Best of
Art-History

2016

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts


Christopher de Hamel - 2016
    Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is like meeting a very famous person. We may all pretend that a well-known celebrity is no different from anyone else, and yet there is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to a person of world stature.The idea for the book, which is entirely new, is to invite the reader into intimate conversations with twelve of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to explore with the author what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and sometimes about the modern world too. Christopher de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, collectors and the international community of manuscript scholars, showing us how he and his fellows piece together evidence to reach unexpected conclusions. He traces the elaborate journeys which these exceptionally precious artefacts have made through time and space, shows us how they have been copied, who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell), how they have been embroiled in politics and scholarly disputes, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and luxury and as symbols of national identity. The book touches on religion, art, literature, music, science and the history of taste.Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts conveys the fascination and excitement of encountering some of the greatest works of art in our culture which, in the originals, are to most people completely inaccessible. At the end, we have a slightly different perspective on history and how we come by knowledge. It is a most unusual book.

A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen


David Hockney - 2016
    Here, in a collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford, he explores the many ways that artists have pictured the world, sharing sparkling insights and ideas that will delight every art lover and art maker. Readers who thrilled to Hockney’s Secret Knowledge know that he has an uncanny ability to get into the minds of artists. In A History of Pictures he covers far more ground, getting at the roots of visual expression and technique through hundreds of images—from cave paintings to frames from movies—that are reproduced. It’s a joyful celebration of one of humanity’s oldest impulses.

Van Gogh's Ear: The True Story


Bernadette Murphy - 2016
    It is the most famous story about any artist in history. But what really happened on that dark winter night?In Van Gogh's Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals the truth. She takes us on an extraordinary journey from major museums to forgotten archives, vividly reconstructing Van Gogh's world. We meet police inspectors and café patrons, prostitutes and madams, his beloved brother Theo and fellow painter Paul Gauguin.Why did Van Gogh commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious 'Rachel' to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he really remove his entire ear? Murphy answers these important questions with her groundbreaking discoveries, offering a stunning portrait of an artist edging towards madness in his pursuit of excellence.BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEKPRIMETIME BBC2 DOCUMENTARY WITH JEREMY PAXMAN

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures


Eric R. Kandel - 2016
    Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism―the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components―has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths. He draws on his Nobel Prize-winning work revealing the neurobiological underpinnings of learning and memory in sea slugs to shed light on the complex workings of the mental processes of higher animals.In Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Kandel shows how this radically reductionist approach, applied to the most complex puzzle of our time―the brain―has been employed by modern artists who distill their subjective world into color, form, and light. Kandel demonstrates through bottom-up sensory and top-down cognitive functions how science can explore the complexities of human perception and help us to perceive, appreciate, and understand great works of art. At the heart of the book is an elegant elucidation of the contribution of reductionism to the evolution of modern art and its role in a monumental shift in artistic perspective. Reductionism steered the transition from figurative art to the first explorations of abstract art reflected in the works of Turner, Monet, Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and Mondrian. Kandel explains how, in the postwar era, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Louis, Turrell, and Flavin used a reductionist approach to arrive at their abstract expressionism and how Katz, Warhol, Close, and Sandback built upon the advances of the New York School to reimagine figurative and minimal art. Featuring captivating drawings of the brain alongside full-color reproductions of modern art masterpieces, this book draws out the common concerns of science and art and how they illuminate each other.

Vincent's Starry Night and Other Stories: A Children's History of Art


Michael Bird - 2016
    The book also includes reproductions of featured artworks, a comprehensive timeline of events, and extra feature spreads on places connected with art.An essential reference book for all children who love art and stories, this book is the perfect blend of both. Discover artists and their art around the world, in exciting and imaginative tales about artists and the way they created their work.• Fresh, new take on presenting the history of art – using a well-thought-out timeline, carefully selected artists and artworks, beautiful illustrations, and engaging storytelling, this book will delight all curious minds• Perfect for home, classroom or school library – an interesting supplement to learning about art and history for parents and teachers• Be inspired – the stories explore art from different parts of the world, and they draw on events from history that inspired many great works of art• A beautiful gift – this is a beautiful book; hardcover with exquisite illustrations and photographs throughoutLet your child discover the wonder of art and history with Vincent's Starry Night and Other Stories. Michael Bird is a writer, art historian and radio broadcaster. His books include 100 Ideas that Changed Art. He has also published many essays and articles, and lectures widely. He currently holds a Goodison Fellowship at the British Library, where he is researching the oral history of modern British art.Kate Evans is a freelance illustrator with clients including HarperCollins, The Guardian, Macmillan Books, National Geographic, Transport for London and V&A Magazine. She has had exhibitions in Bristol, Bath, London and Stockholm. Kate lives and works in Bristol.

Frida Kahlo at Home


Suzanne Barbezat - 2016
    Along with a plethora of images of [Kahlo's] paintings, the book features archive images, family photographs, objects, and artifacts from her personal collection as well as photos of the surrounding landscape, all of which offer insight into how these places shaped her work and vision.' - An Artnet Favourite Art Book of 2016

Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and Michelangelo


Stephanie Storey - 2016
    Leonardo was a charming, handsome fifty year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-twenties, desperate to make a name for himself.Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most famous sculptures of all time: David. Even though his impoverished family shuns him for being an artist, he is desperate to support them. Living at the foot of his misshapen block of marble, Michelangelo struggles until the stone finally begins to speak. Working against an impossible deadline, he begins his feverish carving.Meanwhile, Leonardo’s life is falling apart: he loses the hoped-for David commission; he can’t seem to finish any project; he is obsessed with his ungainly flying machine; he almost dies in war; his engineering designs disastrously fail; and he is haunted by a woman he has seen in the market—a merchant’s wife, whom he is finally commissioned to paint. Her name is Lisa, and she becomes his muse.Leonardo despises Michelangelo for his youth and lack of sophistication. Michelangelo both loathes and worships Leonardo’s genius.Oil and Marble is the story of their nearly forgotten rivalry. Storey brings early 16th-century Florence alive, and has entered with extraordinary empathy into the minds and souls of two Renaissance masters. The book is an art history thriller.

This is Caravaggio


Annabel Howard - 2016
    He spent a large part of his life on the run, leaving a trail of illuminated chaos wherever he passed, most of it recorded in criminal justice records. When he did settle for long enough to paint, he produced works of staggering creativity and technical innovation. He was famous throughout Italy for his fulminating temper, but also for his radical and sensitive humanization of biblical stories, and in particular his decision to include the brutal and dirty life of the street in his paintings. Caravaggio was a rebel and a violent man, but he eyed the world with deep empathy, realism, and an unrelenting honesty.

You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin


Rachel Corbett - 2016
    The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.

Landscapes: John Berger on Art


John Berger - 2016
    As a master storyteller and thinker John Berger challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives.In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He pays homage to the writers and thinkers who infuenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists—from the Renaissance to the present—while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation.Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist’s eye makes him a storyteller in these essays, rather than a critic. With “landscape” as an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid defnition, this collection surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished John Berger’s understanding of the world. Landscapes—alongside Portraits—completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation


James Stourton - 2016
    As writer and presenter of the 13-part TV series Civilisation he was responsible for the greatest syntheses of art, music, literature and thought ever made – ‘a contribution to civilisation itself’.Drawing on previously unseen archives, James Stourton reveals the formidable intellect and the complicated private man who wielded enormous influence on all aspects of the arts and drew into his circle a diverse group, many of whom he and his wife Jane would entertain at Saltwood Castle. These included E.M. Forster, Vivien Leigh, Margot Fonteyn, the Queen Mother, Winston Churchill, John Betjeman, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. Hidden from view, however, was his wife’s alcoholism and his own womanising.From his time as Bernard Berenson’s protege at I Tatti in Florence to being the Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean aged 27 – by which time he had published The Gothic Revival, the first of his many books – to his appointment as the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery, Clark displayed precocious genius. During the war he arranged for the gallery’s entire collection to be hidden in slate mines in Wales, and organised packed concerts of German classical music at the empty gallery to keep up the spirits of Londoners. The war and the Cold War that followed convinced him of the fragility of culture and that, as a potent humanising force, art should be brought to the widest possible audience, a social and moral position that would inform the rest of his career.No voice has exercised so much power and influence over the arts in Britain as Clark’s. James Stourton has written a dazzling biography of a towering figure in the art world, a passionate art historian of the Italian Renaissance and a brilliant communicator who, through the many mediums of his work, conveyed the profound beauty and importance of art, architecture and civilisation for generations to come.

