From the 1890s through the present day, various forms of spirituality have influenced artists and inspired many important transitions from representational art to abstraction. Mystical and speculative philosophies with origins in both eastern and western cultures, as well as other utopian ideas, have been at the heart of the groundbreaking work of Paul Gauguin, Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Beuys. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, this collection of essays by over a dozen distinguished art historians reveals the many aspects of this profound undercurrent of abstract art. Other Details: 523 illustrations, 122 in full color 436 pages 10 1/2 x 10 1/2" Published 1995 Author Biography: Maurice Tuchman is senior curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

    Famous sitters included in the book are Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot and Richard Nixon.

    Some are nude, some rude and others explicitly erotic. In miniature format, the collection presents one of Mapplethorpe's most controversial and accomplished portfolios.

    A small kingdom based on the principles of King Arthur's Round Table sends out its knights on a quest for the legendary substance called gasoline.

    Providing an exploration of feminine identity, the photographs focus on three main themes: the female staged, the female as spectacle and the female as image.

    But as this lavish monograph points out, he mostly portrayed the newly rich middle classes, not the aristocracy, and his pictures reflected their insecurities as well as their need to be flattered. Dismissed today by most critics as superficial and trite, his paintings nevertheless enjoy considerable popularity both for their period charm and their detailed mirroring of a society. London art dealer Wood, author of three books on Victorian painting, offers a wide-angled view: the painter's youthful medieval craze and his late religious canvases triggered by the death of his mistress get their full due, even though the latter look hopelessly stagey. Tissot's love scenes are mysterious dramas pregnant with emotion, and his pictures of shopgirls and circus performers have the offhand quality of works by his friends Degas and Manet. --from Publisher's Weekly Tissot is best known for his brilliant pictures of English and French society in the 1860's and 1870', depicting in minute detail the ravishing costumes, decorative interiors and riverside scenes of the period. More than any other Victorian painter Tissot's pictures mirror exactly the habits and preoccupations of his age. Here Christopher Woods's engagingly written and copiously illustrated book surveys Tissot's entire career, revealing the tensions and contradictions that often lay beneath the deceptively glossy surface .of his pictures. --amazon Tissot occupies a unique and ambivalent position in 19th-century painting. Born a Frenchman, he sought fame in England, and after a brilliant career as a society painter he turned late in life to religion. He set his glittering and minutely detailed scenes in elegant London ballrooms and conservatories and peopled them with chic young women in ravishing costumes, while at the same time investing them with a note of brooding melancholy. This became overwhelming in his many portraits of his mistress Kathleen Newton, and intensely romantic figure whom Tissot loved and painted obsessively until her tragically early death. Then, after returning to France, he experienced a dramatic religious conversion and devoted the rest of his life to spiritualism and illustrating the Bible, which brought him even greater fame. --www.amazon.de