• Close-up focus on 22 masterpieces, from Ancient Greek sculpture to 1960s Pop Art.    • Well-known icons along with lesser-known gems — carefully chosen to illuminate the points made in the text.    • Features on major schools and movements to explore and explain their stylistic trademarks, characteristics, and favored subjects. Art: A Visual History is a knowledgeable, thought-provoking, and accessible tour of the creators of Western art.

    Yet few of them are aware of the remarkable history of that place and of the buildings themselves—a fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly chronicles in the first full-length history of the Louvre in English.More than 7,000 years ago, men and women camped on a spot called Le Louvre for reasons unknown; a clay quarry and a vineyard supported a society there in the first centuries AD. A thousand years later, King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191, just outside the walls of a city far smaller than the Paris we know today. Intended to protect the capital against English soldiers stationed in Normandy, the fortress became a royal residence under Charles V two centuries later, and then the monarchy’s principal residence under the great Renaissance king François I in 1546. It remained so until 1682 when Louis XIV moved his entire court to Versailles. Thereafter the fortunes of the Louvre languished until the tumultuous days of the French Revolution when, during the Reign of Terror in 1793, it first opened its doors to display the nation’s treasures. Ever since—through the Napoleonic era, the Commune, two World Wars, to the present—the Louvre has been a witness to French history, and expanded to become home to a legendary collection, including such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, whose often-complicated and mysterious origins form a spectacular narrative that rivals the building’s grand stature.

    Revolutionary in their day, Group f.64 was one of the first modern art movements equally defined by women. From the San Francisco Bay Area, its influence extended internationally, contributing significantly to the recognition of photography as a fine art.The group-first identified as such in a 1932 exhibition-was comprised of strongly individualist artists, brought together by a common philosophy, and held together in a tangle of dynamic relationships. They shared a conviction that photography must emphasize its unique capabilities-those that distinguished it from other arts-in order to establish the medium's identity. Their name, f.64, they took from a very small lens aperture used with their large format cameras, a pinprick that allowed them to capture the greatest possible depth of field in their lustrous, sharply detailed prints. In today's digital world, these “straight” photography champions are increasingly revered.Mary Alinder is uniquely positioned to write this first group biography. A former assistant to Ansel Adams, she knew most of the artists featured. Just as importantly, she understands the art. Featuring fifty photographs by and of its members, Group f.64 details a transformative period in art with narrative flair.

    Simply constructed, the book explores 50 key works – from the realist painting of Courbet to a contemporary installation by Yayoi Kusama – and then links them to the most important movements, themes and techniques. Accessible, concise and richly illustrated, the book reveals the connections between different periods, artists and styles, giving readers a thorough understanding and broad enjoyment of modern art.

    Simultaneous.

    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.

    The author concerns himself not only with art, but also with Chinese philosophy, religion, and the realm of ideas.

    Eight Apulian vases, of the fourth century BC, were discovered in the swimming pool of a German-based art smuggler. More valuable than the recovery of the vases, however, was the discovery of the smuggler's card index detailing his deals and fellow dealers. It revealed the existence of the furtive tombaroli -tomb raiders-who stole classical artifacts, and a clandestine network of dealers and smugglers who spirited them out of Italy and into the hands of wealthy collectors and museums.Peter Watson, a distinguished former investigative journalist of the London Sunday Times and author of two previous exposes of art world scandals, traces the networks and names the key figures who have depleted Europe of its classical treasures. Among the looted items are the irreplaceable and highly collectable vases of Euphronios, the equivalent in their field to the sculptures of Bernini or the paintings of Michelangelo. Their journey takes them through the doors of some of the world's greatest institutions: Sotheby's auction house, the Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Bostons, the British Museum, the Berline Museum of Classical Antiquities, the Miho Museum in Japan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.When the news networks around the world began to broadcast the events of the trial of a former curator at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2005, they stumbled across the corner of a thirty-year conspiracy. Filled with colorful characters and hum drama. The Medici Conspiracy completely and authoritatively exposes the latest version of one of the oldest cons in the world: theft, smuggling, and duplicitous dealing-all in the name of art. With this definitive revelation of the chain of corruptions, the world of antiquities dealing and museum collections will never be the same again.