A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley


Jane Kamensky - 2016
    But, married to the daughter of a tea merchant and seeking artistic approval from abroad, he could not sever his own ties with Great Britain. Rather, ambition took him to London just as the war began. His view from abroad as rich and fascinating as his harrowing experiences of patriotism in Boston, Copley’s refusal to choose sides cost him dearly. Yet to this day, his towering artistic legacy remains shared by America and Britain alike.

Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life


Joseph Leo Koerner - 2016
    But despite their differences, the works of these two artists are closely intertwined. Bruegel began his career imitating Bosch's fantasies, and it was Bosch who launched almost the whole repertoire of later genre painting. But Bosch depicts everyday life in order to reveal it as an alluring trap set by a metaphysical enemy at war with God, whereas Bruegel shows this enemy to be nothing but a humanly fabricated mask. Attending closely to the visual cunning of these two towering masters, Koerner uncovers art history's unexplored underside: the image itself as an enemy.An absorbing study of the dark paradoxes of human creativity, Bosch and Bruegel is also a timely account of how hatred can be converted into tolerance through the agency of art. It takes readers through all the major paintings, drawings, and prints of these two unforgettable artists--including Bosch's notoriously elusive Garden of Earthly Delights, which forms the core of this historical tour de force. Elegantly written and abundantly illustrated, the book is based on Koerner's A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, a series given annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The Lover's Portrait


Jennifer S. Alderson - 2016
    That is, until American art history student Zelda Richardson sticks her nose in.After studying for a year in the Netherlands, Zelda scores an internship at the prestigious Amsterdam Historical Museum, where she works on an exhibition of paintings and sculptures once stolen by the Nazis, lying unclaimed in Dutch museum depots almost seventy years later.When two women claim the same painting, the portrait of a young girl entitled Irises, Zelda is tasked with investigating the painting’s history and soon finds evidence that one of the two women must be lying about her past. Before she can figure out which one it is and why, Zelda learns about the Dutch art dealer’s concealed collection. And that Irises is the key to finding it.Her discoveries make her a target of someone willing to steal – and even kill – to find the missing paintings. As the list of suspects grows, Zelda realizes she has to track down the lost collection and unmask a killer if she wants to survive.The Lover’s Portrait: An Art Mystery draws on the author’s experiences gained while studying art history in the Netherlands and working for several Dutch museums. All of the amateur sleuth mysteries in the Zelda Richardson Mystery Series are stand-alone novels and can be read in any order:The Lover’s Portrait: An Art MysteryRituals of the Dead: An Artifact MysteryMarked for Revenge: An Art Heist ThrillerRelated subjects include: women sleuths, historical mysteries, amateur sleuth books, murder mysteries, whodunit mysteries (whodunnit), travel fiction, cultural heritage, suspense, art crime, art theft, World War II, art history.

What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity


Jean Clottes - 2016
    While other books focus on particular sites and surveys, Clottes’s work is a contemplative journey across the world, a personal reflection on how we have viewed these paintings in the past, what we learn from looking at them across geographies, and what these paintings may have meant—what function they may have served—for their artists. Steeped in Clottes’s shamanistic theories of cave painting, What Is Paleolithic Art? travels from well-known Ice Age sites like Chauvet, Altamira, and Lascaux to visits with contemporary aboriginal artists, evoking a continuum between the cave paintings of our prehistoric past and the living rock art of today. Clottes’s work lifts us from the darkness of our Paleolithic origins to reveal, by firelight, how we think, why we create, why we believe, and who we are.

The Tarot Coloring Book


Theresa Reed - 2016
    Created especially for new practitioners and people who’ve been intimidated by Tarot, this guide was created to help you get going immediately with a Tarot practice that will grow and deepen for many years to come. As you relax and enjoy coloring illustrations from the classic Rider Waite deck, you’ll experience Reed’s accessible guidance as she shares: • Card-by-card insights on the symbolism, meaning, and hidden wisdom of all 78 Major and Minor Arcana • Guidance for coloring—what the classic colors mean, and why it’s sometimes even better to choose your own • Easy, jargon-free explanations about the history and practice of Tarot • Beginner-friendly spreads to help you get to answers fast and aid in decision-making • Tarot-to-Go—a handy quick-reference guide for the essential meaning of each card "As you color the images, you’ll find yourself seeing symbols that you may not have noticed before," writes Theresa. "You’ll see stories and patterns begin to emerge. You’ll find your own meanings while learning the traditional ones." Now you can master the entire deck with a unique and enjoyable guidebook for exploring the hidden aspects of this classic divination system.

Donald Judd Writings


Donald Judd - 2016
    Moreover, this new collection also includes unpublished college essays and hundreds of never-before-seen notes, a critical but unknown part of Judd’s writing practice. Judd’s earliest published writing, consisting largely of art reviews for hire, defined the terms of art criticism in the 1960s, but his essays as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, published here for the first time, contain the seeds of his later writing, and allow readers to trace the development of his critical style. The writings that followed Judd’s early reviews are no less significant art-historically, but have been relegated to smaller publications and have remained largely unavailable until now. The largest addition of newly available material is Judd’s unpublished notes—transcribed from his handwritten accounts of and reactions to subjects ranging from the politics of his time, to the literary texts he admired most. In these intimate reflections we see Judd’s thinking at his least mediated—a mind continuing to grapple with questions of its moment, thinking them through, changing positions, and demonstrating the intensity of thought that continues to make Judd such a formidable presence in contemporary visual art. Edited by the artist’s son, Judd Foundation curator and co-president Flavin Judd, and Judd Foundation archivist Caitlin Murray, this volume finally provides readers with the full extent of Donald Judd’s influence on contemporary art, art history, and art criticism.

Akira Yoshizawa, Japan's Greatest Origami Master: Featuring over 60 Models and 1000 Diagrams by the Master


Akira Yoshizawa - 2016
    He served as a bridge between past and present—between the ancient traditional craft and the development of origami as a contemporary practice—inventing new techniques and in preserving the traditional Japanese forms. In fact, the notational system of diagrams widely used today to indicate how models are folded was developed mainly by him. Above all, Yoshizawa was responsible for elevating origami to the status of an art form. This beautiful origami book is the first comprehensive survey of the extraordinary work of Akira Yoshizawa. In addition to 60 models from his private collection, it features over 1,000 original drawings by the artist, and English translations of his writings in Japanese on origami, all of which are published here for the very first time. Origami projects include:The Koinobori and the HelmetButterflies of Every KindFairy Tale Crowns and CapsThe Lion MaskThe Tengu Masksand much more!Akira Yoshizawa also contains an explanation of the Master's personal philosophy of origami by Yoshizawa's widow, Kiyo Yoshizawa and an insightful introduction from Robert Lang, a leading artist and exponent of origami art in the West.

Lartigue: Life in Color


Martine D'Astier - 2016
    He began by recording the pastimes and customs of his wealthy Parisian milieu, indulging his fascination with sports and aviation, and throughout his long life he was never without his camera. His friendships extended to the superstars of French culture, but he also made thousands of photographs of his family, wives, and lovers. His work was irresistibly warm and engaging.   Although known for his black-and-white work, Lartigue loved color film, experimenting with the Autochrome process in the teens and twenties and embracing Ektachrome in the late 1940s. His color work, reproduced here for the first time, is astonishingly fresh: the French countryside, the women in his life, famous friends (Picasso, Fellini), and glimpses from his travels all come alive in this delightful book.

Living With: Yuko Shimizu


Yuko Shimizu - 2016
    Owing to her immense talent and the success of her work, in 2009 Newsweek Japan selected Yuko as one of the "100 Japanese People The Art, Design, Illustration, Fashion, Gift World Respects."Her rich sensual work has been seen on Gap t-shirts, Pepsi cans, VISA billboards, Microsoft and Target ads, as well as on the book covers for DC Comics, and on the pages of the New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker.Visually engaging, imaginative and provocative, Shimizu creates a unique and alluring universe through her illustration, which is inhabited by tangled limbs, tangled hair and stripy-socked girls. Living with: Yuko Shimizu is an affordable, interactive way of enjoying these imaginative works.This book, with a subtle perforation along the spine, presents 32 of her most stunning artworks, each one removable for framing or gifting.Also available in the series: Living With: Hattie Stewart ISBN: 9781909399778 Living With: My Dead Pony ISBN: 9781909399747

Vigée Le Brun


Katharine BaetjerAnna Sulimova - 2016
      Alongside 85 of her finest paintings and drawings from international museums and collections, this handsome volume details Vigée Le Brun’s story, portraying a talented and intelligent artist who was able to negotiate a shifting political and geographic landscape. Providing further context for the life of this extraordinary individual, essays by international experts address topics such as her travels in exile and the position of women artists in the Salons.

