Best of
Art-History

2010

Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist


Phil Baker - 2010
    This biography charts the rise and fall and rise again of British art's darkest star.

Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations


Philip Guston - 2010
    Over the course of his life, Guston’s wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art—from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston’s voice—as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

Pre-Raphaelites


Heather Birchall - 2010
    Fascinated by the romantic aspects of medieval culture and the vivid, jewel-like colors of Quattrocento art, the movement abhored the Classical poses and composition of Raphael and those influenced by him—hence the group's name—and the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the original Pre-Raphaelites were joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form a seven-member "brotherhood". Its influence on many later British artists was extensive, and Rossetti's work is now seen as a precursor of the wider European Symbolist movement. This book examines the group's emergence, development, influence, and subsequent demise.About the Series: 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 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

Michael Kenna: Images of the Seventh Day


Sandro Parmiggiani - 2010
    Kenna’s photographs captivate viewers through their silent drama and magnetism: rather than being accurate descriptions of a place, the photographer seems interested in capturing the invisible lines which enclose space, and in so doing arousing a viewer’s imagination and reverie. This catalog showcases 290 black-and-white photographs: 200 trace the artist’s career, from early 1970s images shot in England, to the photographs of the following three decades, which result from travels and commissions in every continent throughout the world; 35 record Venice’s everlasting appeal; 20 reflect one of Kenna’s most important jobs, that of recording the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths


Barry Walker - 2010
    Neel (1900–1984) was a portrait painter at a time when this was traditionally the role of a male artist. After ascending to prominence in the 1960s as the feminist movement gained momentum, she has remained an iconic figure in the history of American painting.A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel often painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and Meyer Shapiro, delving into personalities and idiosyncrasies with a rare frankness. Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neel’s range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artist’s early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neel’s style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career.

Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit


Sally Mann - 2010
    Throughout her career, Mann has fearlessly pushed her exploration of the human form, tackling often difficult subject matter and making unapologetically sensual images that are simultaneously bold and lyrical. This beautifully produced publication includes Mann's earliest platinum prints from the late 1970s, Polaroid still lifes, early color work of her children, haunting landscape images, recent self-portraits and nude studies of her husband. These series document Mann's interest in the body as principal subject, with the associated issues of vulnerability and mortality lending an elegiac note to her images. In bringing them together, author and curator John Ravenal examines the varied ways in which Mann's experimental approach, including ambrotypes and gelatin-silver prints made from collodian wet-plate negatives, moves her subjects from the corporeal to the ethereal. Ravenal also supplies a comprehensive introduction as well as individual entries on each series, and essays by David Levi Strauss ("Eros, Psyche, and the Mendacity of Photography") and Anne Wilkes Tucker ("Living Memory") add different, but equally illuminating perspectives to this work. Sally Mann: The Flesh and The Spirit is a must for any serious library of photographic literature, students, scholars, collectors and others interested in her work.Sally Mann (born 1951) is one of America's most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Mann's many books include What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), and the Aperture titles At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994) and Proud Flesh (2009). She lives in Lexington, Virginia.

New Topographics


Britt Salvesen - 2010
    Held at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, in January 1975, it was curated by William Jenkins, who brought together ten contemporary photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel, Jr. Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the show effectively gave a name to a movement or style, although even today, the term "New Topographics"--more a conceptual gist than a precise adjective--is used to characterize the work of artists not yet born when the exhibition was held. Although the exhibit's ambitions were hardly so grand, New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift, for the show occurred just as photography ceased to be an isolated, self-defined practice and took its place within the contemporary art world. Arguably the last traditionally photographic style, New Topographics was also the first Photoconceptual style. In different ways, the artists thoughtfully engaged with their medium and its history, while simultaneously absorbing such issues as environmentalism, capitalism and national identity. In this vital reassessment of the genre, essays by Britt Salvesen and Alison Nordstrom accompany illustrations of selected works from the 1975 exhibition, with installation views and contextual comparisons, to demonstrate both the historical significance of New Topographics and its continued relevance today. The book also includes an illustrated checklist of the 1975 exhibition and an extensive bibliography.

The Hermitage Collections: Volume I: Treasures of World Art; Volume II: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Present Day


Olegs Yakovlevichs Neverov - 2010
    For nearly 250 years the State Hermitage has been one of Europe’s most palatial museums. It encompasses more than three million works of art and artifacts displayed within a spectacular architectural ensemble, the heart of which is the famed Winter Palace. The two volumes of The Hermitage Collections capture the masterpieces and discuss the history that make this world-famous institution a cultural destination and a global treasure. Many of its rarely reproduced works are included in these two volumes, such as The Raphael Loggias (as copied from the Vatican), Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy, The Gonzaga Cameo, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna with a Flower (The Benois Madonna), and Titian’s St. Sebastian. The Hermitage collections were developed beginning in 1764 by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Today, the Hermitage collections constitute one of the great art museums of the world.

Strangest Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke


Lucy Costigan - 2010
    During his short life Harry created stained glass windows for churches, private dwellings, and commercial venues throughout Ireland and England, as well as in the United States and Australia. Also an illustrator of books for Harrap and Co. in London, Harry illustrated five books that show his undoubted genius in the area of graphic art. In total 174 windows and a small number of panels were created by Harry Clarke. This book contains the entire stained glass collection of Harry Clarke, including those windows now in art galleries. This collection has never before been photographed or published in its entirety, and will give those who are unfamiliar with the brilliance and originality of Clarke’s marvelous stained glass windows the opportunity to view images of his greatest creations.

The Queen's Dolls' House: A Dollhouse Made for Queen Mary


Lucinda Lambton - 2010
    In an ever-expanding array of sizes and styles, they may be closely modeled on reality or wildly whimsical. Few, however, approach the splendor of the royal dollhouse on display at Windsor Castle. With running water, electricity, two working elevators, and many other delights, there can be no question that this is a dollhouse fit for a queen.           This lavishly illustrated volume offers a detailed history of the creation, decoration, and furnishing of this extraordinary dollhouse. Commissioned in the 1920s for Queen Mary and designed by renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, the house is a perfect scale replica of an Edwardian residence, complete in every detail. Its library boasts original works by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and Edith Wharton. Its wine cellar is replete with tiny bottles containing thimblefuls of real vintage wine. And, naturally, its tiny residents eschew pink convertibles in favor of the fleet of elegant Rolls Royce limousines housed in the miniature garage. These and hundreds of other charming features are lovingly detailed in color, with extensive use of material from the royal archives, detailing for the first time the contributions of the artists, craftspeople, and donors involved in its creation.An imaginative tour of this smallest and grandest of aristocratic residences, which receives thousands of full-sized visitors each year, The Queen’s Dolls' House is full of surprises that will captivate toy collectors, miniaturists, and fans of the royal family alike.

Ars Sacra: Christian Art and Architecture of the Western World from the Very Beginning Up Until Today


Rolf Toman - 2010
    This glorious tome takes the reader on a tour through seventeen centuries of sacral art, architecture, and culture, from the late antiquity to the middle ages, renaissance, baroque, art nouveau to works by contemporary artists such as Marc Chagall and Gerhard Richter.

A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers


Will Friedwald - 2010
    From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they have created a body of work that continues to please and inspire. Here is the most extensive biographical and critical survey of these singers ever written, as well as an essential guide to the Great American Songbook and those who shaped the way it has been sung. The music crosses from jazz to pop and back again, from the songs of Irving Berlin and W. C. Handy through Stephen Sondheim and beyond, bringing together straightforward jazz and pop singers (Billie Holiday, Perry Como); hybrid artists who moved among genres and combined them (Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé); the leading men and women of Broadway and Hollywood (Ethel Merman, Al Jolson); yesterday’s vaudeville and radio stars (Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor); and today’s cabaret artists and hit-makers (Diana Krall, Michael Bublé). Friedwald has also written extended pieces on the most representative artists of five significant genres that lie outside the songbook: Bessie Smith (blues), Mahalia Jackson (gospel), Hank Williams (country and western), Elvis Presley (rock ’n’ roll), and Bob Dylan (folk-rock). Friedwald reconsiders the personal stories and professional successes and failures of all these artists, their songs, and their performances, appraising both the singers and their music by balancing his opinions with those of fellow musicians, listeners, and critics.  This magisterial reference book—ten years in the making—will delight and inform anyone with a passion for the iconic music of America, which continues to resonate throughout our popular culture.

