In each, Sister Wendy chooses a wide variety of art -paintings, sculpture, porcelain figures- and draws attention to the small details of the work, revealing hidden meanings and symbolism. She relates the background of the artist and briefly explains the techniques and the histories behind each work, with humor and insight.The books includes over 250 full-color illustrations.

    The objects were created from about the fifth to the fourth century b.c. by pastoral people who lived on the steppes near the southern Ural Mountains. The large funerary deposits include wooden, deerlike creatures with predatory mouths and elongated snouts and ears, overlaid with sheets of gold and silver, as well as gold attachments for wooden vessels and gold and silver luxury wares imported from Achaemenid Iran. These treasures are now in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology, Ufa, in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan.The discoveries at Filippovka open a new chapter in the history of the material culture of the nomads who in the first millennium b.c. traversed the steppe corridor extending from the Black Sea region to China. Yet the information provided by the Filippovka excavations is complicated and ambiguous. The identity of the people represented by the finds remains uncertain, but the forms and ornamentation of many works from Filippovka, as well as the cemetery’s location in the southern Urals, argue for the cultural-chronological designation of this material as Early Sarmatian. Stylistic features, however, point also to the arts of Siberia, Central Asia, and China in the east and to the art of the “Meotian-Scythians” in the west. Imported Achaemenid goods raise questions about their place of production and about the circumstances that brought them to be included in tombs on the southern Ural steppes. Finally, robbers penetrated the burials in antiquity, destroying much of the evidence necessary for understanding the Filippovka nomads’ religious and funerary practices.These are among the issues addressed in this volume, the catalogue for an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art that brings together the remarkable new material from Filippovka and, from the incomparably rich collections of the State Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, related luxury objects found in graves of other Eurasian steppe tribes. Gold and silver objects from the Scythian Black Sea tombs; textiles and leather and wooden works from the Altai Mountains; and gold and bronze pieces from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia illustrate developments in the art of the steppes in the centuries preceding the Filippovka burials, in contemporary societies, and in later centuries, toward the turn of the first millennium b.c. These outstanding works not only place the Filippovka discoveries in their proper historical and cultural context but are themselves fascinating and enigmatic.

    For a few hours, they escape their gilded frames and are free to run up and down the grand staircases, chase each other round the marble halls, and explore the other exhibits. But four of the dogs overindulge and sleepily climb back into the wrong paintings. When the mix-up is discovered, the museum's popularity soars! This playful story, with superb illustrations by Alan Curless and lovely reproductions of National Gallery paintings, provides young children with a charming introduction to fine art.

    Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany’s fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust. In this book, he tells for the first time the inside story of Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and his own role in it.In exploring Germany’s memorial crisis, Young also asks the more general question of how a generation of contemporary artists can remember an event like the Holocaust, which it never knew directly. Young examines the works of a number of vanguard artists in America and Europe—including Art Spiegelman, Shimon Attie, David Levinthal, and Rachel Whiteread—all born after the Holocaust but indelibly shaped by its memory as passed down through memoirs, film, photographs, and museums. In the context of the moral and aesthetic questions raised by these avant-garde projects, Young offers fascinating insights into the controversy surrounding Berlin’s newly opened Jewish museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, as well as Germany’s soon-to-be-built national Holocaust memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman.Illustrated with striking images in color and black-and-white, At Memory’s Edge is the first book in any language to chronicle these projects and to show how we remember the Holocaust in the after-images of its history.

    In some five hundred caves carved into rock cliffs at the edge of the Gobi desert are preserved one thousand years of exquisitemurals and sculpture. Mogao, founded by Buddhist monks as an isolated monastery in the late fourth century, evolved into an artistic and spiritual center whose renown extended from the Chinese capital to the far western kingdoms of the Silk Road. Among its treasures are miles of stunning wallpaintings, more than two thousand statues, magnificent works on silk and paper, and thousands of ancient manuscripts, such as sutras, poems, and prayer sheets, which in 1900 were found sealed in one of the caves and then dispersed to museums throughout the world.Illustrated in color throughout, Cave Temples of Mogao combines lavish photographs of the caves and their art with the fascinating history of Mogao, Dunhuang, and the Silk Road to create a vivid portrait of this remarkable site. Chapters discuss the development of the cave temples, the iconographyof the wall paintings, and the extraordinary story of the rare manuscripts, including the oldest printed book in existence, a ninth-century copy of the Diamond Sutra. The book also describes the long-term collaboration between the Getty Conservation Institute and Chinese authorities in conservationprojects at Mogao as well as the caves and the museum that can be visited today. The publication of this book coincides with the centenary of the discovery of the manuscripts in the Library Cave.

    Fifteen soaring sculptures made from more than ten thousand glass parts blown in France, Japan, the Czech Republic, Finland, Israel, and the United States were specifically created to take advantage of the stone walls of the historic Citadel, as well as the Mediterranean sunlight. This full-size book documents the yearlong exhibition with 117 full-colour reproductions of Chihuly's sculptures, his energetic drawings, and his team as they install the exhibition. These beautiful images are accompanied by Chihuly's affectionate letters to his young son, Jackson, about the joys and challenges of the project and his essay (reprinted with permission from Ariel: The Israel Review of Arts and Letters, vol. 111, 1999) on his inspirations at the site. Also included is an illuminating foreword by Shosh Yaniv, director of the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem, and a section containing seven insightful reviews of the exhibition.This book offers an opportunity to share in a unique millennium celebration -- a joyous tribute by an artist as he captures the light, history, and essence of one of the greatest cities in the world.

    

    In Africa: Arts & Cultures, John Mack and an international team of artists and scholars draw on this world-famous collection to take us on a beautifully illustrated tour of African art and the various cultures that created it. Readers expecting the masks and wooden figures commonly collected a century ago will be surprised by the wide variety of art forms covered here, from a Tunisian wedding tunic, to a water bottle of ostrich eggshell from the San in southern Africa, to a multimedia monoprint made by a Nigerian artist in 1999. Moreover, in a rare departure, the book covers the art of all five regions of Africa, including Saharan Africa, with each geographical section introduced by a British Museum curator who provides historical and cultural context for the art from that region. But most important, this is a book of many voices. The art carries the voices of artists, ancient and modern, looking into their own culture and also out into the world around them. Commentaries on the art are written by historians, anthropologists, curators, artists--both insiders and outsiders whose breadth of experience dismantles easy notions of Africanness. Above all, there are African voices: African artists comment on their own work and that of the past; and scholars from African universities shed light on the objects of their specialty. By presenting art from across the continent, past and present, coupled with astute commentary by a worldwide cross-section of artists and scholars, Africa: Arts & Cultures offers an innovative approach that allows the reader to better appreciate African art in its totality.

    This text provides a guided tour in miniature through Washington's oldest and largest private art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art.