Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature


Andy Goldsworthy - 1990
    Illustrates outdoor sculptures created with a range of natural materials, including snow, ice, leaves, rock, clay, stones, feathers, and twigs.

Meggs' History of Graphic Design


Philip B. Meggs - 1983
    Under the new authorial leadership of Alston Purvis, this authoritative book offers more than 450 new images, along with expansive coverage of such topics as Italian, Russian, and Dutch design. It reveals a saga of creative innovators, breakthrough technologies, and important design innovations.

Impressionists


Antonia Cunningham - 2002
    Some of these works are considered the most important; others may be less well known, but they all play an important role in the philosophical and artistic development of this diverse group of artists.

Michelangelo : The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture


William E. Wallace - 1998
    In a rich weave of images and text, each chapter offers an intimate look at the artist's expression in a different medium. This volume includes beautiful photographs of Micheangelo's works but here also are never before seen details of his sculpture and architecture that invite us to linger. The black-and-white photographs printed in lush doutones that add depth, show in the marks of the chisel, the hand of Michangelo at work - the rough but deliberate strokes of a man struggling to express himself in an unyielding and unforgiving medium.

Women, Art, and Society


Whitney Chadwick - 1990
    While acknowledging the many women whose contributions to visual culture since the Middle Ages have often been neglected, Whitney Chadwick's survey reexamines the works themselves and the ways in which they have been perceived as marginal, often in direct reference to gender. In her discussion of feminism and its influence on such a reappraisal, the author also addresses the closely related issues of ethnicity, class, and sexuality.This expanded edition incorporates recent developments in contemporary art. Chadwick addresses the turn toward autobiography in much recent women's art. She considers issues such as the personal versus the political and the private versus the public, and analyzes the differences between women's art today and the seminal feminist work of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Lost Painting


Jonathan Harr - 2005
    Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn't alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others -- no one knows the precise number -- have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.Jonathan Harr embarks on a journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ -- its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.

Seven Days in the Art World


Sarah Thornton - 2008
    Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture. 8 illustrations.

A World History of Photography


Naomi Rosenblum - 1984
    The text investigates all aspects of photography - aesthetic, documentary, commercial and technical - while placing it in historical context. It includes three technical sections with detailed information about equipment and processes. This edition also updates important new international work from the 1980s and 1990s.

Architecture: Form, Space, & Order


Francis D.K. Ching - 1979
    K. Ching. Each page has been meticulously revised to incorporate contemporary examples of the principles of form, space, and order - the fundamental vocabulary of every designer. The result is a beautifully illustrated volume that embraces today's forms and looks at conventional models with a fresh perspective. Here, Ching examines every principal of architecture, juxtaposing images that span centuries and cross cultural boundaries to create a design vocabulary that is both elemental and timeless. Among the topics covered are point, line, plane, volume, proportion, scale, circulation, and the interdependence of form and space. While this revision continues to be a comprehensive primer on the ways form and space are interrelated and organized in the shaping of our environment, it has been refined to amplify and clarify concepts. In addition, the Second Edition contains numerous new hand-rendered drawings; expanded section on openings and scale; examples of contemporary architectural design elements; expanded chapter on design principles; new glossary and index categorized by the author; and new 8 1/2 x 11 upright trim. In the Second Edition of Architecture: Form, Space, and Order, the author has opted for a larger format and crisper images. Mr. Ching has retained the style of his hand-lettered text, a hallmark of each of his books. This rich source of architectural prototypes, each rendered in Mr. Ching's signature style, also serves as a guide to architectural drawing. Doubtless, many will want this handsomevolume for the sheer beauty of it. Architects and students alike will treasure this book for its wealth of practical information and its precise illustrations. Mr. Ching has once again created a visual reference that illuminates the world of architectural form.

A History of Far Eastern Art


Sherman E. Lee - 1973
    Many of these new finds are included among the hundreds of reproductions.

Maxfield Parrish


Coy Ludwig - 1973
    A compendium of the life and work of Maxfield Parrish, it is an essential part of a Parrish library. For the collector, the publisher has included a value guide to some of the products that bear Parrish images. Examples of Parrish's most famous book illustrations are shown, including selections from Mother Goose in Prose and the Arabian Nights. Also included are his famous magazine covers-from Life, Collier's, Harper's Weekly, etc., as well as all the landscapes that he painted for Brown and Bigelow, who reproduced them as calendars every year from 1936 to 1963. One of the highlights of the book is the chapter on Parrish's technique, examining in depth his materials, favorite methods, and unique way of painting. In addition, there is a lengthy excerpt from an unpublished manuscript by Maxfield Parrish, Jr., explaining step-by-step his father's glazing technique and use of photography in his work. This definitive study also contains numerous revealing excerpts from Parrish's unpublished correspondence with family, friends, and clients.

Girl in a Green Gown: The History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait


Carola Hicks - 2011
    This haunting gem of medieval art, a subtle and beautiful portrait of a wealthy Bruges merchant and his wife, intrigues all who see it. Is the painting the celebration of marriage or pregnancy, a memorial to a wife who died in childbirth, a fashion statement or a status symbol? Using her acclaimed forensic skills as an art historian, Carola Hicks set out to decode the mystery.She also tells the fascinating story of the painting's survival through fire and battle, and of its owners. Uniquely, for a masterpiece of its age, its provenance can be tracked through every single owner - from the mysterious Mr Arnolfini via various monarchs to being an early star of the National Gallery in 1842- and these owners have a cameo appearance too, in this enthralling story of how an artwork of genius can speak afresh to each new generation.

A Perfect Red


Amy Butler Greenfield - 2005
    Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal. Did it come from a worm, a berry, a seed? Could it be stolen from Mexico and transplanted to their own colonies? Pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies—all joined the chase for cochineal, a chase that lasted more than three centuries. A Perfect Red tells their stories—true-life tales of mystery, empire, and adventure, in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth.

The Painted Word


Tom Wolfe - 1975
    He addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. This is Tom Wolfe "at his most clever, amusing, and irreverent" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Modern Art: painting, sculpture, architecture, photography


Sam Hunter - 1976
    It avoids the typical encyclopedic approach of surveys in favor of examining selected but highly representative works in greater depth and from an enlarged spectrum of critical discourse. Organized along chronological lines, topics explore the ideas, forms, events, artists, and works with each chapter devoted to a style, movement, or decade from Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh through Minimalism and the general reaction known as Post-Modernism. Ideal for readers with a "general" interest in art. "