The History of American Graffiti


Roger Gastman - 2010
    This book provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the roots of a subculture that has managed to movemainstream without losing its edge.

Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art, and Life


Judith Dupre - 2010
    A mother and a virgin, a saint and a peasant, a woman both tragic and triumphant, Mary has held sway over the human imagination for centuries. Yet she has never felt as relevant to our everyday lives as she does today.   In Full of Grace, Judith Dupré, the bestselling author of Churches, offers an intimate exploration of this beloved figure, now and through the ages. In a series of poignant stories and essays, Dupré examines Mary’s artistic, cultural, and historical influence, and at the same time shows how Mary’s human journey of love, compassion, grief, and humble strength inextricably connects her to our modern lives. Accompanied by a breathtaking visual feast ranging from classic Renaissance portraits to unexpected contemporary images, Dupré’s text offers insights into the Virgin Mary as a mother and as a religious icon. Visits to the great shrines of Marian pilgrimage—Lourdes, Medjugorje, Fatima, and the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe—underscore the author’s journey to find Mary’s meaning in her own life. In an essay about Mary in the Qur’an, we see how Mary, far from being an exclusively Catholic figure, emerges as one of the central women in Islam. Another piece details the author’s travels in the Holy Land, a landscape wracked by religious strife but still overflowing with the spirit of generosity that Mary embodies. From Sudanese refugee camps to the painful reminders of Auschwitz, from the struggle of divorce to the challenges of raising a child with autism, we see how Mary’s tenderness, bravery, and grace infuse the story of every mother, young and old. For men and women seeking to better understand their own life journey, this book looks at the many miracles, large and small, along the way.

Otto Dix


Olaf Peters - 2010
    The celebrated German artist Otto Dix, a volunteer for the German army during World War I, went on to create some of the most powerful anti-war images of the modern age. His work also includes unsettling depictions of civilian life in the Weimar Republic following World War I. This book examines every aspect of Dix's career, from his expressionist work to his gradual embrace of classically influenced realism. Though many of Dix's works were destroyed under the Third Reich, a number of his rarely seen landscapes from that era as well as later works of religious allegory are included here.

Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven


Ross King - 2010
    Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley, over a dozen years in Canadian history. Working in an eclectic and sometimes controversial blend of modernist styles, they produced what an English critic celebrated in the 1920s as the "most vital group of paintings" of the 20th century. A Governor General's Award-winning author, Ross King, recounts the turbulent years during which a group of young Canadian painters went from obscurity to international renown. Sumptuously illustrated, rigorously researched and drawn from archival documents and letters, Defiant Spirits constitutes a "group biography," reconstructing the men's aspirations, frustrations and achievements. It details not only the lives of Tom Thomson and the members of the Group of Seven but also the political and social history of Canada during a time when art exhibitions were venues for debates about Canadian national identity and cultural worth.

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture


Jonathan D. Katz - 2010
    Arcing from the turn of the twentieth century, through the emergence of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, and to the present, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed or tacitly ignored, even by the most progressive sectors of our society: the influence of gay and lesbian artists in creating American modernism.Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists such as Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many more—in addition to artists of more recent works such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and Cass Bird. The authors argue that despite the late-nineteenth-century definition and legal codification of the “homosexual,” in reality, questions of sexuality always remained fluid and continually redefined by artists concerned with the act of portrayal. In particular, gay and lesbian artists—of but not fully in the society they portrayed—occupied a position of influential marginality, from which vantage point they crafted innovative and revolutionary ways of painting portraits. Their resistance to society's attempt to proscribe them forced them to develop new visual vocabularies by which to code, disguise, and thereby express their subjects' identities—and also their own.Bringing together for the first time new scholarship in the history of American sexuality and new research in American portraiture, Hide/Seek charts the heretofore hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists on American art and portraiture and creates the basis for the necessary reassessment of the careers of major American artists—both gay and straight—as well as of portraiture itself.

Art: From Cave Painting to Street Art- 40,000 Years of Creativity


Stephen Farthing - 2010
    Extraordinarily compact yet richly written and extensively illustrated, this remarkable introduction to art traces the evolution of art movement by movement, throughout time and across the world. Filled with classic and iconic masterpieces as well as lesser-known marvels awaiting greater attention, it includes a thorough assessment of artists, movements, concepts, and key works. Among the distinctive features included are the timeline at the foot of each page positioning each work in time and place in relation to other masterpieces and artistic trends. Also included are boxed "focal points" exploring up-close unusual details in the work of art profiled; "artist profiles" allowing the reader to delve deeper into the life and work of key artists; and special in-depth features on related topics, such as how the cost of oil paint affected artistic choices in the Dutch Golden Age, tips on visiting a museum for the first time, or how to start an art collection. Each featured art work appears with detailed analysis explaining everything from signs and symbols in art to visual metaphors and technical innovations. Meant to be a book that can be read from beginning to end or browsed randomly, this will make a treasured gift as well as a wonderful self-indulgence.

Neo Rauch


Wolfgang Buscher - 2010
    His scenes involve the viewer in a history that is at once mythic, intimate, and present. Through a deep consideration of philosophy, art history, literature, and his own dreamscape, Rauch’s paintings depict the precipices of progress and the struggles of communication. Electrified by their rich palettes, Rauch’s fragmented landscapes and timeless characters dance between pop and baroque, social and psychological, graphic and painterly. Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch learned his trade behind the Iron Curtain. His influences and interests were shaped by personal hardship and the tumultuous changes of East Germany after the Wall fell. In the late 1980s, having finished his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, he explored diverse approaches to painting in dialogue with works he encountered by Francis Bacon, the New Wild painters, and the pre-Renaissance painters he saw during his travels in Italy. By 1993, he had arrived at the unique style of intertwining figuration and abstraction that characterizes his oeuvre and has brought him international attention and respect. This monograph is the most inclusive collection of Rauch’s work to date. It offers a generous range of his writings that illuminate the personal, symbolic, and formal complexities of the artist’s world. Wolfgang Büscher’s open and sensitive account of a walk through Rauch’s neighborhood reveals the painter’s compassion and modesty. Harald Kunde tracks Rauch’s stylistic development through its main semantic threads and historical influences. Gary Tinterow draws from his work on Rauch’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum to offer the reader a guide to the symbols that form the painter’s extensive mythology. These essays complement Rauch’s work with nuanced insights while allowing the images room to speak on their own. Within this atlas, readers will discover the rich density and enigmatic openness of Rauch’s paintings.This is the unlimited edition based on the limited first edition.

Japanese Woodblock Prints: Artists, Publishers and Masterworks: 1680 - 1900


Andreas Marks - 2010
    Their massive popularity has spread from Japan to be embraced by a worldwide audience. Covering the period from the beginning of the Japanese woodblock print in the 1680s until the year 1900, Japanese Woodblock Prints provides a detailed survey of all the famous ukiyo-e artists, along with over 500 full-color prints.Unlike previous examinations of this art form, Japanese Woodblock Prints includes detailed histories of the publishers of woodblock prints—who were often the driving force determining which prints, and therefore which artists, would make it into mass circulation for a chance at critical and popular success. Invaluable as a guide for ukiyo-e enthusiasts looking for detailed information about their favorite Japanese woodblock print artists and prints, it is also an ideal introduction for newcomers to the world of the woodblock print. This lavishly illustrated book will be a valued addition to the libraries of scholars, as well as the general art enthusiast.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art


Malcolm Daniel - 2010
    This handsome volume showcases for the first time the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinarily rich holdings of works by these diverse and groundbreaking masters.A passionate advocate for photography and modern art promoted through his “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession” (also known as “291”) and his journal Camera Work, Stieglitz was also a photographer of supreme accomplishment. Featured works by Stieglitz include portraits, landscapes, city views, and cloud studies, along with photographs from his composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (selected by O’Keeffe herself for the Museum). Steichen—perhaps best known as a fashion photographer, celebrity portraitist, and MoMA curator—was Stieglitz’s man in Paris, gallery collaborator, and most talented exemplar of Photo-Secessionist photography. His three large variant prints of The Flatiron and his moonlit photographs of Rodin’s Balzac are highlighted here. Marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography, the final double issue of Camera Work (1915–17) was devoted to the young Paul Strand, whose photographs from 1915 and 1916 treated three principal themes—movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits—and pioneered a shift from the soft-focus Pictorialist aesthetic to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Represented are Strand’s rare large platinum prints—most of them unique exhibition prints of images popularly known only as Camera Work photogravures.The rarely exhibited photographs gathered in Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand are among the crown jewels of the Metropolitan’s collection.