Michelangelo for Kids: His Life and Ideas, with 21 Activities


Simonetta Carr - 2016
    His impressive masterpieces astonished his contemporaries and remain some of today’s most famous artworks. Young readers will come to know Michelangelo the man as well as the artistic giant, following his life from his childhood in rural Italy to his emergence as a rather egotistical teenager to a humble and caring old man. They’ll learn that he did exhausting, back-breaking labor to create his art yet worked well, even with humor, with others in the stone quarry and in his workshop. Michelangelo for Kids offers an in-depth look at his life, ideas, and accomplishments, while providing a fascinating view of the Italian Renaissance and how it shaped and affected his work.  Budding artists will come to appreciate Michelangelo’s techniques and understand exactly what made his work so great. Twenty-one creative, fun, hands-on activities illuminate Michelangelo’s various artistic mediums as well as the era in which he lived. Kids can: make homemade paint, learn the cross-hatching technique used by Michelangelo, make an antique statue, build a model fortification, compose a Renaissance-style poem, and much more.

The Book of Bibles


Stephan Fussel - 2016
    With examples from every epoch of the Middle Ages, the collection explores visualizations of the bible in various theological and historical contexts. In impeccable reproduction quality, these stunning images may be appreciated as much as art historical treasures as they are important religious artifacts.Texts by Andreas Fingernagel, Stephan Fussel, Christian Gastgeber, and a team of 15 scientific authors describe each manuscript in detail, exploring both the evolution of the Bible and the medieval understanding of history. A glossary of important terms is also included so that those not versed in bible history can enjoy the texts as well.About the series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite!"

Barbara Hepworth: Writings and Conversations


Sophie Bowness - 2016
    The compilation finally makes available previously out-of-print and inaccessible writings, and includes a significant number of unpublished texts. A surprisingly large body of work, it spans almost the whole of Hepworth’s artistic life. Her gift for language and desire to communicate to a public are evident throughout. Alongside the writings are Hepworth’s lectures and speeches, a selection of interviews and conversations with writers and journalists, and radio and television broadcasts. The collection sheds new light on Hepworth’s life, her artistic practices, the sources of her inspiration, the breadth of her intellectual interests, and her deep engagement with contemporary politics and society, from the United Nations to St. Ives. Images include replications of the sculptor’s manuscripts and archive photographs from Hepworth’s own collection.

Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence


Martin Bailey - 2016
    Based on original research, the book reveals discoveries that throw new light on the legendary artist and give a definitive account of his fifteen months spent in Arles, including his collaboration with Gauguin.Van Gogh headed to Arles believing that the landscape of Provence would have parallels with Japan, whose art he greatly admired. The south of France was an exciting new land, bursting with life. He loved walking the 5 kilometres up into the hills with the ruined abbey of Montmajour and in late spring he drew and painted over a dozen landscapes there. He went on an excursion to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a fishing village on the far side of the Camargue, where he saw the Mediterranean for the first time, energetically capturing it in paint. He painted portraits of friends and locals, and embarked on his flower still life paintings, culminating in the Sunflowers. During the heat of the Provencal summer, Van Gogh painted harvest scenes. He rented the Yellow House from May, and gradually did it up, calling it "an artist's house", inviting Paul Gauguin to join him there. This encounter was to have a profound impact on both of the artists. They painted side by side in the Alyscamps, an ancient necropolis on the outskirts of town, their collaboration coming to a dramatic end in December.The difficulties Van Gogh faced living by himself led to his eventual decision in May 1889 to retreat to the asylum at Saint-Remy. One of his final tasks at the Yellow House was to pack up two crates with his last eight months' of paintings. Unsold in his lifetime, the pictures have since been recognized as some of the greatest works of art ever created.

Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies


Ross King - 2016
    Seeing them in museums around the world, viewers are transported by the power of Monet's brush into a peaceful world of harmonious nature. Monet himself intended them to provide “an asylum of peaceful meditation.” Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced at the difficulties of capturing the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life.Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies, as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny, and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then 73 and one of the world's wealthiest, most celebrated painters, had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called "the most prodigious eye in the history of painting"--was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture--from his lavish lifestyle and tempestuous personality to his close friendship with the fiery war leader Georges Clemenceau, who regarded the Water Lilies as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit.

The Secret Birds


Tony Fitzpatrick - 2016
    Following a successful quadruple bypass surgery in January 2015, Fitzpatrick muses on mortality and a life spent traveling, collecting, and telling stories.Tony Fitzpatrick's work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. Before making a living as an artist, Fitzpatrick worked as a radio host, bartender, boxer, construction worker, and film and stage actor.

Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet


Omar Kholeif - 2016
    It includes essays by curator Omar Kholeif, Ed Halter and Erika Balsom; conversations between pioneering video artist Judith Barry and Sarah Perks; and newly commissioned artist interviews with Ulla Wiggen and Jonas Lund by S'amus McCormack, plus a sequence of artist interventions from Douglas Coupland.

Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism


Jonathan A. Anderson - 2016
    While appreciating Rookmaaker's invaluable contribution to the study of theology and the arts, this volume coauthored by an artist and a theologian responds to his work and offers its own answers to these questions by arguing that there were actually strong religious impulses that positively shaped modern visual art. Instead of affirming a pattern of decline and growing antipathy towards faith, the authors contend that theological engagement and inquiry can be perceived across a wide range of modern art French, British, German, Dutch, Russian and North American and through particular works by artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, David Jones, Caspar David Friedrich, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Warhol and many others. This book, the first in IVP Academic's new Studies in Theology and the Arts series, brings together the disciplines of art history and theology and points to the signs of life in modern art in order to help Christians navigate these difficult waters."

Hilma AF Klint: Painting the Unseen


Daniel Birnbaum - 2016
    Privately, however, af Klint was already beginning to discard what she had learned at the Academy in favor of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.As early as 1906, af Klint was working with abstract imagery--giving her a lead of several years in the modernist race to be the first to discover abstraction. She joined a group of four other female artists, "The Five," which held s�ances and experimented with automatic writing and drawing--decades before the Surrealists would do something similar.In 1905, af Klint received a "commission" from the mysterious entity Amaliel to create her most important body of work: The Paintings for the Temple. Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen focuses on this important series, consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups. Claiming to act as merely a medium for spiritual forces guiding her hand, af Klint painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science.Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.

America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s


Judith A. Barter - 2016
    This decade was a supremely creative period in the United States, as the nation’s artists, novelists, and critics struggled through the Great Depression seeking to define modern American art. In the process, many painters challenged and reworked the meanings and forms of modernism, reaching no simple consensus. This period was also marked by an astounding diversity of work as artists sought styles—ranging from abstraction to Regionalism to Surrealism—that allowed them to engage with issues such as populism, labor, social protest, and to employ an urban and rural iconography including machines, factories, and farms.   Seminal works by Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis, and others show such attempts to capture the American character. These groundbreaking paintings, highlighting the relationship between art and national experience, demonstrate how creativity, experimentation, and revolutionary vision flourished during a time of great uncertainty.

Hieronymus Bosch, Painter and Draughtsman: Catalogue Raisonné


Matthijs Ilsink - 2016
    His mastery and genius have been redefined as a result of six years of research on the iconography, techniques, pedigree, and conservation history of his paintings and on his life. This stunning volume includes all new photography, as well as up-to-date research on the individual works. For the first time, the incredible creativity of this late medieval artist, expressed in countless details, is reproduced and discussed in this book. Special attention is being paid to Bosch as an image maker, a skilled draughtsman, and a brutal painter, changing the game of painting around 1500 by his innovative way of working.

Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology


Nikolaus Hirsch - 2016
    By engaging artists' widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe--and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North--Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.

Heart of the Brush: The Splendor of East Asian Calligraphy


Kazuaki Tanahashi - 2016
    This book is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the history and art of calligraphy as it's been practiced for centuries in China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia. It works as a guide for the beginner hoping to develop an appreciation for Asian calligraphy, for the person who wants to give calligraphy-creation a try, as well as for the expert or afficionado who just wants to browse through and exult in lovely examples. It covers the history and development of the art, then the author invites the reader to give it a try.      The heart of the book, called "Master Samples and Study," presents 150 characters--from "action" to "zen"--each in a two-page spread. On each verso page the character is presented in three different styles, each one chosen for its beauty and identified by artist when possible. The character's meaning, pronunciation (in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese), etymology, the pictograph from which it evolved, and other notes of interest are included. At the bottom of the page the stroke order is shown: the sequence of brush movements, numbered in their traditional order. On each facing recto page is Kaz's own interpretation of the character, full page.

