Not only are there frequent references to specific works of art, but certain characters are also evoked by comparison to particular paintings. Bloch’s appearance as a boy is likened to the portrait of Mehmet II by Gentile Bellini; Odette de Crécy strikes Swann by her resemblance to a figure in a Botticelli fresco. Even the lesser figure of a certain Mme. Blattin becomes the subject of Proustian mischief by being described as “exactly the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo.” Eric Karpeles has identified and located the many paintings to which Proust makes reference and sets them alongside the relevant text from the novel; in other cases, where only a painter’s name is mentioned to indicate a certain style or appearance, Karpeles has chosen a representative work to illustrate the impression that Proust sought to evoke.With some 200 paintings beautifully reproduced in full color and texts drawn from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, as well as concise commentaries on the evolving narrative, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of Proustians everywhere. The book also includes an authoritative introduction and a comprehensive index of artists and paintings mentioned in the novel.

    From how to look at works by great masters to explaining key movements, styles, and techniques, this monumental book is the quintessential visual guide to more than 2,500 of the world's most revered paintings and sculptures.DK

    One of the masters of modern European painting, he helped found the popular Viennese Secession, or Art Nouveau, movement. This lushly illustrated volume explores his fascinating artistic career, covering Vienna at the time of Klimt’s creative peak. With more than 300 beautifully reproduced pictures, paintings, and photographs, it presents Klimt’s entire artistic production: posters for exhibitions, erotic drawings, and pictorial masterpieces such as The Kiss, Death and Life, and Tree of Life, along with countless portraits such as the famous Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

    Tucker came of age in the 1960s, and this spirited account of her life draws the reader directly into the burgeoning feminist movement and the excitement of the New York art world during that time. Her own new ways of thinking led her to take principled stands that have changed the way art museums consider contemporary art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney, she organized major exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. As founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized and curated groundbreaking exhibitions that often focused on the nexus of art and politics. The book highlights Tucker's commitment to forging a new system when the prevailing one proved too narrow for her expansive vision.

    A guided tour of European prehistoric caves by world-renowned expert Jean Clottes, Cave Art brings together an unparalleled selection of spectacular and beautiful images of wall paintings, mysterious rock engravings and refined sculptures, all accompanied by accessible, informative text.

    If art can be anything, where do you begin?For more than three decades Calvin Tomkins’s incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the most satisfying reports on contemporary art and artists available in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten major artists are captured in Tomkins’s cool and ironic style to record the new directions art is taking during these days of limitless freedom. As formal technique and rigorous training continue to fall away, art has become an approach to living. As the author says, “the lives of contemporary artists are today so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.”Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of deliberately outrageous art that feeds off the allegedly corrupting influences of capitalist glut and entertainment; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages multiple transformations as she disappears into her own work; and Julian Schnabel, who has forged a second career as award-winning film director. Tomkins shows that the making of art remains among the most demanding jobs on earth.

    A complete online environment, including all images and an eBook, is also available. The unique Scale feature will help you better visualize the actual size of the artworks shown in the book. A new timeline within each chapter, along with "The Big Picture" overviews at the end of every chapter, will help you review for exams.

    Spanning three thousand years, this beautifully illustrated history offers a thorough and delightfully readable introduction to the artwork even as it provides insight into questions that have long engaged experts and amateurs alike. In its scope, its detail, and its eloquent reproduction of over 250 objects, Gay Robins's classic book is without parallel as a guide to the art of ancient Egypt. And her eagerly awaited new edition includes many new color photographs and a fully revised and updated bibliography.

    The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of more than 50 works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.

    In this volume, leading art critics reassess the achievement of this great artist, whose style was so personal and distinctive that his influence lay more in the intensity of his commitment to art than in any direct stylistic legacy.

    Commissioned by its magisterial patron, Jean de France, duc de Berry, this richly illuminated Book of Hours, intended for private devotion and now housed in The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum, counted among the duke’s large collection of prized possessions. The luminous scenes depicting the legends of the saints, the Hours of the Virgin, and the like, many with elaborately designed borders, exemplify the transcendent splendor of the Limbourg brothers’ talents.

    Accompanying a major touring retrospective to mark Twombly's eightieth year, it surveys a vast output of paintings, drawings and sculpture by an artist whose indifference to supposed distinctions between Pop and abstraction, between writing, drawing and painting, and between literature and art had, for many years, brought his work severe neglect. Twombly's art upsets the prudish purist with its hybridism; as he declares, "I'm not a pure; I'm not an abstractionist completely. There has to be a history behind the thought." For Twombly, this history entails a wealth of literary and mythic allusion and an openness to all kinds of forms. Alongside contributions from Richard Shiff, Nicolas Cullinan and Tacita Dean, this essential volume also presents a rare and revealing interview with the artist by Nicholas Serota, an illustrated chronology, an exhibition history and an extensive biography. It will be the most thorough examination of the life and work of this extraordinary artist for years to come. Cy Twombly is a leading figure in a heterogeneous generation of American artists that also includes Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Unlike these others, he left America early in his career to live and work in Italy, where he has drawn inspiration from European literature, classical culture and the Italian landscape.

    Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise provided one critic with the key word for his pejorative article entitled “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes”. Thus was born the name of an artistic movement, which by the turn of the century had established itself as pointing the way forward.Claude Monet is regarded as the most important of the Impressionists. His landscapes are the embodiment of what is commonly thought of as Impressionist painting. Impressionist theory claims that we do not see an object as such, but rather the light in which it appears to us. Thus Monet, for instance, painted the portal of Rouen Cathedral at various times of day and under different weather conditions, showing us how the changing light affects its appearance. In his paintings of the sea and of his motifs from nature—landscapes, flowers and ultimately the water lilies in his greatest pictures from Giverny—Monet sought to capture the instant of a particular natural manifestation. In his opinion, it was the task of the artist “to represent what stands between the object and the artist, which is the beauty of the atmosphere, the impossible”. Through his paintings, Monet was to come closer than almost any other artist to this—admittedly unattainable—aim.

    Jane's romance inspired her to write Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Read the story of Jane Austen and how she became one of the greatest writers of English literature.

    Boris Artzybasheff’s striking graphic style, which includes everything from grotesque experiments in anthropomorphism, to the depiction of vivid and extreme ranges of human psychology and emotion, is displayed to full effect in this seminal collection of his work. A stunning collection from an artist with a strong sense of design and humour!

    Presenting an exploration of the work of leading contemporary painter Peter Doig, this title includes comparatives and source material, featuring interviews with the artist by Chris Ofili.

    From crude model animations in the 1890s, through the first animated feature and into the computer age, Ray Harryhausen and his co-author, Tony Dalton, reveal the patience and ingenuity of animators and explain the development of the technology. The insights of Harryhausen, the pioneer whose name is indelibly linked with stop-motion, add a rich extra dimension to this history, packed with cinematic monsters, fantasy creatures, the imaginings of Tim Burton and Aardman, and much more. Never-before-published stills and photos of the artists at work, sketches and storyboards for projects both realized and abandoned, and a host of recently unearthed memorabilia make A Century of Stop-Motion Animation a must-have for all fans of animation and film.