Chuck Close: Life


Christopher Finch - 2010
    Chuck Close is one of the most acclaimed American artists to emerge since Andy Warhol. His larger-than-life portraits look out from the walls of museums and galleries around the globe. His virtuosity and variety of technique, combined with the ambition and accessibility of his chosen subject matter the portrait re-invented on a heroic scale has made him a great favorite with the public and has won him the respect of his peers. Chuck Close has achieved fame, yet his full story has never been told until now. Author Christopher Finch has known Close since the late 1960s when the artist was creating his first masterpieces in an unheated SoHo loft. Finch chronicles Close's childhood battles with illness and dyslexia and his rise to the pinnacle of the art world. At the age of 48 he was struck down by an occluded spinal artery that left him a partial quadriplegic. With extraordinary determination, Close overcame this potentially career-ending disability, not only learning to paint again but producing work of extraordinary richness that equals or surpasses his previous achievements. With style and authority, Finch reveals the human reality behind Close's visually eloquent but eternally silent portraits.

John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1883-1899: Complete Paintings, Volume V


Richard Ormond - 2010
    The young artist moved from Paris to London during this period and successfully ignited his career as a portraitist, and this time also marked his experimentation with Impressionist techniques. These pages contain the first detailed account of Sargent’s relationship with Claude Monet, including letters—most published for the first time here—from the artist to the great Impressionist. This exquisitely illustrated volume also covers the period when Sargent journeyed to Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Spain, North Africa, and Italy in search of inspiration for a mural cycle commissioned by the Boston Public Library. The works he painted as source material included here stand in stark contrast to the sensuous, painterly exercises of the early and mid-1880s, underlining his versatility and artistic reach.As in the previous volumes in this series, the images in this book are reproduced in full color and documented in depth, with complete provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, and are accompanied by relevant studies and related drawings.

Abstract Expressionism at the Museum of Modern Art: Selections from the Collection


Ann Temkin - 2010
    The name stuck, and over the years it has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different from one another as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. The achievements of this generation put New York on the map as the center of the international art world, and constitute some of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces. From the mid-1940s, under the aegis of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., works by then little-known American—including Pollock, de Kooning, Smith, Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb—began to enter the Museum's collection. These ambitious acquisition initiatives continued throughout the second half of the last century and produced a collection of Abstract Expressionist art the breadth and depth of which is unrivalled by any museum in the world. Supplemented by an essay by Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, this volume celebrates the richness of the Museum's holdings of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs from this epochal moment in the history of art and of this institution.

For Us the Living: The Civil War in Paintings and Eyewitness Accounts


Mort Künstler - 2010
    Marking the sesquicentennial of this epic struggle for America's soul, which began in 1861, For Us the Living features stunning paintings by acclaimed Civil War artist Mort Künstler paired with stirring text by Pulitzer Prize-nominated author James I. Robertson, Jr.No other Civil War book equals this breathtaking volume, which brings the crisis to life through eyewitness accounts and dramatic art. Robertson insightfully describes key events in each year of the conflict, weaving his words together with those of the people who lived through it-and Künstler's masterful paintings illuminate it all.For Us the Living will give readers the sense of being there at this critical moment in American history.

The Mourners: Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy


Sophie Jugie - 2010
    Working in a studio presided over by Claus Sluter, these sculptors created monuments for the ducal family that rivaled contemporary Italian works.This stunning book provides an in-depth study of the twin summits of the achievement of these artists––sculptures from the tombs of Philip the Bold (1342–1404) and his son, John the Fearless (1371–1419). These extraordinary marble and alabaster tombs serve as platforms for the ducal figures, who rest atop fully carved arcades. Within the spaces of the arcades, the artists carved individual monks in procession. Just over two feet high, each monk is a miniature embodiment of late medieval devotion. Shown in various states of mourning, they move in perpetual procession beneath the marble bodies of their rulers.Accompanying the first major traveling exhibition of these recently restored sculptures, The Mourners illuminates the artistic sophistication and craftsmanship of these works.

Lucian Freud: The Studio


Cécile Debray - 2010
    "I want the painting to be flesh," Freud has avowed, and through this aspiration he achieves almost devastatingly unsentimental and revelatory portraits of his sitters, as he translates the act of scrutiny into strokes of paint. Like the studio of his friend Francis Bacon, Freud's own studio has attained its own intensity as the site of his one-on-one encounters, and as a backdrop or stage in his paintings, and the atmosphere of his interiors, and in the light in them, are among his paintings' most pungent qualities. (One of his earliest canvases, from 1944, is titled "The Painter's Room.") Accompanying the critically acclaimed spring 2010 Pompidou retrospective, this mammoth survey posits Freud's studio as the decisive stage for his art, and tracks his career in over 200 color illustrations of paintings, graphic works and photographs. Included here are his large interiors, his nudes and variations on portraits by earlier masters, his famous series of self-portraits and imposing portraits of sitters such as Leigh Bowery and substantial photographic documentation of the studio. "Lucian Freud: The Studio" is the essential book on the artist.Grandson of Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud was born in Germany in 1922, and permanently relocated to London in 1933 during the ascent of the Nazi regime. After seeing brief service during the Second World War, Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London. Despite exhibiting only occasionally over the course of his career, Freud's 1995 portrait "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" was sold at auction, at Christie's New York in May 2008, for $33.6 million--setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist.

Egon Schiele: Landscapes


Rudolph Leopold - 2010
    Best known for his depictions of the human form, Schiele was also interested in portraying the beauty and structure of the world he inhabited. In fact, Schiele's paintings of the countryside and his native Vienna comprise a large portion of his body of work. Nearly one hundred of the artist's landscapes are exquisitely reproduced in this handsome book and presented alongside photographs of the scenes he depicted, taken from the vantage point of the original works. This volume proves that Schiele s mastery extends beyond his radical renditions of the human figure and reveals themes that appear throughout his work. Schiele's landscapes represent an important facet of his career and are a valuable contribution to the school of European nature painting.

Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness


Nicole R. Fleetwood - 2010
    Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness?Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.

Sumi-e: The Art of Japanese Ink Painting


Shozo Sato - 2010
    From waterfalls to bamboo, learners paint their way to understanding sumi-e—a style of painting that is characteristically Asian and has been practiced for well over 1,000 years. Although it's sometimes confused with calligraphy, as the tools used are the same, sumi-e instead tries to capture the essence of an object or scene in the fewest possible strokes.This all-in-one resource also provides a timeline of brush painting history, a glossary of terms, a guide to sources and an index—making it a tool to use and treasure, for amateurs and professionals alike. This sumi-e introduction is ideal for anyone with a love of Japanese art or the desire to learn to paint in a classic Asian style.

Fighting Theory


Avital Ronell - 2010
    For Fighting Theory, psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle conducted twelve interviews with Ronell, each focused on a key topic in one of Ronell's books or on a set of issues that run throughout her work.What do philosophy and literary studies have to learn from each other? How does Ronell place her work within gender studies? What does psychoanalysis have to contribute to contemporary thought? What propels one in our day to Nietzsche, Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, and other philosophical writers? How important are courage and revolt? Ronell's discussions of such issues are candid, thoughtful, and often personal, bringing together elements from several texts, illuminating hints about them, and providing her up-to-date reflections on what she had written earlier.Intense and often ironic, Fighting Theory is a poignant self-reflection of the worlds and walls against which Avital Ronell crashed.

Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680-850: A History


Leslie Brubaker - 2010
    This is the first book in English for over fifty years to survey this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to combine the expertise of two authors who are specialists in the written, archaeological and visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual, written and other materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium. In doing so they challenge many traditional assumptions about iconoclasm and set the period firmly in its broader political, cultural and social-economic context.