Exchanging Van Goghs


Joe Beine - 2016
    They send each other postcards with reproductions of art by Van Gogh, Monet, Morisot, Manet, Rothko and others, as their lives slowly intertwine."Last year a lone sunflower started growing in the south garden. Maybe a seed blew in from a neighbor's yard. Maybe it was a touch of Vincent's spirit. I started noticing the flower would turn itself toward the sun in the morning, waking up. I thought that was magical. This year the sunflower did not return. So its magic was fleeting. I should probably plant some sunflower seeds, but I'm sure they would just flop over. Or the peonies would be jealous." -Rezzie in Exchanging Van Goghs

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance: Photography in Japan 1960-1975


Diane Dufour - 2016
    The magazine's goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country's first large-scale student protests. The movement yielded a wave of new books featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively "poor" materials. The writings and images by Provoke's members--critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yakata Takanashi and Daido Moriyama--were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held on the magazine and its creators. Illuminating the various uses of photography in Japan at the time, the catalogue focuses on selected projects undertaken between 1960 and 1975 that offer a strongly interpretative account of currents in Japanese art and society at a moment of historical collapse and renewal.

How to Read Medieval Art


Wendy A. Stein - 2016
      Formal explorations of individual works, chosen to exemplify key ideas crucial to understanding medieval art, are accompanied by relevant information about the context in which they were created, conveying the works’ visual nuances but also their broader symbolic meaning.  Superb color illustrations further reveal the visual and conceptual richness of medieval art, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of the history and iconography of this pivotal era.

World War I and American Art


Pearl James - 2016
    Nearly every major artist responded to events, whether as official war artists, impassioned observers, or participants on the battlefields. It was the moment when American artists, designers, and illustrators began to consider the importance of their contributions to the wider world and to visually represent the United States' emergent role in modern global politics. World War I and American Art provides an unprecedented consideration of the impact of the conflict on American artists and the myriad ways they reacted to it.Artists took a leading role in chronicling the war, crafting images that influenced public opinion, supported mobilization efforts, and helped to shape how the appalling human toll was mourned and memorialized. World War I and American Art features some eighty artists--including Ivan Albright, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Violet Oakley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Man Ray, John Singer Sargent, and Claggett Wilson--whose paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, posters, and ephemera span the diverse visual culture of the period to tell the story of a crucial turning point in the history of American art.Taking readers from the home front to the battlefront, this landmark book will remain the definitive reference on a pivotal moment in American modern art for years to come.Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Olympia Le-Tan: The Story of O.L.T.


Thomas Lenthal - 2016
    An admitted bookworm, designer Olympia Le-Tan is best known for creating one-of-a-kind handbags resembling literary classics such as Catcher in the Rye, Doctor Zhivago, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Olympia Le-Tan--designed to look like a bag that looks like a book--invites the reader to discover the scope of the multifaceted French designer's creations from her signature minaudieres to her quirky ready-to-wear line and seemingly endless collaborations with fellow artists and designers. Born in London and raised in Paris, Le-Tan, whose father and sometimes collaborator is celebrated illustrator Pierre Le-Tan, got her sartorial debut at the age of nineteen. After working with Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, Gilles Dufour at Balmain, and deejaying for the likes of Kirsten Dunst, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Purple magazine, she has earned the image of a prolific designer and worldly collector with a finger on the pulse of fashion. This book offers a playful and autobiographical glimpse into the world of Le-Tan and the inspirations behind her eclectic designs. Filled with candid photographs and charming illustrations, Olympia Le-Tan presents a whimsical look into one of the most creative designers on the scene today.

On the Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and his Illness


Marije Vellekoop - 2016
    Was he mentally ill or a genius? What was the precise nature of Van Gogh’s illness? Did it influence his work? This intriguing publication examines how Van Gogh’s mental condition revealed itself in 1888 and how he struggled with it throughout his life. Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, his artist friends, and his sister Willemien reveal that his primary reason for living was his art. Richly illustrated with artworks, letters, previously unpublished historical documents, and photographs, On the Verge of Insanity provides a nuanced and considered overview of an extraordinary man who had to cope with mental illness at a time when the symptoms were readily misunderstood and professional treatment was insufficient. The authors also offer a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding Van Gogh’s death in Auvers-sur-Oise, and they review the many diagnoses that have been proposed since the artist's death.

Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow


Laurie Wilson - 2016
    By 1950, she was an artist living on her own, financially dependent on her family, but she had received a glimmer of recognition from the establishment: inclusion in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1980, Nevelson celebrated her second Whitney retrospective. Her work was held in public collections around the world; her massive steel sculptures appeared in public spaces in seventeen states, including the Louise Nevelson Plaza in New York City’s Financial District.The story of Nevelson’s artistic, spiritual, even physical transformation (she developed a taste for outrageous outfits and false eyelashes made of mink) is dramatic, complex, and inseparable from major historical and cultural shifts of the twentieth century, particularly in the art world. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson brings a unique and sensitive perspective to Nevelson’s story, drawing on hours of interviews she conducted with Nevelson and her circle. Over 100 images, many of them drawn from personal archives and never before published, make this the most visually and narratively comprehensive biography of this remarkable artist yet published.

Bodoni: Manual of Typography


Stephan Fussel - 2016
    In his Manuale tipografico, published posthumously in 1818, he distilled these principles into a comprehensive catalog of type and set the standard for printing the alphabet thereafter.TASCHEN s meticulous reprint of Bodoni s masterwork celebrates what was an unprecedented degree of technical refinement and visual elegance, as well as exploring the origins of the much-loved Bodoni typeface, still much deployed in both print and digital media. Like the original, the book features 142 sets of roman and italic typefaces, a wide selection of borders, ornaments, symbols, and flowers, as well as Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, Phoenician, Armenian, Coptic, and Tibetan alphabets.About the series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite!"

A Place in the Sun: The Southwest Paintings of Walter Ufer and E. Martin Hennings


Thomas Brent Smith - 2016
    Martin Hennings (1886–1956) returned to the United States to foster the development of a national art. They ultimately established their reputations in the American Southwest. The two German American artists shared much in common, and both would gain membership in the celebrated Taos Society of Artists. Featuring nearly 150 color plates and historical photographs, A Place in the Sun is a long-overdue tribute to the lives, achievements, and artistic legacy of these two important artists. In tracing the lifelong friendship and intersecting careers of Ufer and Hennings, the contributors to this volume explore the social and artistic implications of the artists’ German heritage and training. Following their training in Munich, both men hoped to build careers in the spirited art environment of Chicago. Both were sponsored by wealthy businessmen, many of German descent. The support of these patrons allowed Ufer and Hennings to travel to the American Southwest, where they—like so many other talented artists—fell under the spell of Taos and its picturesque scenery. They also encountered the region’s Native peoples and Hispanic culture that inspired many of their paintings. Despite their mutual interests, Ufer and Hennings were not identical by any means. Each artist had a distinct artistic style and, as the essays in this volume reveal, the two men could not have had more different personalities or career trajectories. Connoisseurs of southwestern art have long admired the masterworks of Ufer and Hennings. By offering a rich sampling of their paintings alongside informative essays by noted art historians, A Place in the Sun ensures that their significant contributions to American art will be long remembered.A Place in the Sun is published in cooperation with the Denver Art Museum.

Object-Oriented Feminism


Katherine Behar - 2016
    Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.”Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an “object” in relation to others in this collection.  Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL.

Epitaphs of the Great War: The Somme


Sarah Wearne - 2016
    By the time the fighting in the region finally ended on November 18, 141 days later, the British and French had pushed the German lines back six miles—at a cost for all sides of more than 1 million soldiers killed or wounded. The Battle of the Somme was thus one of the bloodiest in human history, and it has occupied a central place in the tragic story of World War I for a century.         This book brings together one hundred epitaphs from headstones marking the graves of British soldiers who died in the battle. The Imperial War Graves Commission limited epitaphs to sixty-six letters, including spaces, a constraint that left little room for flowery sentiment and rendered these commemorations stark and unforgettable. Lieutenant Dillwyn Parrish Starr’s epitaph reads merely “Of Philadelphia, U.S.A.,” while Lieutenant Richard Roy Lewer’s reads “For England.” The headstone of South African Private John Paul however, asks “Did He Die in Vain?” Sarah Wearne has selected epitaphs that cover a range of approaches and emotions, from soldiers famous and forgotten, each one simultaneously a personal tribute to an individual and a marker of the era, the culture, and the sacrifices it expected. As the centennial commemorations of World War I continue, this book brilliantly reminds us that its staggering costs, while marked in the millions, ultimately reduce down to the individual.