    And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own problematics: an altermodernity whose issues and features this book seeks to sketch out."In his most recent essay, Nicolas Bourriaud claims that the time is ripe to reconstruct the modern for the specific context in which we are living. If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century's modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.To be radicant: it means setting one's roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a "world art criticism" in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced."And if twenty-first-century culture was invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who insistently is emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation. This figure is accompanied by a domain of forms and by an ethical mode: translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate."

    Lekson, much of what we think we know about the Southwest has been compressed into conventions and classifications and orthodoxies. This book challenges and reconfigures these accepted notions by telling two parallel stories, one about the development, personalities, and institutions of Southwestern archaeology and the other about interpretations of what actually happened in the ancient past.

    In this brilliantly illustrated  survey, edited by a leading Waterhouse scholar, the painter's seductive vision of femininity is captured in sumptuous reproductions and illuminated by an engaging and informative text.Published to accompany an important exhibition of the artist's work, the book explores Waterhouse's creative responses to such contemporary concerns as medievalism, the classical tradition, and spiritualism. A comprehensive examination of his life and work, including his well-known painting The Lady of Shallott, this volume explores also the artist's connection to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and his engagement with French art of the period.

    This volume closely “reads” thirty-six masterpieces of Chinese painting from the encyclopedic collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to reveal the major characteristics and themes of this rich pictorial tradition. The book examines multiple layers of meaning—style, technique, symbolism, past traditions, and the artist’s personal circumstances—through accessible texts and numerous large color details. A dynastic chronology, map, and list of further readings supplement the text. Spanning a thousand years of Chinese art, these landscapes, flowers, birds, figures, religious subjects, and calligraphies illuminate the main goal of every Chinese artist: to capture not only the outer appearance of a subject but also its inner essence.

    Drawing on a rich range of sources, from inventories and guild regulations topoetry and chronicles, it examines everything from panel paintings to carved altarpieces.While many little-known works are foregrounded, Susie Nash also presents new ways of viewing and understanding the more familiar, such as the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, by considering the social and economic context of their creation and reception.Throughout, Nash challenges the perception that Italy was the European leader in artistic innovation at this time, demonstrating forcefully that Northern art, and particularly that of the Southern Netherlands, dominated visual culture throughout Europe in this crucial period.

    Pitch Blackness, his first monograph, includes selections from this series and several others. The book begins with a deeply personal and interpretive re-telling of the senseless murder of young Songha Willis, the artist's cousin, who was robbed at gunpoint and murdered outside a nightclub in Philadelphia in 2000. It then charts Hank Willis Thomas' career as he grapples with the issues of grief, black-on-black violence in America and the ways in which corporate culture is complicit in the crises of black male identity. The concluding section presents his newest body of work, Unbranded--in which he examines advertising and media representation of African-Americans. With his characteristic pointedness and dark humor, Willis Thomas shows in Pitch Blackness why he is considered one of today's most compelling emerging artists. Essays by Rene de Guzman and Robin D. G. Kelley. Hank Willis Thomas, born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1976, received his BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA in Photography, along with an MA in Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He has exhibited in galleries and museums, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Leica Gallery, New York; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Willis Thomas is the first recipient of the Aperture West Book Prize, a new annual prize awarded by Aperture Foundation. He lives in Oakland, California.

    Blessed with an unerring eye, he tackles a myriad of subjects with wit, poetry, and perspicacity, examining and questioning the art before him while reveling in the power and beauty of language. His writing springs from a desire to be understood by all readers, and a determination to help them engage with art of every kind.Covering subjects drawn from a broad canvas of the history of art—from ancient Greece, Mexico, and Byzantium, through Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt, to Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and John Currin—the writings collected here seek out with precision and economy the essence of the individual artist or work under discussion, but they never lose sight of the bigger picture: What is beauty? What does it mean to be an American artist? What can the art we produce and admire tell us about ourselves?With an imaginative introduction—twenty questions, each one posed to Schjeldahl by a different artist or writer—this collection will appeal to anyone who considers the experience of art, and of writing on art, an invitation to a voyage.Coverage includes:     • large-scale exhibitions at leading institutions around the world     • shows at private galleries     • profiles of prominent members of the art world     • personal accounts of time spent with artists     • the influences of museum spaces on our experience of art

    Landscapes and portraits such as Cass, Central Otago, and Rutu have become national icons. But until now, Angus’s life has remained a mystery. In this fascinating book, Jill Trevelyan (editor of Toss Woollaston: A Life in Letters) paints a vivid picture of Rita Angus the person – curious and forthright, staunchly pacifist and feminist, and wholly dedicated to her art. Stunning artworks, personal photographs, and insightful letters help bring Angus’s colourful and complex story to life.

    Born in Tokyo in 1797, his talent became evident by the tender age of 12, when he became an apprentice to a famous print master. Starting out with vivid illustrations of cultural icons — including Kabuki actors and Japanese heroes — he moved on to a unique treatment of warrior prints, incorporating elements of dreams, omens, and daring feats that characterized his distinctive style. These dramatic eighteenth-century illustrations represent the pinnacle of his craft. One hundred and one full-color portraits of legendary samurai pulse with movement, passion, and remarkably fine detail. A must for collectors of Japanese art and a perfect first work for those who want to start their own collection, it includes brief captions and a new introduction.

    Their actions spared these magnificent pieces from the threat of destruction, first by the invading Soviets in 1979 and more recently by the Taliban. Exquisitely crafted in gold and ivory, the artifacts illustrate Afghanistan's key place at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, at the center of the ancient Silk Road-a rich heritage to be displayed at four major U.S. museums through 2009. Crowning this headline-making exhibition is a famous hoard of Bactrian gold, considered to be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. To help create the exhibit and book, archaeologist and National Geographic Society Fellow Fredrik T. Hiebert inventoried the artifacts at the request of the Afghan government. Gorgeously photographed and elegantly packaged, the collection shines in this official companion to the much anticipated and widely covered tour. For the eager audiences who will visit, and for legions of art and history lovers across the United States, Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures provides a beautiful, affordable keepsake, a handsome gift, and a rare opportunity to appreciate this matchless tradition of artistry and the steadfast human spirit that preserved it.

    James M. Goode canvasses more than 500 sculptural pieces, often overlooked by residents and visitors, and presents critical discussions and detailed histories of each work. The result is a graphic history of the cultural, political, and military contributions of America’s greatest leaders.Washington Sculpture revises and updates Goode’s classic 1974 book The Outdoor Sculpture of Washington, D.C., expanding its survey to include pieces found in nearby Maryland and Virginia, unusual cemetery sculpture, and monuments recently erected on the National Mall—the National WWII Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. Chapters explore the city's fourteen neighborhoods as well as the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Both a guide for visitors and a reference for serious historians, Washington Sculpture offers the most comprehensive examination of urban sculpture in the nation's capital.

