Best of
Visual-Art

2007

Pokémon Diamond & Pearl Pokédex - The Official Pokémon Full Pokédex Guide


Lawrence Neves - 2007
    Providing stats, levels, learned moves, and more.* Exclusive Poster - The Pokedex will include an exclusive poster for fans.* Strategy Included - In addition to complete information for each individual Pokemon, this guide will include strategy for keeping, collecting, and raising the creatures in your collection.

Pokémon Diamond & Pearl - The Official Pokémon Scenario Guide


Lawrence Neves - 2007
    Welcome to the Sinnoh region — full of new Pokémon and more awesome adventures!Detailed walkthrough of the Sinnoh region! Who you should meet! Who can help you out!Special Sinnoh-only Pokédex! Check out the newest Pokémon!Detailed charts, maps, and information — including all items, berries, and moves!

This Is for You


Rob Ryan - 2007
    This Is For You is a magical, romantic and touching story of thoughts and dreams, loneliness and longing, the personal and the universal. Each page has been cut out of paper using a scalpel, sprayed and photographed.

Assassin's Creed: Limited Edition Art Book


Ubisoft Entertainment - 2007
    To gather interedt and understanding of the project, a wealth of materials were created, fleshing out a new heroic adventurer who turned from a prince to an assassin. A ballet of new moves were imagined for this stealth-slayer, and the traversing of giant cityscapes, populated by crowds of individually intelligent citizens, was proposed. The four years of building Assassin's Creed from the ground up had begun.

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love


Kara Walker - 2007
    Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

Polaroids


Robert Mapplethorpe - 2007
    Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white Polaroid photographs from the 1970s--a medium in which he established the style that would bring him international acclaim--are brought together in this exquisite volume for the first time.Prestel Publications

Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings


Catherine Lampert - 2007
    Many critics and admirers now consider Uglow one of Britain’s greatest post-war artists. This is the first book devoted to Uglow and his oeuvre. Richard Kendall’s essay explores Uglow’s fundamental attitudes, beliefs, and processes in the years 1950 to 1970, and Catherine Lampert looks at the content and personal nature of the artist’s paintings over a lifetime, emphasizing his growing attention to color and light. The volume reproduces every known oil painting by Uglow—a total of more than 400 works--some 80 of which are here reproduced for the first time. In addition to a chronology, bibliography, and exhibition history for each work, the catalogue entries provide many other details and illuminating notes, including the artist’s own observations.

Native Trees of the Southeast: An Identification Guide


L. Katherine Kirkman - 2007
    "Native Trees of the Southeast" is a practical, compact field guide for the identification of the more than 225 trees native to the region, from the Carolinas and eastern Tennessee south through Georgia into northern Florida and west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas into eastern Texas. For confident identification, nearly 600 photographs, close to 500 of them in color, illustrate leaves, flowers and fruits or cones, bark, and twigs with buds. Full descriptions are accompanied by keys for plants in both summer and winter condition, as well as over 200 range maps. Crucial differences between plants that may be mistaken for each other are discussed and notes on the uses of the trees in horticulture, forestry, and for wildlife are included.

Come Alive!: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita


Julie Ault - 2007
    After more than 30 years, at the end of the 1960s, she left the order to devote herself to making her own work. Over a 35-year career she made watercolors, posters, books and banners--and most of all, serigraphs--in an accessible and dynamic style that appropriated techniques from advertising, consumerism and graffiti. The earliest, which she began showing in 1951, borrowed phrases and depicted images from the Bible; by the 1960s, she was using song lyrics and publicity slogans as raw material. Eschewing convention, she produced cheap, readily available multiples, including a postage stamp. Her work was popular but largely neglected by the art establishment--though it was always embraced by such design luminaries as Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass. More recently, she has been increasingly recognized as one of the most innovative and unusual Pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and making some of the most striking--and joyful--American art of her era, all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun. This first study of her work, organized by Julie Ault on the 20th anniversary of Kent's death, with essays by Ault and Daniel Berrigan, is the first to examine this important American outsider artist's life and career, and contains more than 90 illustrations, many of which are reproduced for the first time, in vibrant, and occasionally Day-Glo, color.

Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004


Richard Avedon - 2007
    This beautifully produced catalogue, designed by the renowned Danish graphic designer Michael Jensen, features deluxe tritone printing and varnish on premium paper. It includes 125 reproductions of Avedon's greatest work from the entire range of his oeuvre--including fashion photographs, reportage and portraits--and spans from his early Italian subjects of the 1940s to his 2004 portrait of the Icelandic pop star Bjork. It also features a small number of color images, including what must be one of the most famous photographic portraits of the twentieth century, -Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent- (1981). Texts by Jeffrey Fraenkel, Judith Thurman, Geoff Dyer, Christoph Ribbat, Rune Gade and curator Helle Crenzien offer a sophisticated and thorough composite view of Avedon's career.

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution


Lisa Gabrielle Mark - 2007
    WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others, as well as important works made in those years by artists whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video, arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics, including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism, provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.Essays by: Cornelia Butler, Judith Russi Kirshner, Catherine Lord, Marsha Meskimmon, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Peggy Phelan, Nelly Richard, Valerie Smith, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jenni SorkinArtists include: Marina Abramovic, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Jay DeFeo, Mary Beth Edelson, Valie Export, Barbara Hammer, Susan Hiller, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Maria Lassnig, Linda Montano, Alice Neel, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Orlan, Howardena Pindell, Yvonne Rainer, Faith Ringgold, Ketty La Rocca, Ulrike Rosenbach, Martha Rosler, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke

Staring Back


Chris Marker - 2007
    Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jet�e (1962)--a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le Jet�e, Sans Soleil, �Cuba Si!, and The Case of the Grinning Cat), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's Ran, a woman seen on a street in Siberia). The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book--which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University--also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit.

Edward Hopper


Carol Troyen - 2007
    Accompanying an exhibition touring the States throughout 2007 and 2008, this work reassesses Edward Hopper and examines the dynamics of his creative process and discusses his work within the cultural currents of his day, looking at the influence not only of other painters, but also of such media as literature and film.

Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works


Jackson Mac Low - 2007
    The works span the years from 1937, beginning with "Thing of Beauty," his first poem, until his death in 2004 and demonstrate his extraordinary range as well as his unquenchable enthusiasm. Mac Low is widely acknowledged as one of the major figures in twentieth-century American poetry, with much of his work ranging into the spheres of music, dance, theater, performance, and the visual arts. Comparable in stature to such giants as Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg, Mac Low is often associated with composer John Cage, with whom he shared a delight in work derived from "chance operations." This volume, edited by Anne Tardos, his wife and frequent collaborator, offers a balanced arrangement of early, middle, and late work, designed to convey not just the range but also the progressions and continuities of his writings and "writingways."

Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I am


Sara Fanelli - 2007
    From Dante and Goethe to Calvino and Beckett, Fanelli draws on her favorite quotations and aphorisms to create a work of utter originality, previously unpublished sketches, collages, paintings, and drawings, at the heart of which lies a beautiful miniature book-within-a-book. Famed art director Steven Heller provides an illuminating introduction while critic Marina Warner introduces each of the book's five chapters, "Devils and Angels," "Love," "Color," "Myth," and "The Absurd." Eclectic, dynamic, and full of creative energy, Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am speaks to the power of inspiration and the capacity for books to embody it.

Acrylic Revolution: New Tricks and Techniques for Working with the World's Most Versatile Medium


Nancy Reyner - 2007
    With over 101 of the most popular, interesting, and indispensable tricks for working with acrylic-each with its own step-by-step demonstration-there is literally page after page of acrylic instruction and inspiration for readers to discover. A gallery of finished art at the back of the book will show readers how to combine different tricks to use in their artwork offering them real-life applications for acrylic techniques.

