Between the world of spray-painted poetry and what critic Peter Schjeldahl called "New York big-painting aesthetics" lies a fantastic coming-of-age: Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981: The Studio of the Street includes paintings and drawings on everything from note cards to sheet metal to a leather jacket and conventional canvas. In them, as throughout his career, Basquiat married an exuberant spontaneity and art-brut sensibility with a firm command of not only art materials but art history. He would go on to define the 80s Neo-Expressionist idiom, and to remain its most compelling representative. The Studio of the Street examines this charged point of contact in works that show the artist's progression from text to text-and-image, from found materials to traditional canvasses, and from pure drawing to his uniquely evocative hybrid of drawing and painting.

Impressionism: 50 Paintings You Should Know


Ines Janet Engelmann - 2007
    Here fifty of the most important works from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries are gorgeously reproduced, including the best of Monet, Degas, van Gogh, Renoir, C�zanne, Cassatt, Manet, Seurat, and Pisarro. Each piece is given a brief overview establishing its place in the Impressionist pantheon as well as in its artist's oeuvre. An introductory text explains the Impressionistic style, tracing the movement's development, while an appendix offers biographies of the artists. The result is a veritable seminar on Impressionism, creating a fun and practical art history lesson that everyone can enjoy.

The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora


Irwin Chusid - 2007
    His style is cartoonish, evoking childhood nostalgia and dereliction of adult responsibility. There are clowns and kitty cats, grinning faces and beaming suns. But Flora did not restrain his darker impulses. His montages are crammed with bullets and knives and fang-baring snakes. Muggers run amok, demons frolic with rouged harlots, and Flora's characters suffer that is, are afflicted by the artist with severe disfigurement. The banal and the violent often coexist within inches of each other on the canvas. Figures from his burlesque-tinged absurdity "The Rape of the Stationmaster's Daughter" adorn the book cover.There is also a wealth of 1940s Columbia Records printed matter exhibiting Flora's visual pranks; 1950s RCA Victor-era work; magazine illos, sketchbooks, and prints; 1930s Little Man Press-era drawings; paintings from all decades; photos, and personal keepsakes. All are abundantly represented in The Curiously Sinister Art. Flora's early 1940s musician portraits in Columbia bulletins are raucous and undignified, featuring piss-takes on such legends as Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Gene Krupa. Flora once said he "could not do likenesses"so he conjured outlandish caricatures. His exotic fauna defy logic and the laws of physics. We suspect he often leaned back from the drafting table, examined his work, and issued a macabre chuckle.Much of the work in the book is light-hearted it's not all Flora 'rassling his demons. But even in his impish renderings, there's something vaguely unsettling in the nuances. His comic grotesqueries echoed, and in many cases foreshadowed, the 1950s Harvey Kurtzman-era MAD magazine, as well as the underground comix of the late 1960s.When Flora died in 1998, his family gathered his artistic estate and secured it in a storage facility. In late 2005, the heirs allowed Chusid and Economon access to the vault. What they discovered were "lost works""lost" because fans of Flora's LP covers, kid-lit, and Mischievous Art offerings have never seen most of these eye-boggling treasures, which include paintings, watercolors, sketches, woodcuts and all manner of artistic genius.Flora once said that all he wanted to do was "create a little piece of excitement." He overshot his goal with many of these works.

Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints


Manfred Sellink - 2007
    He has been especially beloved through the centuries for his paintings of peasant scenes. With an illuminating text by Manfred Sellink, this superb monograph, now available at a new affordable price, reprints the first biography of Bruegel, in facsimile and translation, written by Karel van Mander around 1604. This stunning book reproduces all 40 paintings and 70 drawings attributed to Bruegel in lush full color, with numerous close-up details, as well as his 75 prints.

Tord Boontje


Martina Margetts - 2007
    One of the most original and innovative product and furniture designers working today, Boontje is an artist and a craftsman, and in designs for Swarovski, Artecnica, and Moroso, his lamps, chairs, fabric designs, paper products, and art installations have vaulted him into the top ranks of contemporary design culture. Featured in headline exhibitions at the Milan Furniture Fair, the Victoria and Albert Musem and Art Basel: Miami, the unique paper creations and furniture developed by Boontje have become global objects of desire, spawning a cult following among collectors and design consumers. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 sketches, concept renderings, and photographs, the book is a comprehensive visual document of the designer's work and an art object in itself, featuring a number of custom printing effects-stencils, perforated and die-cut pages, and textured and woven details-that capture the intricacy of Boontje's approach to pattern-making.

The Gayer-Anderson Cat


Neal Spencer - 2007
    This book presents a detailed description of the cat and a discussion of its possible meaning and role in ancient times. Surprising new finds from scientific analyses are presented for the first time, shedding light on the cats somewhat traumatic modern history, from its acquisition by the British Army major and avid antiquities collector John Gayer-Anderson to its donation to the British Museum. The fascinating narrative is complemented by outstanding new photography.

Gustave Baumann's Southwest


Joseph Traugott - 2007
    This book includes reproductions of Baumann's watercolours (referred to in the book as opaque watercolours, they are otherwise known as gouaches) and woodcuts.

Oil Painter's Solution Book - Landscapes: Over 100 Answers to Your Oil Painting Questions


Elizabeth Tolley - 2007
    The handy Q&A format covers everything from basic brush techniques to deciding what to paint first while on location. Learn how to:Choose the right materials for youPrepare indoor and outdoor workspacesDesign spectacular compositionsSelect eye-catching color for visual impactPaint with new brushstrokes and techniquesEvaluate your own workIncluding 10 mini-demonstrations to help refine your technique and 7 complete step-by-step projects, the Oil Painter's Solution Book: Landscapes is one reference no painter can be without!Popular Landscape Questions Include:What type of palette should I use?How do I divide space in my painting?How does light change at different times of day?Can I work back into a dry painting?How can I see and correct mistakes?Get the answers to all these questions and more!

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion


Philippe-Alain Michaud - 2007
    His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg's project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture.Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg's method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using procedures of "montage-collision" he brought together pagan artifacts with masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, the astrology of the ancient Near East with the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals with the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism.Michaud provides us with a book that not only is about Warburg but also extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Lo�e Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English.