    Often biomorphic or topographical in character, her large-scale abstract works utilize systematic arrangements of thousands or even millions of units. Visually evocative and perceptually seductive, her pieces are at once organic and highly structured. Donovan has been recognized for her commitment to process and her ability to discover how the inherent physical characteristics of an object might allow it to be transformed into art.Published in conjunction with a major solo exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, this book is the first to document Donovan's complete oeuvre, from her beginnings working in ink to her most recent pieces. Among the many works shown are Untitled (Plastic Cups), a 50-by-60-foot landscape of plastic cups; Haze, a 42-foot-long wall of over two million clear plastic drinking straws stacked like wood; and her three 40-inch cubes, one of steel pins, one of toothpicks, and one of shattered glass. An in-depth conversation between Donovan and Lawrence Weschler traces the artist's schooling, early career, and current work.

    Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practics. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities.

    Even Degas himself, notoriously misogynistic, invited Mary Cassatt to exhibit with him (she was the only American to do so); and Marie Bracquemond also exhibited at the Impressionist exhibitions of 1879, 1880 and 1886, despite the discouragement of her husband. All of these women practiced and supported Impressionism from its earliest days, when it was still a popular sport to deride it. Nonetheless, for Morisot, Gonzalès, Bracquemond and Cassatt, the chances of equivalent long-term recognition were predictably slim, and while their own individual oeuvres were too strong and too omnipresent in their own time to be entirely eradicated from the annals of art, they have rarely received due attention in the hands of subsequent commentators. This stunning 400-page compendium, published to accompany the important traveling exhibition which goes to San Francisco in the summer of 2008, corrects this longstanding oversight, presenting these pioneering painters alongside each other for the first time, reproducing their oil paintings, pastels, watercolors, drawings and etchings and offering a cogent rebuttal of familiar Impressionist narratives.

    The results are like no other medium--mysterious, deep, and translucent, with a glow that seems to emanate from within. It's an ancient technique that has recently been reborn, capturing the imagination of a new generation of painters who are adopting encaustic as their medium of choice. Embracing Encaustic will teach you how to paint with this fascinating medium using simple step-by-step instructions accompanied by full color photographs. Inside, you will find: - An overview of the tools and supplies you ll need to get started - Detailed instructions for mixing your own encaustic paint - The basic techniques you'll need to create an infinite number of unique styles - A gallery of work by notable encaustic painters, with information on how they created each piece - More than 90 full color photographs illustrating detailed techniques, tips, tricks, and examples of contemporary encaustic paintings - A directory of material suppliers For beginners and experienced encaustic artists alike, the book offers another gem a rare peek behind the curtain. The gallery section features the work of twenty-five notable painters who spill their secrets, describing in detail how they created the works on display. It s the next best thing to watching over their shoulders as they work.

    Sigmund Freud once said of Dali, "I never met anyone who was so thoroughly a Spaniard. What a fanatic!" Excursions into particular aspets of Dali's creative work, as well as a detailed timeline that places his biography in the historical and cultural context of the twentieth century, complete the portrait.

    Book by Shelton, Andrew

    From the powerful god Shiva, greatest of all yogis and most beautiful of all beings, to stone dancers twisting along temple walls, the body in Indian art is always richly adorned. "Alankara" (ornament) protects the body and makes it complete and attractive; to be unornamented is to invite misfortune.In "The Body Adorned," Vidya Dehejia, who has dedicated her career to the study of Indian art, draws on the literature of court poets, the hymns of saints and "acharyas," and verses from inscriptions to illuminate premodern India's unique treatment of the sculpted and painted form. She focuses on the coexistence of sacred and sensuous images within the common boundaries of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu "sacred spaces," redefining terms like "sacred" and "secular" in relation to Indian architecture. She also considers the paradox of passionate poetry, in which saints praised the sheer bodily beauty of the divine form, and nonsacred Rajput painted manuscripts, which freely inserted gods into the earthly realm of the courts.By juxtaposing visual and literary sources, Dehejia demonstrates the harmony between the sacred and the profane in classical Indian culture. Her synthesis of art, literature, and cultural materials not only generates an all-inclusive picture of the period but also revolutionizes our understanding of the cultural ethos of premodern India.

    Includes 9 quilt projects.Noted quilting authority Barbara Brackman has packed her book with historic photos, stories, and insights into the role of fabrics in everyday life. Making History is a compelling page-turner as well as a practical quilting book.

    Guggenheim Museum's major mid-career survey of Catherine Opie's work, is the first to gather all of the artist's key projects to date in a single volume. Opie is best known for her subtle but potent portraits of people from the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. In this definitive volume, each of Opie's series--among them Portraits, Freeways, Domestic, Icehouses and In and Around Home--is reproduced in full color plates alongside works that were not displayed in the exhibition, allowing for the most complete overview of this important Los Angeles artist's work to date. In addition, this volume features a lead essay by exhibition curator Jennifer Blessing, which surveys Opie's artistic career and its historical contexts; a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson, Chair of the Department of Art at UCLA; and a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores many concerns similar to Opie's. It also includes introductory essays on each of the artist's series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography, making it the primary source for future research on Opie's work. Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently Professor of Photography at UCLA. Opie's work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

    Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta were two halves of an idiosyncratic team—Claribel bold and assertive and Etta reflective and sensitive—who used the fortunes of their German Jewish immigrant family to seek out works that inspired and pleased them, regardless of public opinion and with only self-taught expertise.This richly illustrated biography documents their lives from a unique perspective: that of their great-niece, who wrote this book with her daughter. Ellen B. Hirschland and Nancy Hirschland Ramage delve into Claribel’s and Etta’s world, following the sisters through letters and personal stories as they travel to meet some of the artists whose works would turn their adjoining apartments into a gallery. They bought art by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne, as well as of Picasso and Matisse, whom they came to know well. The sisters’ experiences in Paris from 1901 through the 1920s provide an exceptional view of the bright artistic ferment in the city at that time. They were two Victorian women from Baltimore buying avant-garde masterpieces, attending salons with friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, and building a collection that would initially enrage the conservative people around them. Only with time would their keen eyes and unwavering taste prove them right.

    Since 1997, a programme of conservation and research has focused on these paintings, making possible their publication in this superbly illustrated book. Richard Parkinson includes all the known background history to the paintings, from Luxor to London, along with detailed descriptions of the paintings accompanied by stunning colour photographs. Some of the scenes include funerary offerings, a banquet, Nebamun viewing the produce of the estate, agricultural scenes, fishing and fowling in the marshes and Nebamun's garden, providing insights not just into the life of an Egyptian official, but also more generally into Egyptian culture and society.

    It presents a chronological and thematic survey that charts the artist's creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: drawings made from gunpowder fuses and explosive powders laid on paper and ignited; explosion events, documented by videos, photographs and preparatory drawings; large-scale installations; and social projects, wherein the artist works with local communities to create an art event or exhibition site, documented by photographs. Featuring works from the 1980s to the present, this volume illuminates Cai's significant formal and conceptual contributions to contemporary international art practices and social activism. Generously illustrated more than 368 pages, this volume includes essays by Alexandra Munroe, David Joselit, Miwon Kwon and Wang Hui--along with some 60 documented plate entries. It is the defining scholarly publication on the artist thus far.