Georges Seurat: The Drawings


Jodi Hauptman - 2007
    This comprehensive publication surveys the artist's entire oeuvre, from his academic training and the emergence of his unique methods to the studies made for his monumental canvases. Accompanying the first exhibition in almost 25 years to focus exclusively on Seurat's drawings, this volume presents approximately 130 works, primarily the artist's incomparable cont' drawings along with a small selection of oil sketches and paintings. In an effort to bridge the seemingly opposite goals of description and evocation, Seurat masses dark and light tones to abstract figures, exploits medium and paper to amplify radiating light, and engages with the Parisian metropolis, revealing urban types, the industrial suburbs and nineteenth-century entertainment. Though Seurat is perhaps best known as the inventor of Pointillism, this volume demonstrates his tremendous achievement as a draftsman and his fundamental importance to the art of the twentieth century. It includes carefully selected details of the work, as well as reproductions from pages of Seurat's sketchbooks, which have never before been published. Texts by Jodi Hauptman, Karl Buchberg, Hubert Damisch, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff and Richard Thomson address specific aspects of Seurat's techniques, materials, and subject matter. They are rounded out by a chronology, a selected bibliography and a detailed checklist.

Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella


Robert Rauschenberg - 2007
    That work, interrelated but not collaborative, resulted in an astonishing number of almost monochromatic black paintings, which today are considered treasures of many major collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art's. For the first time, Black Paintings gathers all of the best of the title artist's black works together: textured black, striped black, blue-black, brown-black, black-black. In thorough illustration and thoughtful analysis, it sheds light on the differences between these postwar works as well as their commonalities. For Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, black was a way to disappear into something new, a way to a new artistic vocabulary. For Mark Rothko, it stood for emptiness and nothingness; it asked the spectator to reflect back on it. For Ad Reinhardt, it offered denial and invisibility. Each artist's black portfolio reflects a breakthrough or transition in his own work, and, combined, they represent a larger moment of transition. The Black Paintings marked both a beginning and an end: the end of painting as illusion, as a window onto the world, and the beginning of painting as the mode for the creation of self-sufficient perceptual objects--a change that granted new roles to both artist and viewer.

Martin Puryear


John Elderfield - 2007
    Departing from the impersonal and machined aesthetic of Minimalism, Puryear's work combines Modernist abstraction with the traditions of crafts and woodworking, in shapes informed by the natural and by ordinary objects, made with materials such as tar, wood, stone and wire. It is quiet but deliberately associative, encompassing wide-reaching cultural and intellectual experiences and drawing on a huge and varied reserve of images, ideas and information. As a high school and college student, the artist studied ornithology, falconry and archery, and in the 1960s he volunteered with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where he schooled himself in the region's indigenous crafts; these are only a few of the influences and methods that have embedded themselves in his work. And the sources of his works are no less varied than the possible and open-ended interpretations: "I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated," Puryear said in a 1978 interview. "It gives me pleasure to feel there's a level that doesn't require knowledge of, or immersion in, the aesthetic of a given time or place."This volume is published on the occasion of the artist's Fall 2007 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, which travels from New York to Fort Worth, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. It follows Puryear's development from his first solo show in 1977 to new works that are presented here for the first time and contains essays by John Elderfield, Michael Auping and Elizabeth Reede, and a conversation with the artist by Richard Powell.

Neo Rauch: Neue Rollen: Paintings 1993-2006


Neo Rauch - 2007
    In a Dali-esque interior, the corner of a comforter drips off a bed. This major new overview of the work of the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch makes, once again, the case that he is one of the most important artists of his generation. He remains committed to putting brush on canvas in an age when digital media are gaining ground, and among a crowd of similarly dedicated colleagues, he stands out at the forefront. While his work of the 1980s was influenced by Expressionism, his more recent portfolio revels in a new take on Socialist Realism, clearly shaped by the experience of growing up in the former East Germany. Rauch riffs on the once-mandated styles of his youth and on Western abstraction from the second half of the twentieth century, all in coloration and figuration that directly allude to the Socialist past. Between cartoon styling and historic technique, he has found a distinctive style, palette, and concept. These dreamlike sequences feel both timeless and deeply rooted: Rauch gathers figures from the past in surreal landscapes and interiors to tell enigmatic stories about the present.