Monet (Grand Palais Paris exhibition catalogue): 1840-1926


Joseph BailloRichard Thompson - 2010
    In a rapturous review on the front page of The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman says that it gives us a sublime painter whose achievement places him in the company of artists who reveal the world with new vision. This catalogue offers a permanent record of this magnificent art exhibition. Claude Monet is one of the most beloved painters in the history of art. His work appeals both to the broad general public and to artists, who are moved and challenged by his achievement over a working life that spanned six decades. With more than 300 illustrations of Monet’s greatest works and accessible essays by leading art historians, this lush volume offers a vivid new perspective on the artist and his work. Praise for Monet:"The biggest art spectacle in Europe this fall . . . it is, believe it or not, the first full-dress overview Paris has staged in decades, the first chance anywhere to see the whole sweep of his work in some time. The French are treating it like a national celebration. . . . The exhibition would have been a box office smash even if it had corralled fewer of Monet's benchmarks. It happens to be ravishing."--Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto


Florine Stettheimer - 2010
    She was a painter, designer, and poet. Together with her sisters Ettie and Carrie, Stettheimer hosted a legendary salon, midtown/uptown, where they entertained Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, critic Henry McBride, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1934 Stettheimer designed the set and costumes for the Thomson-Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts to much acclaim. In 1949, Ettie collected Florine's poems in Crystal Flowers, a privately printed, elegant edition of 250. In addition to these rare poems, this new volume offers formerly unpublished material culled from archives, including three new poems and Stettheimer's libretto for her ballet "Orphee of the Quat-z-arts." Gammel and Zelazo have re-situated this overlooked poet among her modernist sisters, presenting her as an important practitioner of a modernism that integrates multiple art forms. Sixty years after it first appeared for a select few, her poetry shines for a new generation of readers ready to appreciate her irreverent aesthetic and her exuberant painterly style.

Caravaggio: The Complete Works


Rossella Vodret - 2010
    Without them, as the great Italian art writer Roberto Longhi once noted, "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed... and the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different." It was Longhi who rescued Caravaggio's painting for the twentieth century, prior to which it had lain dormant since the painter's mysterious death in 1610. During Caravaggio's lifetime, however, his work was enormously influential and controversial. Each of his innovations in some way upset the prevailing tendencies of the day--not least when his insistence on physical realism led him to paint Saint Matthew as a bald peasant with dirty legs (attended upon by an irreverently intimate boy angel). Nonetheless, Caravaggio was never short of commissions or patrons, and left to posterity around 80 masterpieces. This monograph is published on the fourth centenary of Caravaggio's death, and documents his complete paintings in high-quality reproductions. Authored by renowned scholar Rossella Vodret, it is the must-have monograph on the artist.Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, was born in 1571 and made his debut in 1600 with two public commissions on the theme of Saint Matthew. He soon became notorious for his temper, and killed a young man in 1606; two further contretemps in Malta and Naples are recorded--the latter, in 1609, involving an attempt on his life--and by 1610 he was dead, after a brief but extraordinary career.

Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936


Kenneth E. Silver - 2010
    Accompanying the Guggenheim's exhibition of the same name, it examines the interwar period in its key artistic manifestations and their interpretations of classical values and aesthetics: the poetic dream of antiquity in the Parisian avant garde of Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso; the politicized revival of the Roman Empire under Benito Mussolini by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Mario Sironi; and the austere functionalist utopianism of the Bauhaus, as well as, more chillingly, the pseudo-biological classicism, or Aryanism, of nascent Nazi society. This presentation of the seismic transformations in interbellum French, Italian and German culture encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, film, fashion and the decorative arts. Among the other artists surveyed here are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Andre Derain, Gino Severini, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Amedee Ozenfant, Madeleine Vionnet, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Carlo Carra, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Ubaldo Oppi, Felice Casorati, Giuseppe Terragni, Gio Ponti, Arturo Martini, Georg Kolbe, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Georg Scholz, Georg Schrimpf, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger and August Sander.

The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City


Katherine Wentworth Rinne - 2010
    Supported by the author’s extensive topographical research, this book presents a unified vision of the city that links improvements to public and private water systems with political, religious, and social change. Between 1560 and 1630, in a spectacular burst of urban renewal, Rome’s religious and civil authorities sponsored the construction of aqueducts, private and public fountains for drinking, washing, and industry, and the magnificent ceremonial fountains that are Rome’s glory. Tying together the technological, sociopolitical, and artistic questions that faced the designers during an age of turmoil in which the Catholic Church found its authority threatened and the infrastructure of the city was in a state of decay, Rinne shows how these public works projects transformed Rome in a successful marriage of innovative engineering and strategic urban planning.

How to Read Italian Renaissance Painting


Stefano Zuffi - 2010
    Here, 180 works illuminate key ideas in Renaissance painting, from "perpective" and "the golden section" to "grace" and "symbolism." In addition, there are brief biographies of the major artists. The result is an original, accessible, and affordable volume that offers an introduction into the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance.

Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead


John H. Taylor - 2010
    It is a ground-breaking and timely book that draws on intensive recent research at an exciting moment. It is the first comprehensive book on the subject for over thirty years. The British Museum holds an unequalled collection of Book of the Dead manuscripts on papyri, many of which have never been published before New photography provides lasting record of fragile and rarely exhibited material. It is published to accompany a major exhibition at the British Museum, 4 November 2010 6 March 2011. The Book of the Dead is a compilation of spells that the ancient Egyptians believed would assist them in the afterlife as they made their perilous journey towards the realm of the gods and the ultimate state of eternity.

The Cathedral


William R. Cook - 2010
    What is a cathedral? -- Lecture 2. Early Christian architecture -- Lecture 3. Romanesque: a new monumental style -- Lecture 4. Vaulting: a look at roofs -- Lecture 5. Romanesque at its best -- Lecture 6. Saint-Denis and the beginning of Gothic style -- Lecture 7. The urban context of cathedrals -- Lecture 8. Notre Dame in Paris -- Lecture 9. Early Gothic style: Laon -- Lecture 10. Chartres: the building -- Lecture 11. Chartres: the sculpture -- Lecture 12. Chartres: the windows -- Lecture 13. Amiens: the limits of height -- Lecture 14. Amiens: the façade -- Lecture 15. Reims: the royal cathedral -- Lecture 16. Cathedrals: who builds? who pays? how long? -- Lecture 17. New developements in Gothic France -- Lecture 18. Late Gothic churches in France -- Lecture 19. Early Gothic architecture in England -- Lecture 20. Decorated and perpendicular English Gothic -- Lecture 21. Gothic churches in the Holy Roman Empire -- Lecture 22. Gothic churches in Italy -- Lecture 23. Gothic styles in Iberia and the New World -- Lecture 24. Gothic architecture in today's world.

The World's Greatest Paintings [DVD]


NOT A BOOK - 2010
    24 Lectures 1Greatness in Painting 2The Majesty of Duccio and Giotto 3Acts of Faith-Masaccio, Van Eyck, Van der Weyden 4The Diversity of Piero, Mantegna, Botticelli 5The Devotion of Bellini, Geertgen, Dürer 6Masterworks by Leonardo, Raphael, Correggio 7Great Ensembles-Michelangelo and Grünewald 8Ideal and Real-Giorgione, Titian, Holbein 9Living and Dying-Bruegel, El Greco, Caravaggio 10Life Stories by Ter Brugghen, Rubens, Steen 11Inside Vermeer, Velázquez, Rembrandt 12Spirit and Thought-Hals, Rembrandt, La Tour 13The Serenity of Poussin, Claude, Watteau 14In Contrast-Chardin, Tiepolo, Gainsborough 15Dark Images of David, Goya, Friedrich 16The Worlds of Constable, Turner, Delacroix 17Dark to Bright-Courbet, Church, Monet 18Alone and Together-Whistler, Degas, Renoir 19Unlike Any Other-Sargent, Manet, Seurat 20Close Observation-Cézanne, Van Gogh, Homer 21The Human Condition-Munch, Matisse, Schiele 22Art in Time of War-Monet and Picasso 23Time and Memory-Magritte, Hopper, Gorky 24Expressive Abstractions-Pollock and Hofmann

The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque


David Bindman - 2010
    Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.The much-awaited "Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque" has been written by an international team of distinguished scholars, and covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of slavery and the presence of black people in Europe irrevocably affected the works of the best artists of the time. Essays on the black Magus and the image of the black in Italy, Spain, and Britain, with detailed studies of Rembrandt and Heliodorus's "Aethiopica," all presented with superb color plates, make this new volume a worthy addition to this classic series.