The Birth of Grafitti


Jon Naar - 2007
    The Faith of Graffiti, the first and most celebrated book about this controversial new art form, reproduced just over forty selections from the hundreds of photographs he took. Now more than one hundred thirty never-before-published pictures from that landmark body of work, together with a selection of key photographs from The Faith of Graffiti, are brought together in a book destined to become a classic in its own right. Presented full-frame, at high resolution, and with meticulous attention to the original color, this book brings to life the gritty, exciting Germany of the early 1970s and the raw visual power of early graffiti. These photographs recall a time when subway cars and tenement walls seemed to explode overnight into bursts of color and energy. Today these ephemeral works survive only in Naar's masterful photographs. Sacha Jenkins, an authority on graffiti's history, places these pictures within an emerging youth culture that now reaches into every corner of art, fashion, and entertainment.

A Play of Selves


Cindy Sherman - 2007
    She began by experimenting with makeup and costumes, getting dressed up for parties and surprising her friends. She then moved on to photograph herself in the various personas she had created, producing highly inventive but somewhat more primitive versions of the seminal work for which she would later become known, the Untitled Film Stills series. It was during this early period that Sherman created A Play of Selves--a visual tale of a young woman overwhelmed by various alter-egos that compete inside of her, and her final conquering of self-doubt. Acted out with 16 separate characters, these 72 photographic assemblages mark Sherman's earliest explorations of herself-as-subject in a series of staged photographs. Published here for the first time, these photographs include hundreds of shots of the artist costumed as various characters in dozens of poses. Organized in a four-act "play" with an elaborate, handwritten script, the individual images were cut by the artist from original black-and-white prints. Preface by Cindy Sherman.

Raphael


Bette Talvacchia - 2007
    - Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483-1520), was a pre-eminent artist of the Renaissance, whose work has influenced the course of the history of art- The perfect introduction to Raphael for general readers, the author also presents new research, which will prove fascinating for subject specialists- Charts Raphael's entire career in remarkable depth, from his artistic beginnings in Urbino and The Marches, the early altarpieces and periods of study in Florence, to his unprecedented success in Rome at the courts of Popes Julius II and Leo X- Includes all Raphael's most celebrated paintings, such as the frescos of the Vatican stanze (1509-14) and the Sistine Madonna (1513-14), together with many of his lesser-known works, drawings and sketches- Bound in a richly coloured silk that evokes the look and feel of classic Phaldon fine art volumes and enhances the luxurious quality of the books

Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism


Rhonda K. Garelick - 2007
    Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, she attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor, impresario, and one of the first women filmmakers in the world. Fuller befriended royalty and inspired artists such as Mallarm�, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and Isadora Duncan. Today, though, she is remembered mainly as an untutored pioneer of modern dance and stage technology, the electricity fairy who created a sensation onstage whirling under colored spotlights. But in Rhonda Garelick's Electric Salome, Fuller finally receives her due as a major artist whose work helped lay a foundation for all modernist performance to come. The book demonstrates that Fuller was not a mere entertainer or precursor, but an artist of great psychological, emotional, and sexual expressiveness whose work illuminates the centrality of dance to modernism. Electric Salome places Fuller in the context of classical and modern ballet, Art Nouveau, Orientalism, surrealism, the birth of cinema, American modern dance, and European drama. It offers detailed close readings of texts and performances, situated within broader historical, cultural, and theoretical frameworks. Accessibly written, the book also recounts the human story of how an obscure, uneducated woman from the dustbowl of the American Midwest moved to Paris, became a star, and lived openly for decades as a lesbian.

Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter


Sylvia Yount - 2007
    Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter is the most comprehensive appraisal of Beaux’s talent in more than three decades. This handsomely illustrated book presents a range of the artist’s strongest work and offers a fresh understanding of her career by examining critical questions of gender, class, and the importance of place. It features substantive essays which examine Beaux’s participation in the international portrait market of the 1890s, explore the artist’s professional identity and changing fortunes through a close reading of key images, investigate Beaux’s sensitivity to the framing and display of her work. An illustrated chronology of Beaux’s life and work, compiled by Alison Bechtel Wexler, completes the study.Copub: High Museum

Radical lace & subversive knitting


David Revere McFadden - 2007
    Featuring 27 artists from seven countries, this exhibition exhibits work that ranges from Althea Merback's microknit garments (1:144 scale) to large-scale, site-specific installations. Artists employ a variety of media, from traditional yarns and laces, to found objects and video, and explore contemporary currents in art practice of socially engaged, participatory work. An illustrated, full-color catalogue published by MAD that includes an essay by Chief curator David McFadden; illustrations of works by each artist, along with biographical essays; and an index.

A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls


Martin Eidelberg - 2007
    A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls presents the celebrated works of Tiffany Studios in an entirely new context, focusing on the "Tiffany Girls", the 27 women who laboured behind the scenes to create the masterpieces now inextricably linked to the Tiffany name.Recently discovered correspondence written by Ohio-born Clara Driscoll, head of the so-called "Women's Glass Cutting Department" at Tiffany Studios, reveals in convincing and vivid detail how it was in fact Driscoll who generated designs for such masterpieces as the famous Wisteria, Dragonfly and Peony goods. At the heart of the book are over 50 Tiffany lamps, windows, ceramics, enamels and mosaics, supplemented by a wide array of related documents and archival photographs.

Rene Lalique: Extraordinary Jewellery, 1890-1912


Dany Sautot - 2007
    Not just another showcase of Lalique art nouveau glories, this catalog includes photographs taken by the artist, preparatory sketches and life-size studies, and the objects that inspired Lalique–as well as finished pieces from a period when he laid the foundations for his style. The authors compare Lalique’s work to that of his creative contemporaries and contextualize his work within the creative arts of the time. They show how Lalique’s creativity was situated among the arts, poetry, and literature of the day, and how he used other art forms to effect a stylistic renewal of jewelery that is still treasured. With stunning images and authoritative essays, this monograph illuminates the full range of this ingenious craftsman.