    1390/95–1455), known as Fra Angelico. From the delicate altarpieces of his early career to the serene frescos in the monastery of San Marco in Florence and the many magnificent works he executed for the Popes in the Vatican, Fra Angelico’s paintings are here discussed in the context of the time and places in which they were created, and are beautifully reproduced in their true, glorious colours.

    This book offers the first critical exploration of the many creative genres of this self-taught artist, who first came to notice in the 1950s and 1960s but has only recently been recognized by major museums.Lavishly illustrated with more than 300 full-colour reproductions and packaged with an original documentary DVD illuminating fascinating aspects of his life and art, this book examines Castle's drawings, colour-wash works, idiosyncratic cardboard and paper constructions, and word, sign, and symbol pieces. As a child he developed his favourite medium and method of working, mixing stove soot with saliva and applying this "ink" with sharpened sticks and cotton wads to such found materials as product packaging and discarded paper. These everyday materials have given his works a singular, immediate, and appealing natural quality.This engaging volume considers Castle's remarkable art from a variety of perspectives, examining his life, modes of depiction, working methods and materials, and the "visual poetry" of his text works.

    Monet's dazzling depictions of flowers, sunsets, fields, and oceans, in which line and shape are suggested through pure color, changed the way we perceive our natural surroundings. His numerous series, in which he depicts the same object at varying times of the day and in different seasons, pushed the limits of representational art. His final series of water lilies are considered to have ushered in the abstract movement of the twentieth century. Overflowing with images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details, allowing every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre to be appreciated. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading.

     After more than fifteen years of marriage to a fellow artist and the birth of two daughters, Merian left her husband. She began to support herself by selling watercolors of insects, fruit, and flowers, eventually establishing an art business in Amsterdam with her daughters, Johanna Helen and Dorothea Maria. Merian's innovative compositional style--displaying the life cycle of an insect against the background of its host plant--developed out of her own careful and painstakingly recorded observations of insect metamorphoses. Ella Rietsma is the first author to attempt to separate Merian's work from that of her two daughters, who collaborated extensively with their mother. Writing in a lively, accessible style, Reitsma includes newly discovered drawings and fresh biographical details. This book coincides with an exhibition of Merian's work on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 10 through August 31, 2008.

    Presented as 35 loose-leaf Elephant folio-sized color prints as well as a booklet including an introduction and the original texts of the 31 botanical plates TASCHEN's Temple of Flora consists of the following, packaged in a presentation case: a 44-page booklet including author Werner Dressend????rfer's introduction as well as the texts of the 31 botanical plates 33 loose-leaf Elephant folio-sized color prints for browsing or framing

    Clay may start out soft, but in the right hands it can deliver a hard blow. From British Toby Jugs to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain to a wall of gruesome tiles that forms a portrait of President George W. Bush, ceramic art has the power to provoke and subvert.Confrontational Ceramics surveys the work of contemporary sculptors, potters, and mixed media artists who have turned the ancient medium of clay into an articulate vehicle for political and social commentary. Educator and curator Judith S. Schwartz gathers the works of more than two hundred artists from thirty different countries into a glossy full-color overview of the radical ceramics scene. Provocative pieces from makers such as Grayson Perry, Robert Arneson, Richard Notkin, Howard Kottler, as well as newer talents, address personal, social, and geopolitical injustices from rape to racism. In their own words, these bold artists discuss the outrage behind their outrageous works. Schwartz provides historical context for current and late twentieth-century protest in the form of ceramics. She also places the artists within thematic groupings: war and politics, the social and human condition, gender issues, the environment, and popular and material culture.Filled with subtle satire, garish jests, grotesque shock treatments, and moving testaments, Confrontational Ceramics is a radical departure from conventional coffee-table ceramics books on decorative housewares or formal abstractions. This art book will amuse, inspire, and possibly offend art historians, ceramics collectors, and anyone with an eye for the outlandish.

    Old Masters such as Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and countless others rendered these stirring, poignant, bloodthirsty, and even erotic tales on panel or canvas, in the process creating a familiar way of visualizing our collective imagination.

    Louvre: 400 Masterpieces showcases a selection of works from this great institution, from the most famous—the Venus de Milo and Mona Lisa—to lesser-known gems.  With a foreword by the institution’s director, Henri Loyrette, the book is organized according to the museum’s eight departments: Near Eastern Antiquities; Egyptian Antiquities; Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities; Islamic Art; Sculptures; Decorative Arts; Paintings; and Prints and Drawings. The ninth and final chapter tells the history of this one time imperial palace as seen through its architecture. With its appealing format and carefully selected images, many newly photographed, Louvre: 400 Masterpieces is the perfect book for museum visitors, art lovers, and Francophiles.

    Now, collected in Frazetta, The Definitive Reference, are essays and illustrated data in a one-of-a-kind volume tracing the entire arc of Frazetta's career with more than 800 of his unforgettable images. From his early 1950s comics, to Tarzan, Pellucidar, and John Carter of Mars book covers; to his 1960s monster mags, Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella; to his major movie posters, including After the Fox and What's New Pussycat; to, of course, his revolutionary Conan paintings--it's all here. Frazetta overflows with fantastic images, insightful commentary, and the most complete index of artwork ever compiled on this fantastic icon.

    Three levels of review including extended image captions, "The Big Picture" overviews at the end of every chapter, and a special global timeline will help you study for your exams. You'll also find materials that will help you master the key topics quickly in the ArtStudy Online (a free interactive study guide that includes flash cards of images and quizzes).

    This title contains works spanning the legendary and prolific artist's 20-year career, including many of his self-portraits, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and exhibition posters.

    "It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” Through an innovative manner of handling paint, a group of American artists around 1900 created deceptively simple canvases that convey images of shimmering transience, visions suggested rather than delineated. Focusing on this singular aesthetic characteristic—softness—Like Breath on Glass explores this painterly phenomenon through works by fifteen important artists, including Whistler, George Inness, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, John Twachtman, and Edward Steichen. Leading scholars in American art consider a wide variety of topics: the very different motives—technical, social, religious, and scientific—that prompted these artists in their experimentation; their materials; their techniques for creating the appearance of effortlessness; period notions of “the vague” through art and writing; and the revival of "painting softly" in the 1950s and 1960s. This beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated catalogue highlights a surprisingly understudied yet important aspect of American cultural and painterly achievement.