Aldwyth: Collage and Assemblage 1991-2009: Work V. / Work N.


Mark Sloan - 2010
    In an accompanying essay, Rosamond Purcell describes Aldwyth's work thus: "packed with intricately fashioned episodes, they seem like worlds that lie outside of our world, and infinitely worth exploring." As records of other worlds, these works manage to simultaneously suggest maps, instruments and ruins. This catalogue, coinciding with the first major retrospective of this under-recognized artist, brings Aldwyth's work to a wider public for the first time.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée D'Orsay


Sylvie Patry - 2010
    Representing a pivotal moment in the history of European art,the Post-Impressionists created some of the mostrecognizable and stylistically inventive paintings of themodern era. Published to accompany a major exhibition, thisbook presents over one hundred celebrated paintings from theunparalleled collection of Paris s Musée d Orsay. Focusing onthe decades around 1900, this publication presents lateImpressionist landmarks by Monet and Renoir; early modernmasterpieces by Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and VanGogh; and avant-garde canvases by the Nabis painters Denis,Bonnard, and Vuillard. The volume also provides a unique lookat the Musée d Orsay s outstanding collection of Pointillism,including works by artists such as Seurat and Signac. Togetherthese works offer a fresh assessment of seismic transitions inthe European art world at the turn of the twentieth centurythat ushered in the birth of modern painting and producedlasting treasures of its own.

Velo: Bicycle Culture and Design


Robert Klanten - 2010
    They are not only shaping styles, but promoting cycling as a primary form of transport. The book also explores the aesthetic of today's cycling culture and presents custom-made frames and art bikes as well as a selection of contemporary illustration and design influenced by the cycling movement. Geared toward anyone who has a personal or professional interest in cycling, Velo is the fast lane into a current topic that is both entertaining and socially relevant.

What Makes a Masterpiece: Artists, Writers, and Curators on the World's Greatest Art


Christopher Dell - 2010
    It covers art from Africa to China, Japan to South and Central America, Persia to Sri Lanka, as well as a large selection of European works from Ancient Greece to Impressionism. Little-known treasures such as the Iberian Lady of Elche or a Maya relief from Palenque appear alongside well-loved classics such as Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve or Degas’s Little Dancer, creating a fascinating and unique collection of groundbreaking and beautiful works.The book brings together an impressive list of authors: artists such as Antony Gormley and Avigdor Arikha, writers including Marina Warner and Philip Pullman, and cultural figures like Germaine Greer and Quentin Blake appear alongside curators and directors from the Louvre, Prado, Museo di San Marco, Berlin Gemäldegalerie, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, British Museum, and the National Gallery, London. Intimate knowledge combines with unique insight (and some startling new interpretations) to create fresh analyses of these works, of as much interest to art historians as to the general reader.

Charley Harper: The Animal Kingdom: A Book of Postcards


NOT A BOOK - 2010
    5 x 7 in size and perfect for framing!

Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500


Elizabeth Morrison - 2010
    This volume celebrates the vivid historical imagery produced during these years by bringing together some of the finest masterpieces of illumination created in the Middle Ages. It is the first major publication to focus on exploring the ways in which text and illumination worked together to help show medieval readers the role and purpose of history. The images enabled the past to come alive before the eyes of medieval readers by relating the adventures of epic figures such as Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, and even the Virgin Mary.Presented here are approximately fifty-five manuscripts from over twenty-five libraries and museums across the United States and Europe, supplemented by medieval objects ranging from tapestries to ivory boxes. Together they show how historical narratives came to play a decisive role at the French court and in the process inspired some of the most original and splendid artworks of the time. Additional contributors to this volume include Élisabeth Antoine, R. Howard Bloch, Keith Busby, Joyce Coleman, Erin K. Donovan, and Gabrielle M. Spiegel.

The Art of American Book Covers: 1875-1930


Richard Minsky - 2010
    Readers accustomed to today’s more utilitarian book covers will find breathtaking images here. The diversity and ingenuity of the artwork will capture the imagination of book lovers and collectors alike—and anyone who enjoys engaging design.

Before Color


William Eggleston - 2010
    The photos were subsequently exhibited and sold at Cheim & Read gallery in New York. This book reunites these photos in their entirety, and shows the artistic beginnings of a pioneer of contemporary photography. In the late 1950s, Eggleston began photographing suburban Memphis using high-speed 35 mm black-and-white film, developing the style and motifs that would come to shape his pivotal color work, including diners, supermarkets, domestic interiors and people engaged in seemingly trivial and banal situations. Now, 50 years later, all the plates in Before Color have been scanned from vintage prints developed by Eggleston in his own darkroom. In the mid-1960s Eggleston discovered color film and was immediately satisfied with the results: "And by God, it worked. Just overnight." Eggleston then abandoned black-and-white photography, but its fundamental influence on his practice is undeniable.

Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject


Kirsten Pai Buick - 2010
    Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct “American” national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis’s career—including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy—and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis’s most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha; Forever Free and Hagar in the Wilderness in light of art historians’ assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and The Death of Cleopatra in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Gardners Art Through the Ages. Vol. 1


Fred Kleiner - 2010
    Over 100 additional new images are integrated into Volume I, and appear online as full size digital images with discussions written by the author. These bonus images are complemented by groundbreaking media support for students including video study tools and a robust eBook. The most widely read history of art in the English language for more than 80 years, GARDNER has built its stellar reputation on the inclusion of the most significant images and monuments, discussions of these images in their full historical and cultural context, reproductions of unsurpassed quality, scholarship that is up-to-date and deep, and more help for students and instructors than any other survey text. The 13th Enhanced Edition adds to this heritage with unsurpassed media-integration that addresses the challenges of your art history classroom like no other learning tool available for your course. ArtStudy Online, the interactive study tool available at no extra charge with the text, includes new video and audio study tools, image flashcards, and more. A robust eBook for the ultimate in portability is available bundled with new texts at a small additional price. Dynamic lecture tools-including a digital library with a full zoom and side-by-side comparison capability and the exciting Google Earth technology-will save instructors time in preparing for class and personalizing their lectures.

Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art


Slobodan Ćurčić - 2010
    300 to the early nineteenth century.Byzantine art abandoned classical ideals in favor of formulas that conveyed spiritual concepts through stylized physical forms. Scholarship dealing with Byzantine icons has previously been largely focused on depictions of holy figures, dismissing representations of architecture as irrelevant space-filling background. Architecture as Icon demonstrates that background representations of architecture are meaningful, active components of compositions, often as significant as the human figures. The book provides a critical view for understanding the Byzantine conception of architectural forms and space and the corresponding intellectual underpinnings of their representation.Introduced by four thought-provoking essays, the catalogue divides the material as included in the exhibition into four categories identified as: generic, specific, and symbolic representations, and a final grouping entitled “From Earthly to Heavenly Jerusalem.” This handsomely illustrated volume addresses various approaches to depicting architecture in Byzantine art that contrast sharply with those of the Renaissance and subsequent Western artistic tradition.

The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to John Cage


Peter Vergo - 2010
    Peter Vergo in this volume examines the changes in the analogies between the two disciplines, using in his analysis critical and philosophical sources as well as evidence of artistic and musical practice.

G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923-1926


Detlef Mertins - 2010
    Founded by Hans Richter, a pioneer of abstract animated film, G featured works by some of the important names in the advanced cultures of Europe: Hans Arp, Walter Benjamin, Theo van Doesburg, Viking Eggeling, Naum Gabo, Werner Graeff, George Grosz, Hugo Häring, Raoul Hausmann, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Frederick Kiesler, El Lissitzky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Antoine Pevsner, Man Ray, and Tristan Tzara.This edition, the first in English translation, preserves the original design by Lissitzky, Richter, and Graeff, and includes essays that explore the role of the journal in its time and in relation to contemporary culture. An introduction analyzes the principles of the journal, situates it in the culture of the early 1920s, and evaluates its achievements.