Klimt


Alfred Weidinger - 2007
    The author presents Klimt's entire painted oeuvre on an unprecedented scale. His commentary reflects the latest academic findings, such as Klimt's newly discovered church frescoes in Istria, in chapters featuring a wide-range of topics, including Klimt and women, the Viennese Secession, landscapes, portraits, and allegories. This volume's remarkable packaging reflects the magnificence of the work within. The book's large format allows close examination of the exquisite detail and luminescent quality of the work for which Klimt is renowned, making it a perfect gift or collector's item. Best of all, it provides viewers with an all-encompassing perspective on one of history's greatest painters.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Warriors: A Photographic History by Gertrude Kasebier


Michelle Delaney - 2007
    One hundred years later, Kasebier's portraits remain significant visual records into the lives of these Sioux performers and their nation. Her striking photographs capture the strength and character of each individual, documenting the complexity of true warriors playing a staged version of themselves.In 1898, Kasebier wrote to William F. Cody requesting to photograph Indians performing in his Wild West show at Madison Square Garden. Her photographs proved poignant. Her studio had no elaborate backdrops, and she removed Indian regalia to depict her subjects as "raw" individuals, with strong personalities and experiences that blurred the distinction between traditional life and contemporary times. Kasebier developed long relationships with several of the Indians, corresponding with a few for many years. Examples of these letters appear in the volume, as well as drawings done by Indians waiting in her studio, photographs of Dakota Sioux on their reservation, little-known historical background, and Wild West show memorabilia, including rare pages from Buffalo Bill's original route book.Kasebier's photographs are preserved at the National Museum of American History's Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian Institution.

Chimneys and Towers: Charles Demuth's Late Paintings of Lancaster


Betsy Fahlman - 2007
    He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later at the Academie Colarossi and Academie Julian in Paris, where he was first exposed to the European avant-garde. Returning to America after his studies, he participated in the transmission of modern European ideas into American art--along with Georgia O'Keeffe, Demuth was a proponent of Precisionism, a movement that incorporated the clean lines and geometrical forms of Cubism and Futurism into depictions of the American landscape.Chimneys and Towers focuses on Demuth's late paintings of industrial sites in Lancaster. During this period he struggled with diabetes and painted little, but the powerful visual impact of the works he completed belies his diminishing physical strength. Depicting the warehouses and factories of the city's tobacco and linoleum industries in sharp, geometric forms, these paintings show an artist negotiating both artistic and personal identity, bringing to the depiction of his hometown the style of the American avant-garde that he helped create.While scholars have long recognized the importance of these works, Chimneys and Towers offers new perspectives on their initial critical reception, as well as a more complete understanding of the paintings' relationship to Demuth's native Lancaster. Betsy Fahlman also explores in depth the effects of Demuth's failing health on his art, offering previously unpublished correspondence that reveals the central role that Pennsylvania art collector Albert C. Barnes played in extending Demuth's life.

Jeremiah: A Romantic Vision


Jeremiah Goodman - 2007
    Goodman’s expressive watercolors not only act as an archive of interior design for the second half of the 20th century, but also provide a glimpse into the artist’s unique ability to infuse a depiction of domestic space with a sense of drama and emotion second only to being there. In addition to making art based on the interiors, Goodman painted studies for rooms-to-be, creating the beautiful plans on which the rooms themselves would be based. Jeremiah: A Romantic Vision is a 208-page retrospective of Goodman’s career, with over 80 plates of Goodman’s work, photos and ephemera from his life, and reflections from Goodman himself. Over the span of his career, Goodman has made renderings of the homes of such influential icons as President Ronald and First Lady Nancy Reagan; legendary theatre personas Mary Martin, Sir John Gielgud, and Richard Rodgers; Baron and Baroness Philippe de Rothschild; jewelry designer Elsa Peretti; Greta Garbo; Cecil Beaton; Betsy Bloomingdale; the Duchess of Windsor; fashion designers Elsa Schiaparelli and Bill Blass; Vogue editor-in-chief and fashion icon Diana Vreeland; interior designers Billy Baldwin and Mario Buatta; and famed photographer Bruce Weber; in addition to illustrating rooms for House and Garden, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Interior Design, a publication for which Goodman illustrated each month’s cover for 15 years. With an introduction by playwright Edward Albee, Jeremiah: A Romantic Vision offers a rare look at a true life of grandeur.

The Art and Architecture of Persia


Giovanni Curatola - 2007
    Populated since prehistoric times, thus making it one of the most dynamic areas of Islamic civilization, this region was home to the world’s first powerful empire (lead by Cyrus the Great during the Achaemenid dynasty) and has influenced the aesthetic grammar of a large portion of central Asia, including Armenia, Georgia, and India.From the ancient Iranian civilizations in 500 BC, through the Islamic period, and on to modern-day Iran, Iran: The Art and Architecture of Persia explores the common characteristics and thematic threads running through Persian art. Iran presents its readers with archaeological landscapes, monuments, sculptures, carpets, and dazzling ornaments and art objects from this stunning artistic milieu. The text takes as it subject the most fascinating and unusual facets of the Persian artistic experience, with a particular focus on post-Hellenic culture, namely late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Iran investigates how the examined regions were hothouses of specific artistic developments and identifies how the Iranian passage along the Silk Route acted as a bridge between distant lands for trade as well as the dissemination of religious and material culture.The two authors, Gianroberto Scarcia and Giovanni Curatola, write in an engaging, refreshingly accessible manner, catering both to specialists and to novices wishing to immerse themselves in this captivating region and its art. Author Scarcia writes the first part of the book, covering the era from the Achaemenids to the Sassanids and examining the great architecture from Persepolis onward while also addressing the powerful metalwork produced by these cultures. The second part, by Curatola, explores the Islamic period, when architectural decoration moved into the forefront with brilliant chromatic effects etched onto massive built works. The same colors bloom throughout the other arts, including carpets and miniature paintings. Dynamic and absorbing, Iran and its over 200 color photos will take readers on a virtual tour of this region and the art it has produced over the centuries.

Gustave Courbet


Laurence Des Cars - 2007
    At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism of Ingres, coined instead an idiom he named "Realism." Realism was not pretty, classically proportioned or literary; rather, it confronted the conditions of rural working life, then an unimaginable subject for art. The first masterpiece of this new style was "Burial at Ornans" (1849-1850), a colossal anti-epic that depicted an ordinary funeral in Courbet's home town. The contrast between the work's scale and its subject matter was pronounced, and its murky earth tones struck critics as willfully ugly--a defining reaction that would recur throughout the Modern period, particularly in the reception of early works by Manet and Picasso. Courbet's palette emphasized mass and body politically--that is, in a manner that affirmed the world itself rather than the transcendence of it. His equally famous "The Origin of the World" of 1866, which presented the female genitalia close-up, made this stance explicit. The conceptual beginnings of the "painting of Modern life" are as much in Courbet's Realism as in Charles Baudelaire's famous essay of the same name.In this new assessment, published on the occasion of a major 2008 traveling exhibition, renowned experts shed light on the development of Courbet's realistic, critical style and trace his influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations, as well as his relationship to early photography. At 480 pages, this monumental volume provides a long-overdue reckoning of this great artist's work.