    Among the most remarkable of all albums ever created are those made in the years 1600-1657 for the emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The Mughal dynasty ruled India for more than three centuries, but the period of greatest artistic production was that of these two great emperors, and the albums of paintings and calligraphy (called muraqqa' in Persian), that they assembled now serve as a window to understanding the history and culture of this important period of Indian history. The paintings in the albums include formal (often symbolic) portraits of the emperors themselves, depictions of members of the royal family in relaxed private settings, portraits of courtiers, Sufi saints and mystics, genre scenes, and natural history subjects. This lavishly-illustrated, color catalogue, contains essays by Elaine Wright, Curator of the Islamic Collections, Chester Beatty Library, Wheeler Thackston, Lecturer, Harvard University, Susan Stronge, Curator Asia Department, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Steven Cohen, Textile Specialist, Independent Scholar and Author, London. Exhibition Itinerary The exhibition premieres at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (May 3 - August 3, 2008). Subsequent venues include the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan (August 23 - November 16, 2008); the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawai'i (December 17, 2008 - March 1, 2009); the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (March 21 - June 14, 2009); and the Denver Art Museum, Colorado (July 4 - September 27, 2009).

    Starting in the 1930s, the modern ranch house took the country by storm, migrating from California to Arizona, and Cliff May was the chief proponent of this style. His long, low designs managed to be both modern and traditional, celebrating a casually elegant, indoor-outdoor lifestyle, and drawing inspiration from California’s Spanish Mexican ranchos while embracing the latest technological gadgetry. With their low profile, large carports and garages, patios, and expansive horizontality, May’s modern ranch houses became synonymous with the nascent California lifestyle and were enthusiastically promoted by the popular Sunset magazine throughout the U.S. He personally designed and built more than 1,000 homes and commercial buildings, and over 18,000 designs are attributed to his office, including the Robert Mondavi Winery and the offices of Sunset.Complete with new color photography, Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House celebrates the best of May’s work, from his start building homes during the Depression to how he evolved a brand of regional modernity that fulfilled the public’s desire for informal living in the 1950s and 1960s.

    America's icon Teddy Roosevelt battles Mayan gods and Martians in Creatures to protect his country and the world. Enter Swamp Demon as the battle against good and evil wages on in the land of Iparsia, and two horror classics collide toe-to-toe in Dracula Meets the Wolfman! All brought to life by some of the industries' top creators, along with new, never-before-printed bonus material.

    Using a series of die-cut windows, the book invites the reader to admire and explore twenty of the most significant masterpieces of the Impressionist movement including Degas' The Dancing Class and Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party from a variety of angles and viewpoints.

    It chronicles the tumultuous history of Castile in the wake of the Christian capture of the Islamic city of Tulaytula, now Toledo, in the eleventh century and traces the development of Castilian culture as it was forged in the new intimacy of Christians with the Muslims and Jews they had overcome. The authors paint a portrait of the culture through its arts, architecture, poetry and prose, uniquely combining literary and visual arts. Concentrating on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the book reveals the extent to which Castilian identity is deeply rooted in the experience of confrontation, interaction, and at times union with Hebrew and Arabic cultures during the first centuries of its creation. Abundantly illustrated, the volume serves as a splendid souvenir of southern Spain; beautifully written, it illuminates a culture deeply enriched by others.

    It explores the diverse ways artists from the early 20th century, beginning with Kandinsky, through the 1960s used abstraction to express artistic ideas.

    Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival.Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories. His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists—the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

    A comprehensive look at emerging artists from one of the most exciting mediums in the fine art world today, that profiles some of the most daring and innovative examples of textiles in fine art.

    Divided into five themes, Collage is lavishly illustrated with works by both collage 'masters', such as Picasso, Georges Braque, Kurt Schwitters and Richard Hamilton, as well as those by contemporary artists who are finding new ways to define the medium. As a result, this volume presents a rich history that serves both as a context in which to consider contemporary developments in collage as well as the implications for future practice.

    The firm was also a prime mover in the realm of residential design, with Stanford White as its visionary head. As an architect of opulent houses—in Newport, Rhode Island, along the Hudson, on the Long Island Gold Coast, and elsewhere—Stanford White had few peers. His genius for this form is expressed nowhere more wonderfully than in such personal masterpieces as his country home Box Hill and his city home in Gramercy Park. Along with residential commissions for such eminent American families as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Pulitzers, Paynes, and Whitneys, Stanford White lent his eye and hand to New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Brooklyn Museum, The American Academy in Rome, and the Boston Public Library, as well as many diverse commissions, including social clubs, public buildings, churches, monuments, university buildings, and many other forms, each of which is represented in this landmark volume.

    But the theory of perspective that changed the course of Western art originated elsewhere-it was formulated in Baghdad by the eleventh-century mathematician Ibn al Haithan, known in the West as Alhazen. Using the metaphor of the mutual gaze, or exchanged glances, Hans Belting-preeminent historian and theorist of medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary art-narrates the historical encounter between science and art, between Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence, that has had a lasting effect on the culture of the West.In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial theory (in Europe). How could geometrical abstraction be reconceived as a theory for making pictures? During the Middle Ages, Arab mathematics, free from religious discourse, gave rise to a theory of perspective that, later in the West, was transformed into art when European painters adopted the human gaze as their focal point. In the Islamic world, where theology and the visual arts remained closely intertwined, the science of perspective did not become the cornerstone of Islamic art. Florence and Baghdad addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?

    A to Z magazine-style entries include short biographies, exhibition history and bibliographical information, and images of important recent work. The illustrated appendix features names and contact information for the galleries representing the artists featured as well as primary market prices and examples of auction results. Think of this tome as a global go-round of the world's most influential galleries: a truly invaluable, invigorating, and intense experience.

    A compilation of Angolan music is included in CD format.Marissa J. Moorman presents a social and cultural history of the relationship between Angolan culture and politics. She argues that it was in and through popular urban music, produced mainly in the musseques (urban shantytowns) of the capital city, Luanda, that Angolans forged the nation and developed expectations about nationalism. Through careful archival work and extensive interviews with musicians and those who attended performances in bars, community centers, and cinemas, Moorman explores the ways in which the urban poor imagined the nation.The spread of radio technology and the establishment of a recording industry in the early 1970s reterritorialized an urban-produced sound and cultural ethos by transporting music throughout the country. When the formerly exiled independent movements returned to Angola in 1975, they found a population receptive to their nationalist message but with different expectations about the promises of independence. In producing and consuming music, Angolans formed a new image of independence and nationalist politics.

    Through eighty-three color plates, nineteen black-and-white illustrations, and six thematic essays, the collection examines depictions of plantation structures, plantation views, and related slave imagery and art in the context of the American landscape tradition, addressing the impact of these works on race relations in the United States. Created by artists as diverse as Thomas Coram, Louis R�my Mignot, Dave The Potter Drake, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Thomas Hart Benton, Hale Woodruff, Aaron Douglas, Juan Logan, Joyce Scott, Carrie Mae Weems, Radcliffe Bailey, and Kara Walker, the wide range of objects discussed includes paintings, drawings, photographs, statuary, ceramics, and items of folk art.A genre predominantly tied to the American South, the plantation view has received slight attention in the study of American landscape art. Regarded by art historians as derivative of the early-eighteenth-century British estate view, the plantation image straddles the aesthetic boundary between topographical depiction and landscape painting. In recent years, however, plantation views have increasingly attracted the attention of social and cultural historians who have identified the genre as a rich source for exploring themes of wealth, power, race, memory, nostalgia, and conflict. Landscape of Slavery provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetic motives and social uses of this art in the shaping of Southern history and culture. The contributors analyze depictions of white dominion, Southern affluence, and the idealizing nostalgia of the post-Civil War era as well as the black aesthetic that has developed as a dissident counterpoint to this tradition.Serving as a companion to a traveling exhibit of the same name, the volume includes a foreword by Todd D. Smith, executive director of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina; an introduction by editor and chief curator Angela D. Mack; and essays by John Michael Vlach, Roberta Sokolitz, Leslie King-Hammond, Maurie D. McInnis, Alexis L. Boylan, and Michael D. Harris.

    Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period.The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions.First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings.Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known.A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.

    This compelling volume examines objects from Afghanistan's antiquity—stone and terracotta architecture and sculpture, coins, ivories, and encrusted gold jewelry—as it leads us through the rich background of this fascinating country. Expert perspectives on archaeology, art history, and material culture can be found in ten essays, originally presented at a symposium at the Metropolitan Museum, of superb finds from Aï Khanum, Begram, and Tillya Tepe. Illustrated with over 100 reproductions, these essays explore such issues as the Hellenic presence in Bactria; relations between nomadic and sedentary populations; contacts with Rome, Iran, China, and India; and the creation of unique Bactrian styles of expression.

    With the aid of 200 images, this book offers for the first time a wide-ranging survey of this entire process as well as the changing preoccupations of collectors.

    In Subject to Display, Jennifer Gonz�lez offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes Gonz�lez, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present.All five of the American installation artists Gonz�lez considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as "artifacts" and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.

    He was born Georg Ehrenfried Groß in Berlin, but changed his name in 1916 out of a romantic enthusiasm for America. Anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany in 1932, and in 1933 was invited to teach at the Art Students League of New York, where he would teach intermittently until 1955. Over 500 illustrations, drawings, and paintings in this book document the entire output of the artist’s German and American years, including drawings spanning from when the artist was the age of fifteen to his paintings made during his U.S. period. Also included are sketches of stage designs he created between 1919–1954 for theatre pieces by Bernard Shaw, Iwan Goll, Georg Kaiser, Paul Zech, and Jaroslav Kaek, as well as numerous collages. The volume is complete with unpublished photographs from the painter’s private life and two essays by Enrico Crispolti and Philippe Dagen.

    Portrayed alternately as a middle-class domestic utopia and a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity--with manicured suburban lawns and the inchoate darkness that lurks just beneath the surface--these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations. Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes is the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures and video from more than 30 artists and architects, including Christopher Ballantyne, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Gregory Crewdson, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Dan Graham and Larry Sultan, Worlds Away demonstrates the catalytic role of the American suburb in the creation of new art and prospective architecture. Conceived as a revisionist and even contrarian take on the conventional wisdom surrounding suburban life, the catalogue features new essays and seminal writings by John Archer, Robert Beuka, Robert Breugmann, David Brooks, Beatriz Colomina, Malcolm Gladwell and others, as well as a lexicon of suburban neologisms.

    This trend was most notably incarnated in the famous Case Study House Program, which was championed by the era's leading American journal, Arts & Architecture. Focusing not only on architecture but also design, art, music, politics, and social issues, A&A was an ambitious and groundbreaking publication, largely thanks to the inspiration of John Entenza, who ran the magazine for over two decades until David Travers became publisher in 1962. The era's greatest architects were featured in A&A, including Neutra, Schindler, Saarinen, Ellwood, Lautner, Eames, and Koenig.

    She became an artist. She was not alone. Forced to become self-supporting by financial panics and civil war, thousands of young women moved to New York City between 1850 and 1880 to pursue careers as professional artists. Many of them trained with masters at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, where they were imbued with the Unity of Art ideal, an aesthetic ideology that made no distinction between fine and applied arts or male and female abilities. These women became painters, designers, illustrators, engravers, colorists, and art teachers. They were encouraged by some of the era's best-known figures, among them Tribune editor Horace Greeley and mechanic/philanthropist Peter Cooper, who blamed the poverty and dependence of both women and workers on the separation of mental and manual labor in industrial society. The most acclaimed artists among them owed their success to New York's conspicuously egalitarian art institutions and the rise of the illustrated press. Yet within a generation their names, accomplishments, and the aesthetic ideal that guided them virtually disappeared from the history of American art.Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York recaptures the unfamiliar cultural landscape in which spirited young women, daring social reformers, and radical artisans succeeded in reuniting art and industry. In this interdisciplinary study, April F. Masten situates the aspirations and experience of these forgotten women artists, and the value of art work itself, at the heart of the capitalist transformation of American society.

    1955) has produced an outstanding body of work in multiple mediums—drawings, animations, sculptures, theater and stage design—all of which trace the fraught political and cultural history of South Africa. This book is the first to explore Kentridge’s extraordinary new series of seventeen large-scale tapestries, created under his artistic direction by a team of South African weavers between 2001 and 2007. The tapestries depict shadowy figures that resonate with his collages of itinerant characters set against the weblike backgrounds of 19th-century maps of Europe and Johannesburg. A distinguished group of authors relate the tapestries to the rest of Kentridge’s multifaceted oeuvre, underline the centrality of drawing in his practice, and illuminate the connection between the tapestries and South African geography and history. Together they contribute to an understanding of Kentridge’s tapestries as a precise critical examination of issues surrounding memory and conflict in the context of societies that, while rife with violence, strive for peace and reconciliation.

    Every year millions of people come to see Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, which is the largest fresco painting on earth in the holiest of Christianity's chapels; yet there is not one single Christian image in this vast, magnificent artwork.The Sistine Secrets tells the fascinating story of how Michelangelo embedded messages of brotherhood, tolerance, and freethinking in his painting to encourage "fellow travelers" to challenge the repressive Roman Catholic Church of his time."Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language."—from the PrefaceBlech and Doliner reveal what Michelangelo meant in the angelic representations that brilliantly mocked his papal patron, how he managed to sneak unorthodox heresies into his ostensibly pious portrayals, and how he was able to fulfill his lifelong ambition to bridge the wisdom of science with the strictures of faith. The Sistine Secrets unearths secrets that have remained hidden in plain sight for centuries.

    Comprehensive preparation for the AP Art History test includes: A diagnostic test and two full-length model tests with answers and explanations Art history review describes major artists and art movements Additional chapters on art beyond the European tradition Multiple-choice questions and practice essays follow every chapter

    Wax is tactile, ambiguous, and mesmerizing, confounding viewers and scholars alike. It can approximate flesh with astonishing realism and has been used to create uncanny human simulacra since ancient times—from phallic amulets offered to heal distressing conditions and life-size votive images crammed inside candlelit churches by the faithful, to exquisitely detailed anatomical specimens used for training doctors and Medardo Rosso’s “melting” portraits. The critical history of wax, however, is fraught with gaps and controversies. After Giorgio Vasari, the subject of wax sculpture was abandoned by art historians; in the twentieth century it once again sparked intellectual interest, only soon to vanish. The authors of the eight essays in Ephemeral Bodies—including the first English translation of Julius von Schlosser’s seminal “History of Portraiture in Wax” (1910–11)—break new ground as they explore wax reproductions of the body or body parts and assess their conceptual ambiguity, material impermanence, and implications for the history of Western art.