Ravilious in Pictures. Vol. 2, War Paintings


James Russell - 2010
    One of a series of books, it creates a vivid portrait both of the artist himself and of life in wartime Britain.

20th Century Travel: 100 Years Of Globe-Trotting Ads


Allison Silver - 2010
    In less than 100 years, the U.S. mass-produced the automobile, invented airplanes, freeways, motels, even sent men to the Moon. Travel grew ever faster and easier. Above all, it was democratized — enabling millions to explore distant lands, or see their own more fully. At the start of the 20th century, only people with extensive disposable income and time to spare could enjoy leisure travel. By the century’s end, journeys took hours, not days, and mass travel — especially brief air flights — became the new normal. Along the way, ocean liners broke speed records, aerodynamic trains roared down the tracks, stylish boat-plane clippers evolved into jumbo jets. Whether aboard high-speed locomotives or ships, jets or Greyhound buses — or when setting their own schedule on the open road — Americans demanded ever greater mobility and wider choice of destinations, thereby setting a new standard for travelers around the world. A lush visual history of this national wanderlust, this volume features 400-plus print advertisements from the Jim Heimann Collection, which illustrate the evolution of leisure travel — from domestic to global, exclusive to popular, exotic to standardized — and its crucial role in American culture. With an introduction, decade-by-decade analysis, and  an illustrated timeline, this book highlights the cultural and technological developments that transformed travel from a cushioned journey of the elite into a convenient leisure pastime for the general public. 20th Century Travel takes us on a grand tour of travel’s golden age.

Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350-1527


Kathleen Wres Christian - 2010
    In the early 15th century, when Romans discovered ancient marble sculptures and inscriptions in the ruins, they often melted them into mortar. A hundred years later, however, antique marbles had assumed their familiar role as works of art displayed in private collections. In this important book, the author steps back to examine the “long” 15th century, a critical period in the history of antiquities collecting that has received scant attention. She examines shifts in the response of artists and writers to spectacular archaeological discoveries and the new role of collecting antiquities in the public life of Roman elites. The book culminates in a detailed catalogue of the thirty-six most important antiquities collections formed before the Sack and brings these vanished sites back to life by using archival documents, drawings, and descriptions by visitors to clarify the history and appearance of little-studied collections.

The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the "Age of Discovery": From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood


David Bindman - 2010
    Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones."From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood," written largely by noted French scholar Jean Devisse, has established itself as a classic in the field of medieval art. It surveys as never before the presence of black people, mainly mythical, in art from the early Christian era to the fourteenth century. The extraordinary transformation of Saint Maurice into a black African saint, the subject of many noble and deeply touching images, is a highlight of this volume. The new introduction by Paul Kaplan provides a fresh perspective on the image of the black in medieval European art and contextualizes the classic essays on the subject.

Rogier Van der Weyden 1400 - 1464: Master of Passions


Lorne Campbell - 2010
    Rogier van der Weyden 1400-1464: Master of Passions highlights the body of work of, alongside Jan van Eyck, one of the most important Flemish painters of the fifteenth century.

Ikeda Manabu: 1


Manabu Ikeda - 2010
    This is a deluxe softcover with dust-jacket and obi, 120 pages, 8.2" wide x 11.6" high.

Edward Burne Jones: The Earthly Paradise


Christofer Conrad - 2010
    "I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be," he once wrote, "in a light better than any light that ever shone--in a land no one can define or remember, only desire." Burne-Jones' fantasies of an ideal Albion offered solace against the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which had increasingly come to determine urban life in Victorian Britain, and which his close friend William Morris had also critiqued in his bestselling poetry book The Earthly Paradise (1868). This volume explores Burne-Jones' vision of an "Earthly Paradise" as expressed in painting cycles such as Perseus, Amor and Psyche, St George and Briar Rose, and his wonderful Arthurian tapestry sequences and book illustrations. It also opens up the artist's more practical efforts to secure this earthly paradise through the domestic crafts, rejuvenating the Victorian interior through Medieval precedents: carpets, textiles, stained glass windows, furniture and other Arts and Crafts objects. In emphasizing the conceptual unity of Burne-Jones' painting cycles and domestic designs, this monograph reveals his vision to be a coherent expression and longing for a finer world.Edward Burne-Jones was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he met his future collaborators, the artist-poets William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, under whose influence he left Oxford without graduating. From his first major exhibition in 1877, Burne-Jones was a hit with the English public; his 1884 painting "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" remains a classic expression of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sensibility. After his death in 1898, Burne-Jones' legacy became most apparent in the decorative arts.

Arty Party


Sara Drake - 2010
    Includes a polemical essay about humor in the arts. Available to view for free here: http://issuu.com/jamesdavidpayne/docs...

The Victoria and Albert Museum: the world's leading museum of art and design


Lucy Trench - 2010
    This lasting celebration of this unique and much-loved institu­tion reveals the often surprising range of its collections, and is a fascinating introduction to its treasures. The V&A’s riches include ancient textiles, modern chairs, sculpture by Michelangelo, paintings by Constable and Raphael, photographs by Cartier-Bresson, fabulous Indian jewelry and miniatures, 10" platform heels by Vivienne Westwood, wallpaper designs by William Morris, Leonardo’s Codex Forster I, and more than 34,000 ceram­ics. The chronological and cultural ranges of the V&A’s collections and displays offer many different perspectives. The objects can be seen as examples of craftsmanship and design, as witnesses to history and culture, or simply as superb works of art—things of beauty in and of themselves.

Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art Since the Age of Exploration


Mary D. Sheriff - 2010
    This volume takes a different approach, suggesting instead that a history of art based on national divisions often obscures the processes of cultural appropriation and global exchange that shaped the visual arts of Europe in fundamental ways between 1492 and the early twentieth century. Essays here analyze distinct zones of contact--between various European states, between Asia and Europe, or between Europe and so-called primitive cultures in Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific--focusing mainly but not exclusively on painting, drawing, or the decorative arts. Each case foregrounds the centrality of international borrowings or colonial appropriations and counters conceptions of European art as a pure tradition uninfluenced by the artistic forms of other cultures. The contributors analyze the social, cultural, commercial, and political conditions of cultural contact--including tourism, colonialism, religious pilgrimage, trade missions, and scientific voyages--that enabled these exchanges well before the modern age of globalization.Contributors: Claire Farago, University of Colorado at BoulderElisabeth A. Fraser, University of South FloridaJulie Hochstrasser, University of IowaChristopher Johns, Vanderbilt UniversityCarol Mavor, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillMary D. Sheriff, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillLyneise E. Williams, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fabergé’s Animals: A Royal Farm in Miniature


Caroline de Guitaut - 2010
    Domestic or wild, each creature was to be rendered in hardstone adorned with rose diamonds, emeralds, and rubies by the celebrated Russian goldsmith and jeweler, whose name was already synonymous the world over with opulence and grandeur.Fabergé’s Animals takes the reader on a dazzling tour of the Sandringham commission—the largest collection of Fabergé’s hardstone animal carvings in existence. The book brings the magic of this miniature menagerie to life with photographs, sketches, and other documentary material—some never before seen—from both the Russian and royal archives. Along with a historical introduction to the royal patronage behind the commission, this stunning volume includes information on Fabergé's workshops and carvers, and the materials and special techniques they employed.With more than 150 lavish full-color photographs—many newly commissioned—Fabergé’s Animals is a resplendently beautiful book.

Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial


Joanne Cubbs - 2010
    Born in poverty in Alabama, Dial has lived his entire life in the American South, and his art, informed by decades of struggle as a black working-class man, reveals a unique perspective on America's most difficult and pervasive challenges, such as its long history of race and class conflict, the war in Iraq, and the 9/11 tragedy. This monograph includes reproductions of 70 of Dial's large-scale paintings, drawings and found object sculptures spanning twenty years of his artistic career. Drawing inspiration from the rich symbolic world of the black rural South and with no formal education, Dial has developed a truly distinctive and original style. Incorporating salvaged objects in his work-from plastic grave flowers and children's toys to cow skulls and goat carcasses-he creates highly charged assemblages combined with turbulent fields of expressionistic painting. With commentary from historian David Driskell, cultural critic Greg Tate, and art historian Joanne Cubbs, this volume brings long-overdue recognition to Dial's remarkable career and offers audiences an unprecedented look into the creative world of this important artist.