The Home of the Surrealists: Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Their Circle at Farley Farm


Antony Penrose - 2007
    Written by Anthony Penrose, son of American photographer and feminist icon Lee Miller and British artist Roland Penrose, this work provides a personal insight into their life together at Farley Farm, Sussex where they played host to some of the greatest 20th-century artists.

The Majesty of Mughal Decoration: The Art and Architecture of Islamic India


George Michell - 2007
    Beautifully photographed close-up details of wall reliefs, inlaid metal hookah bowls, carpets, jade sword hilts, gilded borders of miniature paintings and embroidered shawls emphasize the unity of the themes in Mughal art, while George Michell's lucid text places the works in their historical and architectural context. This sumptuous volume will be essential reading for all lovers of Indian art as well as those with a professional interest in the subject.

Monuments: America's History in Art and Memory


Judith Dupre - 2007
    But included too are contemporary monuments that are changing the way we think about commemoration–the AIDS Quilt, a traveling memorial made for the people by the people, and even the haunting lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising,” an intangible remembrance of September 11th. Monuments features more than 200 stunning duotone photographs, as well as fascinating stories, rare illustrations, candid interviews with artists and architects, and a unique chronology of milestones in the history of time and memory. Ultimately, Monuments is about life. It tells the stories of real people, the ordinary and the renowned, whose lives, though immortalized, exist most fully in the mind and heart. Monuments is a book that goes beyond historical fact to touch what is eternal and transcendent about humanity.To view images from Monuments, visit:http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/monum...Praise for Judith Dupré:“Dupré makes the most of a century of neck-craning architecture.”–The Washington Post, on Skyscrapers“Judith Dupré captivates the eye, mind and imagination.”–The New York Times, on Bridges“Magisterial, meticulously researched, and handsomely illustrated.”–O: The Oprah Magazine, on Churches

Picasso


Philippe Dagen - 2007
    What does it mean to be an artist in the twentieth century? What does it mean to be an artist in the time of newspapers and museums, in a time when the art market has expanded to reach the entire western world? Is modern civilization so different that it gives an artist a new attitude and causes him to redefine his role for the public, the market, and, therefore, to invent entirely new artistic practices? Picasso is considered here in view of this last, and most probable, hypothesis. He is a product of his situation and time, in the broadest sense of the term. Refusing to confine himself to his studio or the small artistic community in Paris, Picasso responded forcefully to world affairs, giving pictoral and sculptural form to the passions and events he witnessed around him. This is a thoroughly modern Picasso, constantly and consciously confronting the modernity of the world. Dagen's original exploration of his techniques, materials, and images shows how the artist both allowed modernity to in?ltrate his work and at the same time to react against it. Picasso moved between acceptance and rejection, a perpetual confrontation that is, perhaps, the most satisfying explanation of his will to create change that drove him to leave the most varied and diverse body of work in the entire history of art.

John Sloan's New York


Joyce K. Schiller - 2007
    Following Henri to New York, Sloan joined a small circle of eight talented artists whose dissatisfaction with the dominating National Academy led to a protest exhibit in 1908, the emergence of a powerful movement for change in American art, and ultimately to the famous Armory Show of 1913. It was in part Sloan’s dark palette and views of city streets and working-class life that gave rise to the epithet now used to describe the works of the “Ashcan School.” Sloan’s compelling images of New York City are the subject of this generously illustrated book. His paintings, drawings, and prints clearly reflect his own experience of the city as he walked its neighborhoods and observed human dramas played out in streets and apartments. The contributors to the volume investigate a variety of topics, including Sloan’s understanding of the urban experience in America, his interest in social reform, his fascination with moving pictures and cinema aesthetics, and his relationship with Henri. The authors also situate Sloan’s paintings within the geography and social fabric of New York. John Sloan’s New York presents a unique perspective on New York and its people and also on the artist himself, who was captivated by the soul of the city.

In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century


Patricia G. Berman - 2007
    The extraordinary outburst of artistic energy that occurred in Denmark between 1790 and 1910 has few rivals. Within three generations Danish painters developed a national school that rivaled the artistic centers of France, Germany, and Britain. The range of outstanding works created by the Danish artists includes Classicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, and Symbolism. The book is illustrated with a comprehensive selection of more than 200 key works of art, and an important selection of comparative illustrations including period photographs and ephemera.

Felicien Rops: Life and Work


Bernadette Bonnier - 2007
    The publication of his satirical lithographs in Belgian magazines paved the way for his great breakthrough and his frontispice for Baudelaire's Espaves added the final touch to his burgeoning fame. Rops was a brilliant observer who painted atmospheric seascapes and landscapes; however, it was his ironic, caricatured and sometimes risque drawings, lithographs, and engravings that were especially popular. Now, a hundred years since the artist's death, his work has lost none of its playfulness or eloquence. Text in English, French, Dutch and German.

Portrait in Light and Shadow – The Life of Yousuf Karsh


Maria Tippett - 2007
    His iconic images of Bogart, Hemingway, Churchill, the Kennedys, Auden, Castro, Einstein, the Clintons, Khrushchev, Casals, and Elizabeth II inhabit the mind's eye of anyone familiar with photographic history. A refugee from the ethnic cleansing of Turkish Armenians in 1916, Karsh made his home in Boston and Ottawa but travelled the globe during his sixty-year career, photographing political leaders, celebrities, monarchs, and movie stars. He died in 2002, aged 94. He left a legacy of 50,000 portraits. This is the first biography, written with help from his family and colleagues and based on the Karsh archive in Ottawa. Its publication marks Karsh's centenary in 2008, when retrospective exhibitions are scheduled in a number of locations in North America, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Art Institute of Chicago, Boston Public Library, and Rhode Island School of Design. The book reproduces sixty of Karsh’s most celebrated portraits, and reveals the technique behind the camera and the brilliant mastery of the photographer.