    Though he remained in Switzerland for his entire life, his international reputation has been growing in the past several decades, beginning with a traveling retrospective in the early 1970s. Hodler, who kept up on the latest movements brewing in Paris, is considered a Symbolist who tempered that movement's flights of fancy with Realism. He is regarded as a bridge between the Modern period and the impulses of mid-1800s Realism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau. As may be expected with such a range of influences at the artist's disposal, Hodler's style fluctuated widely throughout his career. His most well known painting may be "The Woodcutter" (1908), which was commissioned as an illustration for the Swiss 50-franc note. "The Woodcutter" is a strange and engaging mixture of Expressionism--the subject is depicted mid-chop in vigorous brush strokes--and Symbolism, as the ghostly landscape behind the figure supports an odd, bright blue, orb-like cloud. More than two decades since his last retrospective, this fresh and extensive assessment of Hodler's paintings finds much new territory to uncover.

    His activities as a painter, printmaker, and book illustrator reveal a distinctly individual style, and his skill in many different media helped him to create a highly successful workshop.Financially more successful than his contemporary Albrecht Durer, Cranach's influence on the development of German painting was profound. His outstanding gifts are evident not only in his portrayal of landscape, animals, and the female nude, but also in devotional paintings and portraiture, in his later work as chief propagandist of the Protestant cause, and in his inventive treatments of biblical and mythological subjects.Published to accompany a major traveling exhibition, this handsome publication stimulates our appreciation of the artist by bringing together works of many different themes, both sacred and profane, notable for their originality. Superbly illustrated throughout, the book contains seven insightful essays by leading authorities.

    Glistening dew drops on flower petals, contorted reflections of light on glass goblets and silver dishes, candied sweets heaped up in Chinese porcelain, the textures of fur, cloth, metal and bone--the rendering of such objects demands of an artist not only skill but an instinct for the thingness of things. Chardin, for example, was so gifted in this respect that certain admirers have been known to literally lick his paintings. However, skill, as always, is not the whole story: "One uses color but one paints with feelings," he once explained to a colleague hoping for tips on technique. For the viewer, the still life demands no extensive training in art theory, since its endless rewards are plain to the eye and mind--excepting the obvious symbolism that attends such items as skulls or fallen petals. This volume boasts a splendid selection of works by such masters of the genre as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Georg Flegel, Sebastian Stoskopff, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Abraham Mignon and Chardin, culled from first-class collections from the St�del Museum in Frankfurt, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt.

    From the processualist study of settlement patterns to the phenomenologist’s experience of the natural world, from human impact on past environments to the environment’s impact on human thought, action, and interaction, the term has been used. In this volume, for the first time, over 80 archaeologists from three continents attempt a comprehensive definition of the ideas and practices of landscape archaeology, covering the theoretical and the practical, the research and conservation, and encasing the term in a global framework. As a basic reference volume for landscape archaeology, this volume will be the benchmark for decades to come. All royalties on this Handbook are donated to the World Archaeological Congress.

    This fascinating book is the first to focus on artwork produced from the 1950s to the 1970s, when Mao Zedong was in leadership, and argues that important contributions were made during this period that require fuller consideration in Chinese art history, especially with relevance to the contemporary world.  Previously, historians have tended to dismiss the art of the Cultural Revolution as pure propaganda. The authors of this volume (historians, art historians, and artists) argue that while much art produced during this time was infused with politics, and individual creativity and displays of free thought were sometimes stifled and even punished, it is short sighted to overlook the aesthetic sophistication, diversity, and accessibility of much of the imagery.  Bringing together more than 200 extraordinary artworks, including oil paintings, ink scroll paintings, artist sketchbooks, posters, and objects from daily life, as well as primary documentation that has not been published outside of China or seen since the mid-20th century, this invaluable volume sheds new light on one of the most controversial and critical periods in history.

    His extremely private life, his supposed use of a camera obscura, and the fact that his teacher remains unidentified have, until recently, encouraged a view of the “Sphinx of Delft” as an isolated genius shrouded in an air of mystery. Walter Liedtke’s new monograph reveals Vermeer’s life to be well-documented and places his work in the context of the Delft school and of Delft society as a whole. Vermeer’s many admirers will relish Liedtke’s exploration of subtleties of meaning and refinements of technique and style. Alongside the most historical approach to Vermeer to date, the annotated color catalogue of Vermeer’s complete paintings reveals a master whose rare sensibility may be described but not explained.

    His reign was a time of cultural and political vitality for the Spanish monarchy, as the king and his court, having successfully maintained a peaceful foreign policy in Europe (the "Pax Hispanica"), ushered in a style of grandeur where fabulous gala celebrations, building campaigns, picture collecting, recreation and travel were the order of the day. Accordingly, the art of this period flourished, witnessing the birth of a naturalistic style that was variously reflected in a new attention to detail and spatiality in court portraiture, the thriving of still life, the humanizing of saints and the development of polychrome sculpture. Focusing on the careers of the mature El Greco and the young Velazquez, which bookend this exciting period of resurgent court culture, this volume also investigates the works of lesser-known but highly talented artists who exerted a critical influence on the development of Spanish painting. Essays by several noted scholars provide indispensable perspectives on the historical, literary, cultural and religious context in which these artists lived. The product of 20 years of research and illustrated with a sumptuousness befitting its subject, El Greco to Velazquez is sure to become a standard reference for enthusiasts of Spanish art.

    Like Emerson, they emphasized the beauty of Mother Nature and humankind's harmony with her, photographing the land in all its seasons. Among the photographers whose work is included are Edward Curtis, Rudolf Eickemeyer, Alfred Stieglitz, and Doris Ulman.

    This title in the Basic Art series features a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, cultural and historical importance, illustrations from the artist, and more.

    Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting.  Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius.  Her Paris home was the leading salon for artists and writers between the Wars.  Picasso painted Stein's portrait and they became firm friends. Their correspondence extends across a time of extraordinary social and political change, between 1906 and 1944, effectively from the Belle Epoque to the German Occupation of the Second World War.  Both wrote in French -- a language neither ever entirely mastered. Written as letters, cards and scribbled notes, their intimate correspondence touches lightly on both the weighty and the everyday -- holidays, money, dinner invitations, art, family, lovers, travel arrangements, how work goes, or the war. The correspondence has been carefully edited and is presented by period, each introduced with an outline of significant personal and historical events of the time.  Explanatory notes to the letters are rich in background detail.  The volume also features photographs, facsimiles of postcards and letters as well as sketches, drawings and paintings by Picasso.