The Genius of Michelangelo


NOT A BOOK - 2007
    The Pietà. The David. The Last Judgment. The Moses. The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo's artistic achievements, in their scope and execution, seem unimaginable. His brilliance is apparent in every medium he worked in and with every tool he used. Today, more than 500 years after his unique artistry burst forth on the Renaissance world, the breadth and depth of his accomplishments still confound our attempts to grasp their full importance.How much do we really know about Michelangelo? Conflicting viewpoints and much confusion surround many aspects of the Renaissance artist's life and art; myth and legend so envelop him that he sometimes seems more like a caricature than a complete human being. Despite a familiarity with some of his works, aspects of Michelangelo's art and life remain open to interpretation. For example: Was he, in fact, difficult to work with? Why did he fall out of favor with art critics until the 18th century? Did he work alone or with assistants? What was the significance of his name, his birthplace, and his religious beliefs? In The Genius of Michelangelo, internationally recognized Michelangelo expert and award-winning Professor of Art History William E. Wallace gives you a comprehensive perspective on one of history's greatest artists, unavailable in any other course. Drawing on a vast command of artistic knowledge and period detail, these 36 intellectually rewarding and visually dazzling lectures explore the relationship between truth and legend to reveal a groundbreaking new picture of Michelangelo as an artist, a businessman, an aristocrat, and a genius. Rediscover a Master Living nearly 89 years (twice as long as most of his contemporaries), Michelangelo Buonarroti's career spanned the glories of Renaissance Florence, the discovery of the New World, the Reformation and the stirrings of the Counter-Reformation, and the pontificates of 13 popes-9 of whom employed him at some point. "Few artists have achieved as much as Michelangelo in so many diverse endeavors," notes Professor Wallace. "Few so completely embody our very notion of genius." Arranged as a chronological survey of the artist's life, The Genius of Michelangelo presents a thorough understanding of Michelangelo's life and work, informed by a broad consideration of the artist and his times, as well as the specific circumstances and contexts in which he crafted his art. As you follow Michelangelo's rise, you learn to separate fact from fiction and to penetrate the myths that have long hampered a complete understanding of this unforgettable artist. "We cannot help but wonder at the humanity, tenacity, and awe-inspiring accomplishments of such a man," remarks Professor Wallace. "Although deeply human and sometimes vulnerable, Michelangelo rose above mundane circumstances and employed his incomparable gifts and transcendent genius to create sublime works of art, for the world and for all time." New Insights, Fascinating Stories "The truth," notes Professor Wallace, "is that we are less likely to discover new works of Michelangelo but rather to discover new things about him." Throughout the course, you discover new insights about aspects of Michelangelo's formative years: Born into a patrician family, Michelangelo spent his youth in the town of Settignano, a village of craftsmen in the stone trade whom he would later hire and use as his assistants. By the time he was 12, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the great Renaissance masters and the greatest artist in Florence. At age 15, Michelangelo was brought by Lorenzo de' Medici into the Medici household, where he was educated alongside two Medici princes and future popes. You also explore fascinating stories behind the creation of Michelangelo's most beloved works, all of which give you new vantage points from which to see this genius's personality at work: The Pietà: Michelangelo insisted on traveling to the marble quarry himself to supervise the extraction of the marble block for this project, which is unusual considering the great number of places he could have purchased readily quarried marble in Rome. Off and on, he spent a total of four years of his life in marble quarries, supervising the extraction of marble for his favorite artistic medium: sculpture. The David: Originally intended as a buttress for the Florentine Cathedral, its magnificence compelled the civic government to place it at Florence's very heart: the Piazza della Signoria. Shifting the statue from its expected religious context was the start of our modern conception of art, with an increasing burden of responsibility placed on the viewer to interpret a work's meaning. The Sistine Chapel ceiling: Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the 12 apostles, but he successfully lobbied for a much grander and more complex scheme that illustrated major scenes from the book of Genesis, including the now-iconic scene of God bestowing Adam with life. The project was completed in four years. A Well-Documented History Michelangelo's work is among the most well documented and well preserved in the history of art; the bulk of his output in sculpture, painting, and architecture survives to this day. The Genius of Michelangelo draws on the master's works, as well as a wealth of additional documentation that survives, to help reconstruct the details of Michelangelo's life: Nearly 1,400 letters in which more than 1,100 persons are named, creating a veritable cross-section of 16th-century society More than 600 drawings, even though Michelangelo burned many of them toward the end of his life Some 300 poems that he wrote, reflecting the artist's talent not just as a painter and sculptor but as a poet as well Some 300 pages of miscellaneous records Two biographies written during Michelangelo's lifetime that serve as testaments to his contemporary fame A Passionate, Knowledgeable Instructor The author of numerous books on Michelangelo, Professor Wallace has been enchanted by the Renaissance artist since a visit to St. Peter's Basilica as an undergraduate student, where he encountered the marvels of the Pietà, the Moses, and the Sistine Chapel ceiling for the first time. His passion and knowledge of Michelangelo and his works earned him an invitation by the Vatican in 1990 to confer about the conservation of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. In addition, Professor Wallace appeared in the BBC film The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Michelangelo's David, and served as the principal consultant for the BBC film The Divine Michelangelo. Professor Wallace puts his teaching skills on display throughout these lectures, which feature more than 800 visuals, including stunning reproductions of Michelangelo's sculptures, paintings, and architecture, as well as rough sketches, preparatory drawings, and photographs of the places he lived and worked. The Genius of Michelangelo, infused with the passion and knowledge of an expert instructor, enriches your appreciation of Michelangelo's many accomplishments and enhances your understanding of one of the world's greatest and most familiar artists.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz


Klaus Biesenbach - 2007
    The first German novel to adopt the technique of James Joyce, it tells the story of ex-con Franz Biberkopf. Struggling to survive among the poverty, unemployment, crime, and burgeoning Nazism of 1920s Germany, fate teases him with a little pleasure before cruelly turning him in. In 1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the genius of New German Cinema, adapted Doblin's novel into a legendary and controversial TV series starring Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, and others. Presented in its re-mastered movie version at the 2007 Berlin film festival to unanimous acclaim, it will be on view in an international travelling exhibition. This book features over 500 color film stills from the series, the complete script, and essays by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Susan Sontag, and exhibition curator Klaus Biesenbach.

Martin Ramirez


Brooke Davis Anderson - 2007
    Political struggles in Mexico and the economic consequences of the Great Depression left him stranded, jobless and homeless, on the streets of California in 1931. Unable to communicate in English and apparently confused, he was soon detained by the police and committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he would eventually be diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic. Ramírez hardly talked to anybody during those thirty-two years. Instead, he began to assemble found bits of paper--candy wrappers, greeting cards, flattened paper cups, hospital supply forms, and book pages, for example--using a self-made glue to create large surfaces for drawing. Sketched in graphite, colored pencil, or crayon, and often collaged with magazine illustrations, the artist's drawings range in size from several inches up to twelve feet. He was a master of pictoral space, using dramatic shifts in depth and scale to create a field in which multiple perspectives coexist. Ramírez's art depicts a variety of subjects, including caballeros, Madonnas, animals, trains, and tunnels. Memory and experience seep through each composition. While one strong component of Ramírez's work is the imagery of Mexico, another is an aesthetic found in the culture of mental illness. Martín Ramírez is the first book to give equal consideration to the biographical, historical, and cultural influences in Ramírez's oeuvre, its artistic quality and merit, and its standing in the context of the work of twentieth-century self-taught artists. An interdisciplinary exploration of Ramírez's life and complex, multilayered artwork, it presents a holistic examination of his drawings and collages beyond the boundaries of his diagnosed schizophrenia.