The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings


James A. Ganz - 2007
    And yet there remains a previously undiscovered aspect of his career: his surprisingly significant role as a draftsman. This book is the first to focus on Monet’s pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist’s life and work.Monet has long been seen as an anti-draftsman, an artist who painted his subjects directly and whose rarely seen graphic works were marginal to his artistic process. In an effort to develop his public image, Monet denied the role of drawing in his working method. In actuality, Monet began his career as a caricaturist and as a teenager developed a passion for drawing that was never extinguished. He went on to master the medium of pastel and included seven in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.Citing recently discovered, unpublished documents that overturn the accepted image of the artist, The Unknown Monet reveals an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist’s career, many of which are unknown to the general public and to scholars: beautiful pastels, stunning black chalk drawings, and fascinating sketchbooks, which include pencil studies that relate to many of his paintings. The book also shows how Monet exploited the print media to promote his art.The most important publication on Monet to appear in a generation, this illuminating volume is essential to anyone interested in his work, Impressionism, and nineteenth-century French culture.

Art That Kills: A Panoramic Portrait Of Aesthetic Terrorism 1984 2001


George Petros - 2007
    The book documents a diabolical era, 1984-2001. It chronicles the evolution of a new aesthetic movement, a terrifying fringe of underground art where enlightenment and depravity combined.

Pictorial Encyclopedia of Historic Costume: 1200 Full-Color Figures


Albert Kretschmer - 2007
    An unparalleled history of costume design, this collection includes the garb of kings and laborers ... ladies and warriors ... peasants and priests. Scores of accessories are also illustrated, including shoes, jewelry, wigs, and hair ornaments, along with furniture, musical instruments, and weaponry from a fascinating array of time periods. Exquisitely rendered and magnificent in scope, the Pictorial Encyclopedia of Historic Costume is a visual delight for designers, artists, historians, and everyone captivated by fashion's timeless allure.

Jasper Johns: Gray


Douglas W. Druick - 2007
    1930), one of today's most acclaimed and influential artists, is rarely considered in relation to monochromatic art. Yet single-colour experimentations have figured prominently in his productions since 1955, and within that significant subset of his work, the majority of monochromes are grey. In fact, every one of his iconic, serialized forms has been articulated in grey.This elegant book, spanning Johns' full career, examines this singular preoccupation, presenting a revolutionary new understanding of and appreciation for the artist as an accomplished tonalist. Johns' greys traverse an infinitely expressive spectrum of differentiated hues and values evident in the new photography expressly commissioned for this catalogue. The volume features paintings, sculptures, drawings, lithographs, silkscreens, etchings, and aquatints created in a wide array of grey media: oil and acrylic paint, encaustic, collage, Sculp-metal, aluminum, lead, silver, graphite, pastel, watercolour, and ink.This book also features recent works published here for the first time. Anchoring this essential publication are compelling essays that enrich our perspective on this prolific artist's entire oeuvre.

Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959


Bruce Altshuler - 2007
    It is the most important reference book available on the subject, and the only book available that charts these groundbreaking events in such detail and scope. Volume I opens with the revolutionary first Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863, and concludes with the multi-locational international exhibition 'The New American Painting,' organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958-59. SALON TO BIENNIAL depicts a wealth of rare documentary material and ephemera, including installation photographs, publications, and reviews of the period surrounding each exhibition. It is an exceptional sourcebook for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century art, exhibition design, or curatorial practice.

Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera ( Two books in slip case) (Temporis Collection)


Gerry Souter - 2007
    Two volume set in clipcase, tight, clean copies, insides pristine, Qualifies for FREE SHIPPING!!

The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839-1885: The Hallmark Photographic Collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art


Keith F. Davis - 2007
    Beautifully designed and produced, with over 600 reproductions in tritone and four-color, this important volume features works by all the leading practitioners of the time and by others who remain unknown. Many of these images are published here for the first time; all are from the acclaimed Hallmark Photographic Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. In a detailed and authoritative text, Keith F. Davis examines photography’s social history and aesthetic development in an era of rapid national growth. He demonstrates how key themes and genres—including the business of daguerreian portraiture, the markets for Civil War images, and the art of Western landscape photography—reflected the concerns and values of 19th-century society. Photographers of this era expressed a new national consciousness while, at the same time, helped to shape it. They also explored the visual language of a radically new medium, laying the foundation for all of photography’s subsequent history.This essential book will be the most definitive study of this period in American photographic history. It will be of interest to all scholars and enthusiasts of the medium, and to anyone interested in the visual history of 19th-century American culture.

New York Rises


Eugène De Salignac - 2007
    As sole photographer at the Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures during that period of dizzying growth, he documented the creation of the city's modern infrastructure--including bridges, major municipal buildings, roads and subways. For years, de Salignac's remarkably lyrical photographs have been featured in books and films, but never credited to their author. New York Rises, which will accompany a traveling exhibition, is the first monograph to present this unprecedented work as an aesthetically coherent oeuvre by a photographer with a unique vision. As meticulous in his record keeping as he was creative in his photography, de Salignac left five handwritten logs that identify each negative by place and exact date. This information is complemented throughout the book by narrative captions expanding on themes such as accidents, bridges, workers and the Depression. Essayist Michael Lorenzini unearths primary sources to reconstruct de Salignac's biography and Kevin Moore explores the photographer's work in the context of other masters of the period, including Eugene Atget and Berenice Abbott.

Stones, Bones and Stitches: Storytelling through Inuit Art


Shelley Falconer - 2007
    Focusing on several important works from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, curators Shelley Falconer and Shawna White take you on an impressive journey through the artistic landscape. The evolving character of the North is explored through the lens of some of Canada’s most significant Inuit artists, past and present.Included are eight different works from sculpture to prints, each highlighted with introductions to the artists, the materials they used, geography, legends, and stories. Photographs together with intriguing facts give the reader insight into the artists’ lives, communities, and working conditions along with brief histories of the region.

Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art


Jeffrey Spier - 2007
    What images did these Christians use to express their faith openly? Were they the first believers to part with Mosaic law by creating “graven images”? What Jewish and pagan sources, if any, did they look to for inspiration? When did they begin to depict the life of Jesus? This beautifully illustrated book takes up such questions, revealing the story of how Christian art began through insights from recent discoveries.Leading experts explore topics ranging from Jewish art in the Greco-Roman period and the influence of Constantine, to the development of church decoration and the meaning of illustrated Bibles. Throughout we see the distinctive pictorial selection of Early Christians, who at first depicted Old Testament figures—Abraham and Isaac, Jonah, and Daniel—and did not invent new images until over a century later. The special meanings attached to old images and new ones like the fish, anchor, and Good Shepherd all come to life in these pages.The essays are complemented by extensive new archaeological research on a range of more than one hundred objects, drawn from major museums of America and Europe. Frescoes, marble sculpture and sarcophagi, silver vessels and reliquaries, carved ivories, decorated crosses, and illuminated Bibles are illustrated in new color photographs, allowing the reader an unprecedented encounter with Early Christian art.

Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court


Thomas P. Campbell - 2007
    Henry VIII amassed an unrivaled collection over the course of his reign, and the author weaves the history of this magnificent collection into the life of its owner with an engaging narrative style. Now largely dispersed or destroyed, Henry’s extensive inventory is here reassembled and reveals how, through tapestry, Henry identified himself with historic, religious, and mythological figures, putting England in dialogue—and competition—with the leading courts of Early Modern Europe while promoting his own religious and political agendas at home. Campbell’s original account sheds new light on Tudor political and artistic culture and the court’s response to Renaissance aesthetic ideals. Sumptuously illustrated with newly commissioned photographs, this stunning re-creation of Europe’s greatest tapestry collection challenges the predominantly text-driven histories of the period and offers a fascinating new perspective on the life of Henry VIII.

Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color


Rembrandt - 2007
    From his intimate observations of everyday life to his richly envisioned biblical allegories, the Dutch master created moving, inspiring images that have captivated viewers across four centuries. This original collection offers an unusual perspective on the artist, consisting exclusively of his drawings—all in their original colors, and most of them in their original sizes.These acclaimed drawings date from the 1620s to the 1660s, spanning Rembrandt's prolific career and documenting his changes in style and focus. Superb examples from every genre of the artist's work include landscape drawings, figure studies, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, animal sketches, and several portraits, including a few of the self-images for which he is famed.Beautifully produced in a generous format on high-quality paper, this deluxe edition offers a rare variety of 116 works from more than twenty major European and American museums. Informative captions accompany each illustration.

Roman Art


Michael Siebler - 2007
    It was only in about 1900 that a search began for ancient Roman art and architecture. Part of the 'Basic Genre' series, this volume features works of Roman art, such as: Augustus of Primaporta; Gemma Augustea; and Lycurgus beaker.

George Bellows: An Artist in Action


Mary Sayre Haverstock - 2007
    This book includes his signature paintings of urban life, a selection of portraits, his lesser-known landscapes and his portrayals of prizefighters and other athletes in action.

Italian Frescoes: The Baroque Era, 1600-1800


Steffi Roettgen - 2007
    The fresco cycles presented include brilliant works by Domenichino, Sebastiano Ricci, Guercino, and Tiepolo—all of them still visible on walls and ceilings of palaces and churches spanning Italy from Venice to Naples.The authors present such celebrated sites as the Barberini Palace in Rome and the Pitti Palace in Florence, as well as lesser–known gems. Each of the chapters is concise and authoritative, offering a descriptive and interpretive essay on all aspects of the fresco cycle, covering the artists and their patrons in the context of their cultural and political history. Each essay concludes with a diagram of the site, followed by a series of full– and double–page color plates showing the entire cycle, many reproduced from new photographs of recently restored frescoes.No publisher until now has attempted to gather together and document all the important fresco cycles of Italian art from the late thirteenth to the eighteenth century. While this volume is a continuation of the previous books, Italian Frescoes: The Baroque Era certainly stands alone as an incredible treasury of art and scholarship that will be eagerly collected by art historians and art lovers alike.

The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece


Gary M. Radke - 2007
    The monumental gilded bronze doors (each more than 15 feet tall) were designed for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Centuries of admirers have considered “The Gates of Paradise” one of the great masterworks of Western art. This extensively illustrated book displays the full glory and elaborate details of many of the newly restored bronze panels, the extraordinary work of the conservators and restorers who cleaned the priceless doors. In a series of fascinating chapters, expert contributors capture Ghiberti’s world, his remarkable talent at representing human emotion in rich illusionistic settings, the relationships between Renaissance patrons and artists, and the collaborations and rivalries among artists. Other chapters explore the challenging craft of bronze sculpture, Ghiberti’s casting and finishing techniques, and the painstaking process involved in documenting and restoring the treasured doors. A chronology of Ghiberti’s life completes this lavishly produced volume.

The Mirror of Antiquity


Caroline Winterer - 2007
    Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome. Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time--the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society--this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.

Ensō: Zen Circles of Enlightenment


Audrey Yoshiko Seo - 2007
    It has been subject to a rich variety of interpretations—seen as everything from a rice cake to a symbol of infinity. But regardless of how it is understood, the ensō is above all an expression of the mind of the artist who brushes it. It is said that the state of the Zen practitioner can be clearly read in his or her execution of the circle. Audrey Yoshiko Seo brings together a collection of the best examples of ensō art to show the wonderful variety of the form and its variations, from the seventeenth century to the present, each with facing commentary. The commentary focuses on the meaning of the art and its historical context and provides an analysis of each artist’s technique. Also included are biographies of the artists, many of whom are important Japanese Zen teachers.

Art History For Dummies


Jesse Bryant Wilder - 2007
    Every age, for the last 50,000 years has left its unique imprint on the world, and from the first cave paintings to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from the Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia, to the graffiti-inspired paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, art history tells the story of our evolving notions of who and what we are and our place in the universe. Whether you're an art enthusiast who'd like to know more about the history behind your favorite works and artists, or somebody who couldn't tell a Titian and a De Kooning--but would like to--Art History For Dummies is for you. It takes you on a tour of thirty millennia of artistic expression, covering the artistic movements, major artists, and indispensable masterworks, and the world events and cultural trends that helped spawn them. With the help of stunning black-and-white photos throughout, and a sixteen-page gallery of color images, it covers:The rise and fall of classical art in Greece and Rome The differences between Renaissance art and Mannerism How the industrial revolution spawned Romanticism How and why Post-Impression branched off from Impressionism Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism and other 20th century isms What's up with today's eclectic art scene Art History For Dummies is an unbeatable reference for anyone who wants to understand art in its historical context.

Dome


Luis Royo - 2007
    The results: especially the women, are all life size. The owner has graciously allowed this masterpiece to be shown to the outside world.

Futurism: An Anthology


Lawrence Rainey - 2007
    Marinetti published his incendiary Futurist Manifesto, proclaiming, “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!!” and “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” Intent on delivering Italy from “its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians,” the Futurists imagined that art, architecture, literature, and music would function like a machine, transforming the world rather than merely reflecting it. But within a decade, Futurism's utopian ambitions were being wedded to Fascist politics, an alliance that would tragically mar its reputation in the century to follow. Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of Futurism, this is the most complete anthology of Futurist manifestos, poems, plays, and images ever to bepublished in English, spanning from 1909 to 1944. Now, amidst another era of unprecedented technological change and cultural crisis, is a pivotal moment to reevaluate Futurism and its haunting legacy for Western civilization.