Art for All. the Colour Woodcut in Vienna Around 1900


Tobias G Natter - 2016
    The gesture, though short-lived, and long overlooked by established art histories, may be seen as a decisive social, as well as aesthetic, moment. Elevating a primarily illustrative, mass-production medium to the status of fine art, the woodblock revival set a formal precedent for Expressionism while democratizing an art for all.Coinciding with the traveling exhibition through the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and Albertina, Vienna, this TASCHEN edition brings together leading examples of the Viennese woodblock renaissance to give a long overdue exploration of its achievements and influence. Through prints, publications, calendars and pages from Ver Sacrum, the official magazine of the Vienna Secession, it gathers works remarkable for their graphic and chromatic intensity, and vital with the traces of japonisme as much as the stylistic seeds of Die Br�cke, Der Blaue Reiter and later Expressionist movements.Through figure studies, landscapes, patterns, and typographical treasures, the featured works are accompanied by detailed captions, as well as essays exploring their aesthetic and ideological implications, and biographies for the more than 40 artists. Examining their stark contours, stylization of the surface per se, and tendency towards contained colour areas we evaluate the Viennese woodblocks as essential harbingers, and benchmarks, of the 20th century modernism to come. At the same time, we assess how the dissemination of the woodblocksubstantiated the Seccessionist claim for a democratized, all-encompassing art, while adding to their reappraisal of originality, and authenticity, and convention.

Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community


Jenni Sorkin - 2016
    Live Form shines new light on the relation of ceramics to the artistic avant-garde by looking at the central role of women in the field: potters who popularized ceramics as they worked with or taught male counterparts like John Cage, Peter Voulkos, and Ken Price. Sorkin focuses on three Americans who promoted ceramics as an advanced artistic medium: Marguerite Wildenhain, a Bauhaus-trained potter and writer; Mary Caroline (M. C.) Richards, who renounced formalism at Black Mountain College to pursue new performative methods; and Susan Peterson, best known for her live throwing demonstrations on public television. Together, these women pioneered a hands-on teaching style and led educational and therapeutic activities for war veterans, students, the elderly, and many others. Far from being an isolated field, ceramics offered a sense of community and social engagement, which, Sorkin argues, crucially set the stage for later participatory forms of art and feminist collectivism.

Georgia O'Keeffe


Tanya Barson - 2016
    Widely celebrated and recognized for her flower paintings and Southwest landscapes, O’Keeffe is revealed in full in this new book. With superb plates of more than 200 works, it ranges from well-known masterpieces to the abstractions, nature studies, and New York City scenes that have captivated new generations of art lovers. It includes essays from prominent art historians, among them Sarah Greenough, who explores the artist’s legendary personal and aesthetic partnership with Alfred Stieglitz; Griselda Pollock on O’Keeffe and feminism; and Cody Hartley on O’Keeffe and the American landscape. Accompanying the first major O’Keeffe retrospective exhibition in this century, Georgia O’Keeffe is the definitive volume for our time on one of America’s most beloved and influential artists.

A-Z of Bead Embroidery


Country Bumpkin Publications - 2016
    With over 440 step-by-step photographs, it brings bead embroidery within the reach of anyone who can thread a needle. Find out how to work tambour beading, beadpoint, padded beading, how to handle sequins and bugle beads, and so much more. Discover the best tools for the task and learn to identify different beads by their size, shape and finish. Full of hints, tips and historical insights, and all patterns are provided.

Fairfield Porter: Selected Masterworks


John Wilmerding - 2016
    A figurative realist in the heyday of abstract expressionism, Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) painted himself, his family, and friends in New York City, in Southampton, Long Island, and on an island off the Maine coast, all depicting a relaxed and comfortable world that seemed to mirror his own affluent, well-connected existence. With virtually all of the artist’s previous publications now out of print, this much-anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great American master.Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Along with months in Maine, Porter lived in New York and from 1948 on, in Southampton where he purchased a large, late Federal-style house for his own expanding family. Porter painted several artist friends, including Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. He was also close to the modern poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler.With a carefully curated selection of the artist’s best works, John Wilmerding, a specialist in American art, gives full consideration to Porter’s expressive compositions and a color palette influenced by his coastal surroundings. Karen Wilkin discusses Porter’s influences and pictorial creativity. Distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy writes a reflection on one of Porter’s paintings.

Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs


Sheila Canby - 2016
    This groundbreaking book examines the roots and impact of this formidable empire, featuring 300 objects as evidence of the artistic and cultural flowering that occurred under Seljuq rule.   Beginning with a historical overview of the dynasty, Court and Cosmos covers such topics as the rise of the Seljuq sultanate, the development of astrology and magic, the visual expression of discoveries in science, medicine, and technology, and the courtly, funerary, and literary arts. Glazed ceramics, incised glass, inlaid metalwork, handwoven textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and more are captured in new photographs. Court and Cosmos is a comprehensive study of the breadth of Seljuq achievement, illuminating the splendor of one of Islam’s most magnificent dynasties and providing insights into a rich cultural tradition that has shaped the legacy of Islamic culture to this day.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: King of Lesser Lands


Joanne Cubbs - 2016
    His large and unusual body of work was not discovered until after he died.In 1939, at the age of 29, Von Bruenchenhein met Evelyn Kalka. She became his wife and muse. Evelyn, who was nicknamed "Marie," served as his model and the subject of thousands of erotic photo-portraits, which he shot and printed himself. For these images, which emulated girlie-magazine pinups with an offbeat air, Von Bruenchenhein designed and created his own background sets and costumes for Marie.Around the mid-1950s, the artist began to make abstract paintings using his fingers or sticks, combs, leaves and other makeshift utensils to push oil paint around the surfaces of Masonite boards or cardboard taken from packing boxes at the bakery where he worked. Von Bruenchenhein's abstract explosions of vibrant color evoke the forms of strange plants or fantasy creatures and architectural structures. Later, Von Bruenchenhein used clay to produce home-fired crowns and vases, and also created mysterious sculptures resembling towers or thrones with chicken and turkey bones.During his lifetime, only his closest family members and friends knew anything about his artistic pursuits. In 1983, after the artist's death, one of his friends called the attention of the Milwaukee Art Museum to Von Bruenchenhein's extraordinary oeuvre.On the occasion of a 2010 survey of his work at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times: "Von Bruenchenhein belongs among the great American outsider artists whose work came to light or resurfaced in the last three decades of the 20th century." Smith placed Von Bruenchenhein's unusual art in the company of that of Henry Darger, Martin RamIrez, Bill Traylor, James Castle and Morton Bartlett.

Outcome: LGBT Portraits


Tom Dingley - 2016
    Several well known people are included.Two years and several exhibitions later, this is the Outcome.

The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881


Rosalind P. Blakesley - 2016
    Starting with the foundation of the Imperial Academy of the Arts in 1757 and culminating with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, it details the professionalization and wide-ranging activities of painters against a backdrop of dramatic social and political change. The Imperial Academy formalized artistic training but later became a foil for dissent, as successive generations of painters negotiated their own positions between pan-European engagement and local and national identities. Drawing on original archival research, this groundbreaking book recontextualizes the work of major artists, revives the reputations of others, and explores the complex developments that took Russian painters from provincial anonymity to international acclaim.

Pre-Raphaelites


Gordon Kerr - 2016
    Their name was a reference to their rejection of the Renaissance master Raphael and the immensely popular classical, elegant poses that had come to be fashionable. Instead, they included abundant colour and detail in their works, leading their movement to become an integral and controversial part of art history, which is explored in this beautifully illustrated new book.

Mid-Century Modern Architecture Travel Guide: West Coast USA


Sam Lubell - 2016
    Discover the most celebrated Modernist buildings, as well as hidden gems and virtually unknown examples - from the iconic Case Study houses to the glamour of Palm Springs' spectacular Modern desert structures. Much more than a travel guide, this book is a compelling record of one of the USA's most important architectural movements at a time when Mid-Century style has never been more popular. First-hand descriptions and colour photography transport readers into an era of unparalleled style, glamour, and optimism.

Rodin


François Blanchetière - 2016
    From a very early stage, he was interested in movement, the expression of the body, chance effects, and the incomplete fragment. It was these elements that gave shape, and the impression of life, to such famous works as The Kiss and The Thinker.Produced in collaboration with the Musee Rodin, this TASCHEN Basic Art introduction examines the formative years of Rodin s training as well as the key stages of his subsequent career. It retraces the genesis of his sculptures and monuments from both a historical and an aesthetic point of view and illuminates the links between his different works. The reader gains access to the artist s ideas, as well as to the real material processes in his studio the modelling in clay, the passage from plaster to bronze or to marble, enlargement, the creation of assemblages, and his deeply sensual erotic drawings.An inexhaustible source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists, Rodin s work incorporated innovation and transgression, but above all an unrivalled passion for working in front of the living model and for capturing the truth of human experience and forms. With rich illustration and texts from Francois Blanchetiere, this book invites us to discover and rediscover this priceless legacy.About the series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions"

Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City


Amanda C. Burdan - 2016
    Paintings of New England coastlines, small-town Pennsylvania, Southwestern canyons, Midwestern farms, and other evocative landscapes fill the pages of Rural Modern. More than sixty modernist works, created between the wars, present an important and often overlooked history: how American painters adapted avant-garde styles like Cubism and Fauvism to reimagine familiar landscapes and develop a distinctively American modernist vernacular.Richly illustrated and with insightful essays by noted scholars, Rural Modern traces this development through a broad range of works by both lesser-known and widely celebrated artists, including Arthur Dove, Dale Nichols, Grant Wood, N. C. Wyeth, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, and Stuart Davis. As important as the marvel of the twentieth-century city was to modernist artists such as these, many sought respite and even refuge in quieter, rural areas of the country, and soon helped to confirm modernism’s enduring nature.

Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect


Annette Blaugrund - 2016
    Why would this renowned painter, who had never before designed a building, advertise himself as such?   The importance of Cole’s paintings and the significance of his essays, poems, and philosophy are well established, yet an analysis of his architectural endeavors and their impact on his painting has not been undertaken—until now. In celebration of the recreation of the artist’s self-designed Italianate studio at Cedar Grove in Catskill, New York, now the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, this book focuses on Cole’s architectural interests through architectural elements found in his paintings and drawings as well as in his realized and visionary projects, expanding our understanding of the breadth of his talents and interests.   An essay by noted art historian Annette Blaugrund and a contribution by Franklin Kelly, illustrated with Cole’s famous works, sketches, and architectural renderings, reveal an unexplored, yet fascinating, aspect of the career of this beloved artist—and thus, a crucial moment in the development of the Hudson River School and American art.   Published to coincide with the exhibition “Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and travelling to the Columbus Art Museum, the book adds a new dimension to scholarship on the artist.

Monet: The Early Years


George T.M. Shackelford - 2016
    Bringing together the greatest paintings from his early career—including his first Salon-exhibited work, the Kimbell Art Museum’s La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide; Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and The Magpie from the Musée d’Orsay; and The Green Wave and La Grenouillère from the Metropolitan Museum of Art—it features essays by distinguished scholars, focusing on the evolution of Monet’s own distinctive mode of painting. Through the 1860s, the young painter absorbed and transformed a variety of influences, from the lessons of the Barbizon school and his mentor Boudin to the challenges posed by his friends Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. Artistic innovation and personal ambition shaped the work of the celebrated impressionist painter from the very start of his long and illustrious career.

LOAC Essentials Volume 8: King Features Essentials 1: Krazy Kat


George Herriman - 2016
     The 1934 strips reprinted in this book fit anyone's definition of "essential." They show Krazy Kat at top speed, ever-changing, endlessly inventive, with language that sparkles with double meanings, and more, in lines such as "his malady drills me to my sole." The year includes homages to old jokes and bricks, followed by playful references to sex, drink, and even drugs. The daily Krazy Kat strips are often Herriman's most personal works and standouts in this year include Krazy Kat's attempt to write a memoir and the Kat's quietly waiting for the last leaf of "ottim" to fall (a tender scene that finds echoes in Charles Schulz's drawing Linus admiring the last autum's leaf stubborn spirit). It could also be argued that the daily is more accessible to the new reader. Herriman biographer Michael Tisserand provides an insightful introduction. LOAC ESSENTIALS reprints, in yearly volumes, the early daily newspaper strips that are essential to comics history, seminal strips that are unique creations in their own right, while also significantly contributing to the advancement of the medium. The strips are reproduced one per page, giving readers an immersive experience, similar to the one newspapers readers had may decades ago--reading the comics one day at a time.

Greek Art and Archaeology C. 1200-30 BC


Dimitris Plantzos - 2016
    The book begins with an introductory chapter covering the basic principles of archaeological research as well as a concise survey of the developments that led to the establishment of classical archaeology as an academic discipline. Four chapters follow, covering developments in Greek art and archaeology in the Early Iron Age, the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods respectively. Through concise, systematic coverage of the main categories of classical monuments, the reader is taken on a tour of ancient Greece through the most important period in its history, the first millennium BC. Architecture and city planning, sculpture, painting, pottery, metallurgy, jewelry, and numismatics are some of the areas covered. The book caters primarily to the nonspecialist looking for the essential in ancient Greece. The text is divided into accessible, user-friendly sections including case studies, terminology, charts, maps, a timeline, and full index. Designed as an academic textbook, the volume will interest anyone seeking an inclusive and detailed survey of the most important material remains of ancient Greek civilization. Originally published in Greek by Kapon Edtions (Athens 2011), Greek Art and Archaeology is now expanded with additional material and illustrations specially provided for this edition, and in a translation by Nicola Wardle.

Social Medium: artists writing, 2000-2015


Jennifer LieseFiona Banner - 2016
    The seventy-five texts gathered here — essays, criticism, manifestos, fiction, diaries, scripts, blog posts, and tweets — chart a complex era in the art world and the world at large, weighing in on the exigencies of our times in unexpected and inventive ways.

Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Concise Global History


Fred S. Kleiner - 2016
    This beautifully illustrated fourth edition has been updated to make it easier than ever for your students to master the material. Gardner's 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 contexts; reproductions of unsurpassed quality; scholarship that is up-to-date and deep; the consistent voice of a single storyteller; reliability; and more online resources for students and instructors than any other art survey text.

Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past


Alison Smith - 2016
    Writers, artists, and museums have long played a role in documenting the cultural impact of British colonialism, and yet, since the vast Imperial exhibitions of the early 20th century, there has been no comprehensive presentation of the objects made across the British Empire. This publication, which accompanies a major Tate Britain exhibition, fills that gap.   In this landmark study, leading scholars focus on how particular objects tell the history of life under British rule. Paintings by artists such as John Singer Sargent and Sidney Nolan are presented alongside Benin bronze heads and Mughal miniatures in a survey that ranges from 16th-century colonialism to the British Empire’s decline in the postwar era.

Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race


Rebecca Peabody - 2016
    Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist’s book and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker’s production: her commitment to examining narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire. Consuming Stories considers Walker’s sustained visual engagement with literary genres such as the romance novel, the neo-slave narrative, and the fairy tale and with internationally known stories including Roots, Beloved, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Walker’s interruption of these familiar works , along with her generative use of the familiar in unexpected and destabilizing ways, reveals the extent to which genre-based narrative conventions depend on specific representations of race, especially when aligned with power and desire. Breaking these implicit rules makes them visible—and, in turn, highlights viewers’ reliance on them for narrative legibility. As this study reveals, Walker’s engagement with narrative continues beyond her early silhouette work as she moves into media such as film, video, and sculpture. Peabody also shows how Walker uses her tools and strategies to unsettle cultural histories abroad when she works outside the United States. These stories, Peabody reminds us, not only change the way people remember history but also shape the entertainment industry. Ultimately, Consuming Stories shifts the critical conversation away from the visual legacy of historical racism toward the present-day role of the entertainment industry—and its consumers—in processes of racialization.

William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master


Elsa Smithgall - 2016
    Chase was a leading member of the international artistic avant-garde and was best known for his mastery of a wide range of subjects in oil and pastel, including figures, landscapes, urban park scenes, interiors, and portraits. As a teacher and founder of the Shinnecock Summer School of Art and the New York School of Art, Chase mentored a new generation of modernists, including Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella.   A century after his death, the breadth and richness of Chase’s career are celebrated in this beautifully illustrated publication. Five essays by prominent scholars of American art offer new insights into Chase’s multi-faceted artistic practice and his position in the international cultural climate at the turn of the 20th century.

Historium Activity Book


Jo Nelson - 2016
    Get hands on in the museum, and discover a world of ancient artefacts in the Historium Activity Book.This companion activity book to the bestselling Historium is packed with puzzles to solve, pictures to colour, doodling, drawing and much, much more …This book guarantees hours of entertainment, with amazing facts to learn along the way!- Find your way through an Aztec Maze- Decorate an Egyptian mummy- Create your own Greek vase design

Botticelli Reimagined


Mark L. Evans - 2016
    His work has inspired countless others, and his legacy is easy to see in everything from Degas’s drawings and Warhol’s first computer portrait to Jeff Koons’s album cover for Lady Gaga. As famous as he is today, Botticelli was quickly forgotten after his death, only to be rediscovered in the 19th century. Much of what we know of his art has been pieced together, as only three of his works are signed or documented. Botticelli’s continuing impact raises a number of questions: How does a painter acquire international fame? What made Botticelli a pop icon? This fascinating book, published to accompany a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the first to contrast Botticelli’s work with modern appropriations of it—including paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, videos, fashion, and design by artists such as Edgar Degas, Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Bill Viola.