Gardner's Art Through the Ages: Backpack Edition, Book B


Fred S. Kleiner - 2010
    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.

The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World


Lynn Hunt - 2010
    In this captivating account, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt take us to the vibrant Dutch Republic and its flourishing book trade to explore the work that sowed the radical idea that religions could be considered on equal terms.Famed engraver Bernard Picart and author and publisher Jean Frederic Bernard produced The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World, which appeared in the first of seven folio volumes in 1723. They put religion in comparative perspective, offering images and analysis of Jews, Catholics, Muslims, the peoples of the Orient and the Americas, Protestants, deists, freemasons, and assorted sects. Despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, the work was a resounding success. For the next century it was copied or adapted, but without the context of its original radicalism and its debt to clandestine literature, English deists, and the philosophy of Spinoza.Ceremonies and Customs prepared the ground for religious toleration amid seemingly unending religious conflict, and demonstrated the impact of the global on Western consciousness. In this beautifully illustrated book, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt cast new light on the profound insight found in one book as it shaped the development of a modern, secular understanding of religion.

Monasteries


Markus Hattstein - 2010
    Monasteries are places of spirituality, closely binding faith and learning. This book examines the traditions of Christian; Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic monastic architecture from its early beginnings to the present. In introducing the world of the monasteries with its unique artistic and architectural forms, this book asks such questions as what were the rules that governed life in the monasteries and convents? What were the ideals that inspired - and continue to inspire - the form taken by monastic buildings?

The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe


David S. Areford - 2010
    Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways"both positive and negative"was quickly realized.

The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Lord of the Rings


Paul E. Kerry - 2010
    Tolkien has a long history. What has been lacking is a forum for a civilized discussion about the topic, as well as a chronological overview of the major arguments and themes that have engaged scholars about the impact of Christianity on Tolkien's oeuvre, with particular reference to The Lord of the Rings. The Ring and the Cross addresses these two needs through an articulate and authoritative analyses of Tolkien's Roman Catholicism and the role it plays in understanding his writings. The volume's contributors deftly explain the kinds of interpretations put forward and evidence marshaled when arguing for or against religious influence. The Ring and the Cross invites readers to draw their own conclusions about a subject that has fascinated Tolkien enthusiasts since the publication of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings.

The Sacred In-Between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture


Thomas Barrie - 2010
    An essential means of understanding this sacred architecture is through the recognition of its role as an in-between place. Establishing the contexts, approaches and understandings of architecture through the lens of the mediating roles often performed by sacred architecture, this book offers the reader an extraordinary insight into the forces behind these extraordinary buildings.Written by a well-known expert in the field, the book draws on a unique range of cases, reflecting on these inspiring places, their continuing ontological significance and the lessons they can offer today. Fascinating reading for anyone interested in sacred architecture.

Edvard Munch: Master Prints


Elizabeth Prelinger - 2010
    Renowned for such powerful paintings as The Scream and Madonna, Munch continually reworked his monumental themes in the graphic arts. This publication brings together nearly sixty of Munch's most important prints, from the National Gallery of Art and two exceptional private collections, demonstrating how the artist's experimental impulses and virtuosic handling of intaglio, lithography, and woodcut over the course of his lifetime endowed his haunting motifs with new meanings. Stunning reproductions reveal Munch as a master printmaker, manipulating materials and color in the service of his artistic concepts. Scholars and general readers alike will gain a much richer and more nuanced appreciation for this great Norwegian artist.

Richard Andrew: Called to Paint


Marian G. Mullet - 2010
    Popular for his deeply sensitive portraits and breathtaking landscapes, the artist was most recognized for his contribution to honor the 104th Massachusetts Infantry that performed with great distinction during World War I. His extraordinary murals line the walls of the third floor of the Massachusetts State House Legislative Chambers.With his characteristic curly brown hair and intense blue eyes, Richard Andrew delighted his Mass Art students for 36 years. A man of deep intellectual merit, his art reflects his intuitive talent.

Dropping the Urn: Ceramics Works, 5000 B.C.E.-2010 C.E.


Weiwei Ai - 2010
    

Beksinski: Paintings & Photographs I: The Collected Works


Zdzisław Beksiński - 2010
    

In Giacometti's Studio


Michael Peppiatt - 2010
    Michael Peppiatt relates how the artist first worked there as a member of the Surrealist movement and then how he gradually made his mark on Paris’s artistic, literary, and intellectual worlds. After an enforced wartime exile in Geneva in a miserable hotel, he returned to Paris and to the same broken-down little shed of a studio behind Montparnasse where he struggled to realize his pared-down vision of mankind and which became a magnet for many of the great artists and writers of the time (from Picasso and Braque to Balthus, from Breton and Genet to Beckett). Peppiatt prefaces his story with a poignant, personal narrative of how as a young man he arrived in Paris with an introduction from Francis Bacon to Giacometti; the encounter was forestalled by the artist’s very recent death, but Peppiatt instead got to know the key people in Giacometti’s world. He explains how the studio, now dismantled, seems to be both Giacometti’s most important artwork, encompassing countless complete or unfinished works, and the archive of years of struggle. With Giacometti’s death, it became his greatest achievement, containing as it did the traces of a lifetime’s search for truth. This vivid exploration of one of the most evocative and influential spaces in 20th-century art connects us with both a unique career and an entire, outstanding moment in French culture.

The Moment of Caravaggio


Michael Fried - 2010
    In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting.Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.

ART OF NEAL ADAMS


Neal Adams - 2010
    From his Ben Casey newspaper strips to Creepy magazine work to groundbreaking comic books, Adams' work serves as an inspiration for every illustrator who works in the field to this day. His topflight 60s and `70s Marvel and DC work are perennial sellers in infinite repackaging. Coinciding with the launch of his Continuity Studio, Adams expanded into cutting-edge advertising work, amusement park ride design, magazine illustration, animation, and paperback book covers. Included in this collection are classic and rare works spanning the artist's noted career and a unique selection of Neal's seldom-seen paintings. Fully annotated by the artist.

John Kelsey: Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art


John Kelsey - 2010
    "When the critic chooses to become a smuggler, a hack, a cook, or an artist," Kelsey said, "it's maybe because criticism as such remains tied to an outmoded social relation." Kelsey's "rich texts" play the double role of explaining the art world and actively participating in it; they close the distance between the work of art and how we talk about it. These playful, elegant writings - many originally published in Artforum - embody a timelessness that strikes at the core of the contemporary art world. The newest edition from the terrific Institut fur Kunstkritik series.

Art HistoryPortable, Book 5: A View of the World, Part Two: Asian, African, and Oceanic Art and Art of the Americas


Marilyn Stokstad - 2010
    These hallmarks make ART HISTORYthe choice for instructors who seek to actively engage their students in the study of art. This new edition of ART HISTORY is the result of a happy and productive collaboration between two scholar-teachers (Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren) who share a common vision that survey courses on the history of art should be filled with as much enjoyment as erudition, and that they should foster an enthusiastic, as well as an educated, public for the visual arts. Like its predecessors, this new edition seeks to balance formal and iconographic analysis with contextual art history in order to craft interpretations that will engage a diverse student population. Throughout the text, the visual arts are treated as part of a larger world, in which geography, politics, religion, economics, philosophy, social life, and the other fine arts are related components of a vibrant and cultural landscape.Art History Portable Edition offers exactly the same content as Art History, Fourth Edition but in smaller individual booklets for maximum student portability. The combined six segment set consists of four booklets that correspond to major periods in Western art and two that cover global art. Each book is available individually, making them ideal for courses focused on individual periods.

Turner: His Life and Works in 500 Images


Michael Robinson - 2010
    It covers the entire period of his lifetime from the early years up until his death in 1851.