Art and Electronic Media


Edward A. Shanken - 2007
    A timely survey that addresses the relationship between art and electronic technology, including mechanics, light, graphics, robots, virtual reality and the web

Mirror of the World: A New History of Art


Julian Bell - 2007
    He follows the changing trends in the making and significance of art in different cultures, and explains why the art of the day looked and functioned as it did. Key images and objects-some of them familiar works of art; others, less known but equally crucial to the story-act as landmarks on the journey, focal points around which the discussion always centers. Along the way, Bell answers fundamental questions such as "What is art and where does it start?" and "Why do humans make it and how does it serve them?"Previous histories tended to focus only on the masterpieces of Western art, in the process excluding the work of women or non-Western artists, or else considering developments around the world as separate, unrelated phenomena. Bell's achievement is to take a global perspective, bringing the distinct stories together in one convincing narrative. He draws insightful and inspired connections between different continents and cultures and across the millennia, which results in a rich and seamless introduction to the world of visual creativity.Hundreds of carefully selected illustrations show how artists from different ages and societies often shared the same formal, technical, and aesthetic concerns, while others took divergent paths when their vision dictated it.Julian Bell, himself a well-known painter, is the grandson of Vanessa and Clive Bell, key members of the celebrated Bloomsbury group of writers and artists. His books include What is Painting?.

Titian


Peter Humfrey - 2007
    Renowned for his extraordinary use of colour, among other skills, Titian was not only in demand as a portrait and landscape painter but was also commissioned to paint a wide variety of religious and mythological subjects, working for patrons as prominent as the pope, the German emperor and the King of Spain.

Art for Art's Sake


Elizabeth Prettejohn - 2007
    The English painters' search for the formula to best express the idea of “art for art's sake” was a unified and powerful artistic undertaking, Prettejohn demonstrates, and the Aesthetic Movement made important contributions to the history of modern art.

Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive


Griselda Pollock - 2007
    Challenging the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so exclusive of women's artistic contributions to the twentieth century, the virtual feminist museum stages some of the complex relations between femininity, modernity and representation.Griselda Pollock draws on the models of both Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and Freud's private museum of antiquities as well as Ettinger's concept of subjectivity as encounter to propose a differencing journey through time, space and archive. Featuring studies of Canova 's Three Graces and women artist's modernist reclamations of the female body, the book traverses the rupture of fascism and the Holocaust and ponders the significance of painting and drawing in their aftermath.Artists featured include: Georgia O'Keeffe, Josephine Baker, Gluck, Charlotte Salomon, Bracha Ettinger and Christine Taylor Patten.

The Pre-Raphaelites


Michael Robinson - 2007
    This illustrated reference book is packed with examples of work by all the key proponents and their influences.

Declaring Space: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein


Michael Auping - 2007
    Developed at the tail end of the abstract expressionist movement, color field painting is distinguished by pure, unmodulated areas of color, flat, two-dimensional space, and large, often irregularly shaped canvases. The genre is often associated with American painting, but was actually embraced by an international group of artists. Four of the most exciting of those practitioners are the focus of this penetrating study. Michael Auping sees the work of each of these artists as representing a different stage in the development of abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s. He comments, "To my mind Rothko draws back the curtains, if you will, on the opening up of this space. Newman emphatically `declares' an almost totemic space, while Fontana literally slices through the picture's plane with a razor, and Klein, as he pronounced it, leaps into the void." Illustrated with color images of the artists' seminal works, Declaring Space shows how each painter made his own individual mark in a new realm of abstract art.

Donald Judd: Architecture In Marfa, Texas


Urs Peter Flückiger - 2007
    Among the lesser-known aspects of his work is a large collection of architectural designs, which explore the relationship of architecture and art. Of special importance for Judda (TM)s work in this field is a former military fort in Marfa, Texas, part of which he purchased and then, beginning in 1971, systematically transformed into one of the largest existing ensembles of contemporary art.This book is the first to address Judda (TM)s built work from an architectural perspective. With this in view, the Marfa buildings have for the first time been carefully measured and drawn to scale by the author and his students. Using standard CAD drawings together with historical and contemporary photographs, this volume illustrates Judda (TM)s architectural alterations to the buildings in Marfa, and discusses and describes them in its accompanying text. The result is an invaluable source of inspiration for contemporary architecture.

The History of Venice in Painting


Georges Duby - 2007
    For centuries, Venice has enchanted visitors with its magnificent architecture and romantic canals. As a lone republic amid mostly monarchical Europe, Venice equally amazed philosophers and poets, leading Wordsworth to hail this floating city of more than one hundred islands as “the oldest Child of Liberty.”Yet it is the imprint Venice left in the realm of painting, not only as a subject that inspired visiting artists from Europe and beyond, but more importantly as the seat of a new school of painting, for which Venice should best be remembered. The Venetian School of painting was developed during the Renaissance, featuring such celebrated painters as Bellini, Mantegna, Giorgione, and Titian. Emphasizing Venice’s pervasive sunlight and glowing color in their works, these painters influenced centuries of painters to come. The authors of The History of Venice in Painting explain how the Venetian School, in addition to other attractions like Carnival, attracted legions of tourists to Venice, making it an obligatory stop on the “Grand Tour” that should complete any eighteenth-century gentleman’s cultural education. Visitors also came to Venice to paint the city’s famous light for themselves, most notably J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet. Sun-soaked Venice, with light reflecting off the waters of its many canals, was indeed an Impressionist’s dream.This vibrantly illustrated text traces the history of the Republic of Venice through its artistic heritage, from medieval mosaics to twentieth-century Futurist paintings. Including 350 full-color images, as well as 4 breathtaking gatefolds, The History of Venice in Painting is a treasure-trove of art, history, and culture. Here such panoramas as religious processions and gondolas criss-crossing the Grand Canal are displayed in a size befitting the subject’s grandeur. Protected in a silkbound slipcase, this gorgeous tribute captures the history and indelible legacy of Venice.

Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art


Metropolitan Museum of Art - 2007
    

A Silver Legend: The Story of the Maria Theresa Thaler


Clara Semple - 2007
    It became a trade coin, and - because of the assured and consistent purity of its silver content - fast became the most acceptable currency throughout the Levant, the Red Sea region, much of Arabia and the Horn of Africa. It circulated in the Americas and as far east as China. Since then over 400 million have been struck in mints in Austria and, on occasions, in Bombay, London, Rome, and other countries in Europe. As an international currency - one of the first of its kind - it was loved and trusted wherever it was circulated and remained official tender of Arabia and remote corners of Africa until well into the 20th century.

Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays


Simon Frith - 2007
    The essays in this important collection address these forces, recognising that music is an effect of a continuous process of negotiation, dispute and agreement between the individual actors who make up a music world. The emphasis is always on discourse, on the way in which people talk and write about music, and the part this plays in the social construction of musical meaning and value. The collection includes nineteen essays, some of which have had a major impact on the field, along with an autobiographical introduction.

The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference


Griselda Pollock - 2007
    Resisting both the rejection of theory and the current displacement of art history in favour of visual culture, New Encounters instead rejuvenate both approaches. Marked out by its critical engagement with and close informed readings of images, texts and cultural events, this series employs new feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives. New Encounters also showcases exciting new volumes which revisit key figures in twentieth century art through highly original feminist approaches. The notion of a special intimacy between "the feminine and the sacred" has received significant attention since the publication of Julia Kristeva and Cathérine Clément's famous ecumenical "conversation" of the same name which focused on the relationship between meaning and the body at whose interface the feminine is positioned. Brought to the wider public as the "sacred feminine", it has also made its mark on popular culture. Taking up the debate and moving beyond anthropology or theology, writers from varied ethnic, geo-cultural and religious perspectives here join with secular cultural analysts to explore the sacred and the feminine in art, architecture, literature, art history, music, philosophy, theology, critical theory and cultural studies. The book addresses key issues in feminist questions of creativity, the imaginary and the sacred as "otherness", exploring the ways in which visual practices have explored this rich, contested and highly charged territory.

The Cambridge Companion To August Wilson


Christopher Bigsby - 2007
    He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in another time and place, but doing something more than just survive. Wilson deliberately addressed black America, but in doing so discovered an international audience. Alongside chapters addressing Wilson's life and career, and the wider context of his plays, this Companion dedicates individual chapters to each play in his ten-play cycle, which are ordered chronologically, demonstrating Wilson's notion of an unfolding history of the twentieth century.

Edward Bawden & His Circle: The Inward Laugh


Malcolm Yorke - 2007
    During this time he was extraordinarily prolific and produced a considerable body of work, including book illustrations, advertising posters, murals (for ships, boardrooms, colleges and churches), fine paintings, tapestries, and wallpapers. Bawden was also responsible for the diverse artistic community which thrived in Great Bardfield in the 1950s. Malcolm Yorke's incisive biography of Bawden, written with the complete cooperation and support of Bawden's children and his artistic executor, follows Bawden's career in the context of the social and artistic friendships he cultivated, such as those with Douglas Percy Bliss and, in particular, Eric Ravilious. The book is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of material from Bawden's personal scrapbooks, allowing the reader an insight into Bawden's working methods and his final pieces. Copiously illustrated with material from every period of Bawden's working life, Edward Bawden and

Craft in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects


Jo Lauria - 2007
    Each tells a story—about the person who laid his or her hands to the work; about the historical moment in which it was created; and about the political mood, community, and cultural forces that gave rise to that design. The only book of its kind and the companion book to the PBS series of the same name, Craft in America highlights the work of America’s most interesting craft artists past and present. Illustrated with more than 200 commanding images and signature objects from furniture, wood, ceramics, and glass to fiber, quilts, jewelry, metal, and basketry, this definitive work shows how crafts, long admired for their marriage of functionality and creativity, also reflect our nation’s history and the remarkable people who passed on their traditions. The last two hundred years have brought extraordinary transformation to America—not just in the landscape and culture but also to the myriad communities that crisscross the continent. Organized by the societies in which our many craft traditions originated, Craft in America introduces the virtuoso craftspeople who expressed and elevated the values and ideals of their groups—ideals that have become quintessentially American. From American Indians and enslaved Africans who worked with indigenous materials to religious people such as Shakers, whose clean lines reflect adherence to simplicity; from designers of the Arts and Crafts Movement for whom handmade objects held a moral integrity and righteousness to the government-sponsored WPA artists who created in the service of their nation, to today’s studio artists reimagining meaning and methods, Craft in America unfolds a rarely examined side of our history. Visceral, important, and seductively beautiful, and with a prologue from former president Jimmy Carter, Craft in America showcases some of the most important American objects. In these pages, you will discover how handcrafted objects are not only essential to daily life but how they are also a culture’s tribute to its own character and place in history. They embody the desire to remember, reflect, and connect, serving as bridges among individuals, community, and the environment. Craft in America will take you on an aesthetic adventure through the evolution of craft and reveal what makes American crafts uniquely ours. Ultimately, this is the story of how enduring handmade objects both unite and define us as Americans. CRAFT IN AMERICA, INC., is a nonprofit organi-zation based in Los Angeles that is dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and celebration of craft and its impact on our nation’s cultural heritage. The mission of Craft in America is to document and advance the original handcrafted works through programs in all media made accessible to all Americans.

Greek Art


Michael Siebler - 2007
    But the reality of ancient art was entirely different, as surfaces were in fact much more brut. As author Michael Siebler points out, recent findings have revealed that the seemingly perfect bodies of statues and sculptures were very often painted in flamboyant colors and ornaments. Thus ancient Greek art combined a high level of classical identity with an equal amount of sensuality. Despite being viewed in a new light, the beauty of the works of art persists.

The Hidden Life of Renaissance Art: Secrets and Symbols in Great Masterpieces


Clare Gibson - 2007
    Are you privy to its secrets? Does the idea of learning what some of the most famous paintings in the world really mean intrigue you? If so, this illuminating book will open your eyes to the fascinating stories related by Renaissance masterpieces, tales that tell of eternal damnation, of murdered wives, and of aristocratic spies, that speak volumes about human fears and frailties, and that convey profound philosophical concepts. This absorbing work of reference is also an invaluable tool that will teach you how to decipher artists’ symbolic messages for yourself.• Fifty Renaissance masterpieces decoded and explained• Encompasses the Early, High, and Northern Renaissance• Reveals the secrets, mores, and codes of the Renaissance world

Art & Architecture Paris


Martina Padberg - 2007
    With town plans and over 600 illustrations. Full-colour throughout.