    The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia offers a superb introductionto the rich artistic traditions of these two regions, traditions that have had a considerable impact on modern western art through the influence of artists such as Gauguin. After an introduction to Polynesian and Micronesian art separately, the book focuses on the artistic types, styles, andconcepts shared by the two island groups, thereby placing each in its wider cultural context. From the textiles of Tonga to the canoes of Tahiti, Adrienne Kaeppler sheds light on religious and sacred rituals and objects, carving, architecture, tattooing, personal ornaments, basket-making, clothing, textiles, fashion, the oral arts, dance, music and musical instruments--even canoe-construction--to provide the ultimate introduction to these rich and vibrant cultures. Each chapter begins with a quote from an indigenous person from one of the island areas covered in the book and features bothhistoric and contemporary works of art. A timeline for migration into the Pacific includes the latest information from archaeology, as well as the influx of explorers and missionaries and important exhibitions and other artistic events. With more than one hundred illustrations--most in fullcolor--this volume offers a stimulating and insightful account of two dynamic artistic cultures.

    They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and postmodernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents, as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, postmodernity, globalization, and decolonization are still relevant or useful. Including twenty essays and seventy-seven images, Antinomies of Art and Culture is a wide-ranging yet incisive inquiry into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment.In the volume’s introduction the theorist Terry Smith argues that predictions that postmodernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated. Smith suggests that the various situations of decolonized Africa, post-Soviet Europe, contemporary China, the conflicted Middle East, and an uncertain United States might be better characterized in terms of their “contemporaneity,” a concept which captures the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all currently competing universalisms. Essays range from Antonio Negri’s analysis of contemporaneity in light of the concept of multitude to Okwui Enwezor’s argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss’s defense of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay’s characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume’s centerpiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard’s Analogue project. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind.Contributors: Monica Amor, Nancy Condee, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Geeta Kapur, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Zoe Leonard, Lev Manovich, James Meyer, Gao Minglu, Helen Molesworth, Antonio Negri, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Nikos Papastergiadis, Colin Richards, Suely Rolnik, Terry Smith, McKenzie Wark

    But since 2006, when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter bought and refurbished the restaurant, it has also been one of the most sought after destinations in the city. And while we can’t guarantee you a reservation there, we can bring you the wonderful, witty mural by Edward Sorel that graces its walls. Sorel--whose caricatures and drawings regularly appear in The New Yorker and on its cover--chose forty Greenwich Village greats from the past 150 years to cavort in bacchanalian splendor. Each of the 40 makes a solo appearance in these pages alongside a charming, telling vignette of his or her life by Dorothy Gallagher, then appears in a foldout of the entire mural at the back of the book. Here you will find Walt Whitman being attacked by a ferocious Truman Capote butterfly; Jane Jacobs, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Willa Cather playing ring-around the rosy; those famous denizens of the White Horse Tavern, Dylan Thomas--who breakfasted on beer and lunched on brandy--and Jack Kerouac, typing his long roll of a novel. Anais Nin appears nude, which, Gallagher points out, was her usual state. Norman Mailer admires himself in a reflecting pond. Here, too, are Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jackson Pollack and James Baldwin, Thelonius Monk, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, Andy Warhol and Fran Lebowitz, Margaret Sanger, Marlon Brando, and many others. The Mural at the Waverly Inn is an enduring delight to treasure and to give.

    Monet's landscapes, Manet's genre scenes, Degas' dancers, Renoir's portraits are presented along with the works of European and American artists who eagerly set about exploring the new paths suggested by the French Impressionists.

    Sailing in a late nineteenth-century yawl, his journey starts in Venice and finishes in Istanbul. Along the way he takes in spectacular ruins, like the Acropolis in Athens and the Lycian Tombs in Turkey; sacred sites like the monasteries of Mount Athos and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul; and beautiful Dubrovnik (destroyed and rebuilt in the last decade). Ancient history and bygone legends intertwine as Francesco visits these wonderful ancient sites, bringing the past vividly to life, and taking readers on a thrilling cultural odyssey. Beautifully illustrated throughout, this book will be a must for fans of Francesco everywhere.

    A fascinating historicakl overview of individual worldwide masterpieces (250) with color photograph & description of each one

    The book explores new developments in English painting of this period, focusing on the early work of Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, Albert Moore, Edward Poynter, Simeon Solomon, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as on paintings by Frederick Sandys and the older G. F. Watts, and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite colleagues Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Allen Staley argues that engagement in the decorative arts, particularly by Burne-Jones, Moore, and Poynter at the outset of their careers, led to a transcending of traditional expectations of painting, making abstract formal qualities, or beauty for beauty's sake, the main goal. Rather than being about what it depicts, the painting itself becomes its own subject. The New Painting of the 1860s examines the interplay among the artists and the shared ambitions underlying their works, giving impetus to what would soon come to be known as the Aesthetic Movement.

    Nearly two hundred works, drawn from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland and the British Museum, by artists including Gainsborough, Ramsay, Wilkie and Lawrence, are illustrated and catalogued within thematic sections.

    Lisa Monnas offers a masterly evaluation of these paintings as source material for classifying surviving textiles, giving particular attention to the identification of historic textile types and their weave structure.Monnas examines a wide range of subjects, including silk as a marker of social status, the material possessions of artists and their ownership of textiles as props, the involvement of painters in silk design, and the repetition and transfer of patterns. She considers the evidence of paintings not only for the veracity with which the silks are depicted but also for their value as a historic source concerning the use of fabrics.

    He was best known for being a modernist activist, an avant-garde artist, an essayist and novelist. But he was also a remarkable portrait painter whose works bristle with the combined energy and charisma of maker and subject. This catalogue to the British National Portrait Gallery exhibition of Lewis's portraits presents a collection of work that has never before been exhibited (or published) together.Whilst Lewis completed a number of commissioned portraits, his best works are those he created of his artistic peers: James Joyce, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound, Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot and Naomi Michison to name a few. The majority of these works are presented here and all demonstrate Lewis's resolutely non-naturalistic, visually complex style.

    Art was seen as a teaching tool with visual beauty as its medium, and Thomas Holloway sought out only the best examples, regardless of cost, to enhance the women’s college he founded in 1879. Included in this lavishly illustrated exhibition catalog are scenes of contemporary life, historical events, landscapes, animal studies, and marine subjects.

    Like Marcel Broodthaers and Susan Hiller, Bloom has a creative attraction toward taxonomy and museology: the installation "Greed" (1988), for instance, is comprised of a chair, an empty frame and a photograph of a museum gallery with a seated guard. An example of one of her own collections is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings for which Bloom redesigned all of the book covers, referring both to herself and Nabokov as collectors (he obsessively collected editions of his own books) and in the process interposing herself as artist. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations to add new elements, resisting and upsetting the orderliness of a conventional artistic chronology. The Collections of Barbara Bloom includes essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman and expands a project developed as part of Bloom's Wexner Art Center Residency Award in 1998.Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Barbara Bloom is a renowned conceptual artist whose intricately crafted installations and witty artist's books have been exhibited internationally. She attended Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, and studied with John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. She has had one-person shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London (1990), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1996), and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). She lives in New York City.