The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes


Matthew Jesse Jackson - 2010
      Kabakov’s art—iconoclastic installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—delicately experiments with such issues as history, mortality, and disappearance, and here exemplifies a much larger narrative about the work of the artists who rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. By placing Kabakov and his conceptualist peers in line with our own contemporary perspective, Matthew Jesse Jackson suggests that the art that emerged in the wake of Stalin belongs neither entirely to its lost communist past nor to a future free from socialist nostalgia. Instead, these artists and the work they produced are inextricably part of a transnational art world for which the Soviet Union is largely a memory, fading fast.   Though remembrance tends to paint the past in broadly heroic tones, The Experimental Group leaves aside the art-hero in order to bring to life the everyday activities of individuals who circulated in a cultural environment that ultimately unmade the Soviet Union. Encompassing most of the nonconformist art world that burst forth between the late 1950s and mid-1980s, Jackson’s narrative builds outward from the life and art of Kabakov to the multimedia undertakings of the Moscow Conceptual Circle, bringing into focus a forgotten avant garde that flourished in the shadow of the official Soviet art establishment.    Lavishly illustrated in full color, and including many rare and previously unpublished documentary images, The Experimental Group is not only a vital contribution to a neglected chapter in the history of twentieth-century art but also a brilliant illumination of the life and work of one of its most remarkable figures.

Experimental Pattern Sourcebook: 300 Inspired Designs from Around the World


Jackie Herald - 2010
    The disk also includes 50 copyright-free patterns in vector format for your use.Author Jackie Herald’s selection is designed to inspire, provoke, amuse, and suggest new associations of ideas, materials, and imagery for further experimentation.The book features 40 contributors from 21 countries:AustraliaAustriaBulgariaCanadaColombiaDenmarkEstoniaFinlandGermanyIcelandIndiaItalyJapanKoreaNetherlandsSwedenTurkeyUkraineUnited KingdomUnited StatesVenezuela

Renoir in the 20th Century


Roger Benjamin - 2010
    During this period, Renoir was initially looking at painters such as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and dedicating himself to cheery subjects such as bathers, domestic idylls and landscapes that were influenced by both classical mythology and by his relocation to the South of France. The thinly brushed color and blurry outlines in later works such as the "Odalisques" and the "Bathers" of 1918-1919 (a picture that Renoir described as "a springboard for future research"), were much admired by an up-and-coming generation of avant-garde artists, who gravitated to their sensuality and to the fleshy richness of his nudes--qualities which have made his art so hugely popular and so widely reproduced. In the wealth of color illustrations in this book--which accompanies a major touring exhibition organized by the R�union des Mus�es Nationaux, the Mus�e d'Orsay and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art--it is possible to see clearly the influence that Renoir had on younger artists such as Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso, as well as how they received and studied his work.Along with Monet and Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a founder of the style that became known as Impressionism, and one of its most prolific members. Surviving most of his contemporaries, he lived to see his paintings hung at the Louvre alongside the old masters he so revered.

Durer And Beyond: Central European Drawings In The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, 1400 1700


Maryan W. Ainsworth - 2010
    Featured are numerous drawings by Albrecht Dürer, including his celebrated study sheet with a self-portrait. In addition to drawings by major artists such as Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Urs Graf, Hans Holbein the Younger, Friedrich Sustris, and Wenceslaus Hollar, the selection also highlights work by lesser known but equally superb draftsmen from the 14th to the end of the 17th century. Richly illustrated and fully documented with artist biographies, comparative illustrations, and enlightening commentary on the variety, quality, and purpose of the featured drawings, this book makes a significant scholarly contribution to a field that has not been widely explored.

The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais


John Guille Millais - 2010
    This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves: Devotions, Demons and Daily Life in the Fifteenth Century


Rob Dückers - 2010
    The craftsmanship of the anonymous artist who created it is visible in every extraordinary detail of the many leaves. This stunning volume is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Morgan Library in New York . The book presents more than 100 leaves of the manuscript, which contains some of the most beautiful illustrations of the Bible ever made, including important scenes from the Old and New Testaments as well as the Stations of the Cross and portraits of the saints. The text discusses the work’s patron, its artist, and the accomplishments of his contemporaries. With exquisite new photography, close-up details, and an in-depth discussion of the manuscript, this is the essential volume on a masterpiece.

Martin Ramirez: Reframing Confinement


Lynne Cook - 2010
    Martin Ramirez created nearly 450 drawings of remarkable visual clarity and expressive power while confined in a California mental institution for more than twenty-five years. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he achieved posthumous fame with recent exhibitions of his works. Eighty important drawings, culled from public and private collections, comprehensively survey his achievement and demonstrate that he was one of the great draftsmen of the twentieth century. The richness of Ramirez s drawings and the depth of historical and cultural influences in his work point to his deep engagement with society. The artist s unique process employing found items, homemade pigments, matchsticks, and large swaths of paper is explored, as are his personal experiences of poverty, exile, and confinement. The volume includes recent research about Ramirez s life, family, and art, and features examples from acache of previously unknown drawings by Ramirez, whose discovery caused a great sensation. This dazzling book displays Ramirez s skill and inventiveness and shows why his work is worthy of its own place in the annals of modern art.

Made for Mughal Emperors: Royal Treasures from Hindustan


Susan Stronge - 2010
    in arrangement with Roli & Janssen BV, The Netherlands"--Last p.

Reconsidering Gérôme


Scott Allan - 2010
    Crowds flocked to see his vividly rendered historical and Orientalist compositions, and thanks to the mass marketing of his work through mechanical reproduction, he reached audiences on an unprecedented scale.From the outset, however, his success met with critical hostility. Émile Zola, champion of Édouard Manet, dismissed Gérôme as a cynical manufacturer of anecdotal images for popular consumption—a critique repeatedly echoed by historians of modern art. In light of revisionist and postmodern trends over the past four decades, however, Gérôme’s work is now being approached with unprecedented seriousness and refreshing creativity. The ten essays in this volume go far in challenging critical biases against the artist and suggesting new avenues of research. These papers indeed suggest that we are just beginning to learn how to “read” Gérôme’s paintings in their full complexity.

Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing


Ann Cooper Albright - 2010
    Born in the same year (1878), both artists influenced the development of modern art in the early twentieth century by blending figurative gesture with abstraction. Duncan grew up in a free-spirited and artistic household in California and then moved to Europe. Walkowitz immigrated to the United States from Russia when he was a child and lived most of his life in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union School and the National Academy of Design.Walkowitz and Duncan met in 1906 in Paris at the studio of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Deeply impressed by Duncan's musicality and expressivity, Walkowitz drew thousands of images of Duncan dancing throughout his life. Because Walkowitz's renderings of Duncan were produced quickly, they carry an element of improvisational vitality that matches the dynamic energy of her presence onstage. In her introductory essay, author Ann Cooper Albright weaves literary theory, art criticism, and dance history into a fluid narrative to explore how Walkowitz's drawings realize Duncan's dancing on paper. Modern Gestures reproduces over fifty watercolors of this unique oeuvre, many of which have never before been published. A perfect gift, this sumptuous little volume will provide hours of enjoyment to anyone interested in dance or modern art.

Stephen Jones & the Accent of Fashion


Hanish Bowles - 2010
    It is illustrated throughout with incredible photographs from his illustrious career - among them are Jones' famous collaborations with Boy George, along with pictures from private collections and museums. The text focuses on varying aspects of his work such as his collaborations with John Galliano and with Thierry Mugler. The book also examines his work with photographers such as Bruce Weber and Nick Knight. Recent collections include: Marc Jacobs, L'Wren Scott, Giles Deacon, Gareth Pugh, Loewe, Christian Dior Haute Couture, PrA t-A-porter, Ski & Baby collections, John Galliano, Comme des Garcons. His recent commissions include: Dita von Teese/Crazy Horse, Bryan Adams, Immodesty Blaize, Take That, Sex and the City 2, Perrier Jouet, Printemps, Ascot, Disneyland, Kylie Minogue, Kate Moss/Met Ball."

Beksinski: The Collected Works III: Drawings


Zdzisław Beksiński - 2010
    

Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era


Ezra Shales - 2010
    Local artisans demonstrated crafts, connecting the cultural institution to the department store, school, and factory, all of which invoked the ideal of municipal patriotism. Today, as cultural institutions reappraise their relevance, Made in Newark explores precedents for contemporary debates over the ways the library and museum engage communities, define heritage in a multicultural era, and add value to the economy.