Architectural Theory: From the Renaissance to the Present


Bernd Evers - 2016
    If you ve ever wondered what goes through architects minds when they design buildings, you ll be happy to know that there s no shortage of brilliant reading material to satisfy your curiosity. Wading through the archives at your local library may prove fruitful to your endeavor, but it won t give you the instant gratification thatArchitecture Theorywill.This book brings together all of the most important and influential essays about architecture written since the Renaissance, copiously illustrated and neatly organized chronologically by country. From Alberti and Palladio to Le Corbusier and Koolhaas, the best treatises by architecture s greatest masters are gathered here, each accompanied by an essay discussing its historical context and significance. This is the all-in-one, must-have book for anyone interested in what architects have to say about their craft.The comprehensive overview that will help transform even the most uninformed novices into well-informed connoisseurs! About the Series: Bibliotheca Universalis Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing.Bibliotheca Universalisbrings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.Bookworm s delight never bore, always excite! "

The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World


Scot McKendrick - 2016
    Within this history illuminated biblical manuscripts are among the best tools for understanding early Christian painting and artistic interpretations of the Bible.This extensively illustrated new book, compiled and written by two internationally renowned experts, transports readers, by way of forty-five featured manuscripts, across the globe and through 1,000 years of history. Passing chronologically through many of the major centers of the Christian world, from Constantinople and imperial Aachen to Canterbury, Mozarabic Spain, Crusader Jerusalem, northern Iraq, Paris, London, Bologna, and Rome, Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle shed light on some of the finest but least-known paintings from the Middle Ages, and on the development of art, literature, and civilization as we know it.

Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Colonial Plantation Manager and Mother of American Patriots, 1722-1793


Margaret F. Pickett - 2016
    Soon after their arrival, England declared war on Spain and he was recalled to Antigua to join his regiment. His wife in poor health, he left his daughter Eliza, 17, in charge of his three plantations. Following his instructions, she began experimenting with plants at the family estate on Wappoo Creek. She succeeded in growing indigo and producing a rich, blue dye from the leaves, thus bringing a profitable new cash crop to Carolina planters. While her accomplishments were rare for a young lady of the 18th century, they were not outside the scope of what was expected of a woman at that time. This biography, drawn from her surviving letters and other sources, chronicles Eliza Pinckney's life and explores the 18th century world she inhabited.

Drawing & Painting Portraits in Watercolour


David Thomas - 2016
    Follow David Thomas as he explains the tools and materials you need, composition and colour theory, and practical techniques to let you unleash your own artistry.Learn how to paint figures and produce portraits that capture character and energy as well as a likeness. This book contains five step-by-step projects which encapsulate the core of portraiture, and also dozens of inspirational portraits and information which will let you apply the lessons to your own work.

Oscar de La Renta: The Retrospective


Jennifer Park - 2016
    In this fabulous book, readers will be immersed in the designs that made Oscar de la Renta one of fashion's most influential designers, who dressed celebrities, American First Ladies, and socialites from around the world. Thematic sections will trace de la Renta's journey, from his upbringing in the Dominican Republic; the rise of his career in Spain, where he gained his first commissions; his formative years spent in the world's preeminent fashion houses; and the eventual creation of the company that bears his name. Luxurious color illustrations include images from his historic 1973 fashion show at Versailles, his designs worn from the red carpet to the White House by glamor icons such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Taylor Swift, along with state dinner-worthy creations made exclusively for Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush. In addition, historic images from de la Renta's archives illuminate both the breadth and depth of the designer's work. Andre Leon Talley's heartfelt introduction looks back on a long and treasured friendship, and the authors examine the designer's artistry and technique, as well as the historical and cultural influences that fostered his visionary work in this elaborate tribute to a singular individual.

The Big Brother Book


Sean Cliver - 2016
    Constantly at the center of much-deserved controversy, the rag has been decried as pornography, bought and unexpectedly dropped by Larry Flynt of the Hustler empire, and credited as the genesis of the Jackass universe; it was also the champion of unknown skaters and featured some of today's biggest names in skate culture when they were just children. Now author Sean Cliver puts a bow on the publication with The Big Brother Book, a collection of covers and spreads from every issue of the notorious publication. Featuring high-quality scans of the magazine itself no production or layout files remain in existence with just enough text to explain what's going on and choice quotes from each issue, this book makes it easy as well as fun to stoop to Big Brother's level.

David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life


Tim Barringer - 2016
    In 2012, Hockney returned to California, where he had lived and worked for long periods. There followed a series of painted portraits, the subjects of which ranged from studio assistants and office staff to family, friends, and long-term acquaintances. Also included are a number of fellow artists, curators, and gallerists, including John Baldessari and Larry Gagosian. Reproduced in stunning colorplates along with two important new texts, this vivid series of portraits, executed in bold acrylics, is observant and full of life, marking Hockney’s vibrant return to Technicolor form.

Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art


Ian McLean - 2016
    But it is controversial, dividing the artists, purveyors, and collectors from those who smell a scam. Whether the artists are victims or victors, there is no denying the impact of their work in the media, on art collectors and the art world at large, and on our global imagination. How did Australian art become the most successful indigenous form in the world? How did its artists escape the ethnographic and souvenir markets to become players in an art market to which they had historically been denied access? Beautifully illustrated, this full stunning account not only offers a comprehensive introduction to this rich artistic tradition, but also makes us question everything we have been taught about contemporary art.

Icons in the Western Church: Toward a More Sacramental Encounter


Jeana Visel - 2016
    In the greater part of Western Christianity, however, discomfort with images in worship, both statues and panel icons, has been a relatively common current, particularly since the Reformation. In the Roman Catholic Church, after years of using religious statues, the Second Vatican Council’s call for “noble simplicity” in many cases led to a stripping of images that in some ways helped refocus attention on the eucharistic celebration itself but also led to a starkness that has left many Roman Catholics unsure of how to interact with the saints or with religious images at all. Today, Western interest in panel icons has been rising, yet we lack standards of quality or catechesis on what to do with them. This book makes the case that icons should have a role to play in the Western Church that goes beyond mere decoration. Citing theological and ecumenical reasons, Visel argues that, with regard to use of icons, the post–Vatican II Roman Catholic Church needs to give greater respect to the Eastern tradition. While Roman Catholics may never interact with icons in quite the same way that Eastern Christians do, we do need to come to terms with what icons are and how we should encounter them.

Japanomania in the Nordic Countries, 1875-1918


Gabriel P. Weisberg - 2016
    This unlikely diffusion of Japanese culture, known collectively as Japonisme, became increasingly apparent in England, France, and elsewhere in Europe during the 19th century, although nowhere was the influence seemingly as pervasive as it was throughout the Nordic countries. The book reveals how the widespread interest in Japanese aesthetics helped to establish notions of a fundamental unity between the arts and transformed the region’s visual vocabulary. The adoption of Japanese motifs and styles in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark gave a necessary cohesion to their existing artistic language, creating a vital balance within and among all of the decorative arts.

Marcel Broodthaers


Christophe Cherix - 2016
    Throughout his career, from early objects variously made of mussel shells, eggshells and books of his own poetry, to his most ambitious project, the MusEe d'Art Moderne, DEpartement des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), and the DEcors made at the end of his life, Broodthaers occupied a unique position, often operating as both innovator and commentator. Setting a precedent for what we call installation art today, his work has had a profound influence on a broad range of contemporary artists, and he remains vitally relevant to cultural discourse at large. Published to accompany Broodthaers' first retrospective in New York, this volume examines the artist's work across all mediums. Essays by the exhibition organizers Christophe Cherix and Manuel Borja-Villel, along with a host of major scholars, including Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Jean FranCois Chevrier, Thierry de Duve and Doris Krystof, provide historical and theoretical context for the artist's work. The book also features new translations of many of Broodthaers' texts.Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) worked as a poet and critic until the age of 40, when he declared himself a visual artist. Over the next 12 years, he moved between Brussels, his birth city, and DUsseldorf and London. From 1968 to 1972 Broodthaers operated the MusEe d'Art Moderne, DEpartement des Aigles, an itinerant museum devoted to the exploration of the role of the institution itself and the function of art in society.

Paper Sculpture: Fluid Forms


Richard Sweeney - 2016
    Pliable, ephemeral and easily manipulated with simple tools, it is a medium with which the artist can form three-dimensional shapes quickly through precise folding and cutting. Richard Sweeney is a British artist and designer who has exhibited his extraordinary paper sculptures all over the world. His aim in Fluid Forms is to show how the basic principles of form-making in paper can be useful for artists, architects and fashion designers. Once mastered, these can then be expanded on and explored with the help of Sweeneys step-by-step analysis of the techniques he uses in the creation of his work. Sweeney leads you through the three stages of his process, from the initial conceptual stage (whether drawing on natural or architectural forms for inspiration), to the basic shapes (modular, in column, or dynamic), and finally to the folding techniques, curved folding, parallel pleating, faceted pleating and radiating pleating. The author also discusses tools and types of paper best suited for this art form.

Madhubani Art


Bharti Dayal - 2016
    The philosophy of Madhubani art is essentially based on the principle of dualism. The artscape appears inundated with divine deities, the sun and moon, and flora and fauna along with features found in Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, tantric symbols and classical Hinduism. Primarily a significant socio-cultural engagement for the womenfolk of Bihar, this art was a welcome break from their daily drudgery. Immersed in the folklore of Mithila, fresh forms and figures are painted and repainted on walls and floors of their homes to mark special occasions. Well-established procedures are followed and techniques are passed on from one generation to the next, keeping the ephemeral art form and ancestral tradition and its lore alive. Madhubani artists today are seen to work more with brushes and acrylic paint rather than natural dyes and pigments. They now also work on paper, cloth, canvas and wood to create art and artifacts, besides painting on walls and floors. Contents: Foreword by H.E.M.S. Puri, Ambassador of India in Belgium; Preface by Martin Gurvich; Imaging the Divine: Artscape of Bharati Dayal by Sushma K Bahl; Krishna; Shiva; Ganesha; Devi; The Mahabharata Nature; Bharati Dayal.

The Secret Story of the Musee du Louvre


Emmanuelle Iger - 2016
    

Women in Antiquity: Real Women Across the Ancient World


Stephanie Lynn Budin - 2016
    The book is divided into ten sections, nine focusing on a particular area, and also includes almost 200 images, maps, and charts. The sections cover Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, the Levant, the Aegean, Italy, and Western Europe, and include many lesser-known cultures such as the Celts, Iberia, Carthage, the Black Sea region, and Scandinavia. Women's experiences are explored, from ordinary daily life to religious ritual and practice, to motherhood, childbirth, sex, and building a career. Forensic evidence is also treated for the actual bodies of ancient women. Women in Antiquity is edited by two experts in the field, and is an invaluable resource to students of the ancient world, gender studies, and women's roles throughout history.

Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet


Valerie Rousseau - 2016
    The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are organized around two seminal art-historical moments: the display of Dubuffet's collection at the home of artist and collector Alfonso Ossorio in the 1950s, and Dubuffet's provocative speech "Anticultural Positions" delivered at the Arts Club of Chicago in 1951. Including both little-known and canonical works--such as drawings, annotated manuscripts, letters, paintings, embroideries and sculptures--created by 38 artists, including Aloise Corbaz, Heinrich Anton Muller, Francis Palanc, Jeanne Tripier and Adolf Wolfli, as well as artworks by anonymous artists and children, this volume points to the influence of Art Brut on the burgeoning American style of Abstract Expressionism, as well as on individual artists and collectors.

Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan


Reiko Tomii - 2016
    As Japanese artists developed diverse practices parallel to, and sometimes antecedent to, their Western counterparts, they found themselves in a new reality of "international contemporaneity" (kokusaiteki dojisei). In this book Reiko Tomii examines three key figures in Japanese art of the 1960s who made radical and inventive art in the "wilderness"--away from Tokyo, outside traditional norms, and with little institutional support.These practitioners are the conceptualist Matsuzawa Yutaka, known for the principle of "vanishing of matter" and the practice of "meditative visualization" (kannen); The Play, a collective of "Happeners"; and the local collective GUN (Group Ultra Niigata). The innovative work of these artists included a visionary exhibition in Central Japan of "formless emissions" organized by Matsuzwa; the launching of a huge fiberglass egg--"an image of liberation"--from the southernmost tip of Japan's main island by The Play; and gorgeous color field abstractions painted by GUN on accumulating snow on the riverbeds of the Shinano River. Pioneers in conceptualism, performance art, land art, mail art, and political art, these artists delved into the local and achieved global relevance.Making "connections" and finding "resonances" between these three practitioners and artists elsewhere, Tomii links their local practices to the global narrative and illuminates the fundamentally "similar yet dissimilar" characteristics of their work. In her reading, Japan becomes a paradigmatic site of world art history, on the periphery but asserting its place through hard-won international contemporaneity.

The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550 - 1820


Antony Griffiths - 2016
    Its techniques and influence remained very stable until the nineteenth century, when this world was displaced by new technologies, of which photography was by far the most important. Print Before Photography examines the unrivalled importance of printmaking in its golden age, illustrated through the British Museum’s outstanding collection of prints. This unique and significant book is destined to be a leading reference in print scholarship, and will be of interest to anyone with an interest in this era of art history.

Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings


Simon Grant - 2016
    Houghton s work, however, predates this momentous artistic breakthrough by half a century. In this respect, she anticipates the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862 1944), whose work is now appreciated for its significance in the early history of abstraction.Houghton was a prominent figure of the early spiritualist movement in Victorian England, which played a significant role in various spheres of 19th century culture and was later championed by such influential figures as Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Spiritualism emerged as the belief that contact with a spirit realm was possible and that such communication could bring one closer to God. Houghton, a trained artist as well as a medium, pioneered the use of drawing as a method of channeling and expressing communications with spirit entities. During the 1860s and 1870s, she produced a series of unprecedented abstract watercolors as part of her practice as a spirit medium. Houghton called these works spirit drawings . Remarkably complex, layered watercolors and technically highly accomplished, their bold colors and fluid forms have a mesmerizing and deeply absorbing effect. Detailed inscriptions on the back of the works declare that her hand was guided by various spirits, including family members, several Renaissance artists, such as Titian and Correggio, and higher angelic beings. Although produced in a very different context, Houghton s abstract works have close connections to the ways in which 20th Century artists developed abstract languages of art to transcend the everyday realm of representation and consciousness.In 1871 Houghton rented a prestigious gallery space in Bond Street and presented 55 of her spirit drawings to a perplexed London audience. The critic from The Era newspaper pronounced it to be the most astonishing exhibition in London at the present moment. The Daily News likened the works to tangled threads of colored wool and concluded that they deserve to be seen as the most extraordinary and instructive example of artistic aberration. Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings will present more than 20 of these remarkable works. Unlike anything typically associated with Victorian culture, it will be a fascinating opportunity to consider their place within the history of art; both as products of their times and as precursors of radical 20th Century art."

Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan


Philip Hu - 2016
    The 1,400 objects in the collection are mostly color woodblock prints, but the holdings also include paintings, lithographs, photographs, stereographs, books, magazines, maps, game boards, textiles, ceramics, toys, sketchbooks, and commemorative materials. This extraordinary body of visual works chronicles Japan's rise as a modern nation from the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 through the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in 1942, with a focus on the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars. Conflicts of Interest will bring to light an important aspect of Japan's visual culture and the narratives it circulated for its citizens, allies, and enemies on the world stage.

Tropical Light: The Art of A. E. Backus


Natasha Kuzmanovic - 2016
    E. Backus (1906–1990) portrayed an unspoiled Florida that has made his paintings synonymous with the state: backcountry terrain is often described as “Backus landscape,” emotive clouds as “Backus sky,” and translucent waves as “Backus water.” As more and more of the state’s wilderness is lost to development, Backus’s paintings emerge as poetic testaments of Florida’s lost paradise. Defining his artistic roots as “part Cracker and part Monet,” Backus was drawn to tropical nature as defined by light, which he rendered using complementary colors. His avant-garde use of a palette knife to create entire compositions produced paintings that combined a sensitive observation of nature with gestural paint application. Backus excelled at capturing the essence of traditional Florida: rustic fishing camps, magnificent beaches, tidal rivers fringed with palms and mangroves, and the abrupt changes in the weather that characterize Florida’s tropical light to both natives and visitors. This is a lush celebration of the life and work of a remarkable regional painter.

Kushana Bush: The Burning Hours


Lauren Gutsell - 2016
    Reaching across history, culture and society, her meticulously detailed compositions, multi-ethnic characters and open-ended narratives combine to create a unique visual language. It is an approach that has attracted significant attention for this Dunedin-based artist, drawing audiences into the complex choreography of her world.The Burning Hours focuses on paintings produced from 2014 to 2016 – years that mark a significant compositional shift in Bush’s practice. Her early works positioned the subject matter in the centre of the page – hovering within the image field as a way of isolating and highlighting what was important. In contrast, her most recent works see the central image reaching out to consume the entire picture plane, a configuration that was first tested in Untitled (drawing). The inclusion of horizons, landscapes and architectural structures bring the narrative to the fore, and anchor the figures in a more realistic pictorial space.This new body of work is rich with detail – each surface, of gouache and gold, is filled with references to illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures, European art history and modern life.This major exhibition catalogue is richly illustrated and features essays by Lauren Gutsell, Justin Paton and Heather Galbraith.