    Originally published in Munich in 1912 and edited by Kandinsky and Marc-- the movements's almanac presented their synthesis of international culture to the European avant garde at large. In both the selection of essays and its innovative interplay of word and image, The Blaue Reiter Almanac remains one of our most critically important works of literature on the art theory and culture of the twentieth century. This edition, long unavailable in English and indispensable to any student of Modernism, simulates the original German format, and includes documents, and musical notations, as well as seminal essays by Kandinsky, Schoenberg, Marc and others. Nearly 150 illustrations, from ancient and contemporary sources, capture the wide-ranging interests and passions that inspired Kandinsky's and Marc's programmatic attempt to make Modernism accessible across national and chronological boundaries. Also included is Klaus Lankheit's extensive critical introduction, which places the Blaue Reiter in context for contemporary readers."The almanac remains unique among European writings on art; no other country produced a comparable work capturing the excitement and tension of the years before World War I." (Will Grohmann)

    Its aftermath lives on to this day.Nazism ascended by brute force and by cultural tyranny. Weimar Germany was a society in turmoil, and Hitler's rise was achieved not only by harnessing the military but also by restricting artistic expression. Hitler, an artist himself, promised the dejected citizens of postwar Germany a purified Reich, purged of "degenerate" influences.When Hitler came to power in 1933, he removed so-called "degenerate" art from German society and promoted artists whom he considered the embodiment of the "Aryan ideal." Artists who had produced challenging and provocative work fled the country. Curators and art dealers organized their stock. Thousands of great artworks disappeared--and only a fraction of them were rediscovered after World War II.In 2013, the German government confiscated roughly 1,300 works by Henri Matisse, George Grosz, Claude Monet, and other masters from the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive son of one of Hitler's primary art dealers. For two years, the government kept the discovery a secret. In Hitler's Last Hostages, Mary M. Lane reveals the fate of those works and tells the definitive story of art in the Third Reich and Germany's ongoing struggle to right the wrongs of the past.

    More than twenty-four hours passed before museum officials realized she was gone. The prime suspects were as shocking as the crime: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, young provocateurs of a new art. As French detectives using the latest methods of criminology, including fingerprinting, tried to trace the thieves, a burgeoning international media hyped news of the heist.No story captured the imagination of the world quite like this one. Thousands flocked to the Louvre to see the empty space where the painting had hung. They mourned as if Mona Lisa were a lost loved one, left flowers and notes, and set new attendance records. For more than two years, Mona Lisa’s absence haunted the art world, provoking the question: Was she lost forever? A century later, questions still linger.Part love story, part mystery, Vanished Smile reopens the case of the most audacious and perplexing art theft ever committed. R. A. Scotti’s riveting, ingeniously realized account is itself a masterly portrait of a world in transition. Combining her skills as a historian and a novelist, Scotti turns the tantalizing clues into a story of the painting’s transformation into the most familiar and lasting icon of all time.

    Working from government reports, manuscripts, and the diaries and letters of those persons—both white and Indian—who knew him, Margaret Coel has developed an unusually readable, interesting, and closely documented account of his life and the life of his tribe during the fateful years of the mid-1800s.It was in these years that thousands of gold-seekers on their way to California and Oregon burst across the plains, first to traverse the territory consigned to the Indians and then, with the discovery of gold in 1858 on Little Dry Creek (formerly the site of the Southern Arapaho winter campground  and presently Denver, Colorado), to settle.Chief Left Hand was one of the first of his people to acknowledge the inevitability of the white man’s presence on the plain, and thereafter to espouse a policy of adamant peacefulness —if not, finally, friendship—toward the newcomers.Chief Left Hand is not only a consuming story—popular history at its best—but an important work of original scholarship. In it the author:Clearly establishes the separate identities of the original Left Hand, the subject of her book, and the man by the same name who succeeded Little Raven in 1889 as the principal chief of the Southern Arapahos in Oklahoma—a longtime source of confusion to students of western history;Lays to rest, with a series of previously unpublished letters by George Bent, a century-long dispute among historians as to Left Hand’s fate at Sand Creek;Examines the role of John A. Evans, first governor of Colorado, in the Sand Creek Massacre. Colonel Chivington, commander of the Colorado Volunteers, has always (and justly) been held responsible for the surprise attack. But Governor Evans, who afterwards claimed ignorance and innocence of the colonel’s intentions, was also deeply involved. His letters, on file in the Colorado State Archives, have somehow escaped the scrutiny of historians and remain, for the most part, unpublished. These Coel has used extensively, allowing the governor to tell, in his own words, his real role in the massacre. The author also examines Evans’s motivations for coming to Colorado, his involvement with the building of the transcontinental railroad, and his intention of clearing the Southern Arapahos from the plains —an intention that abetted Chivington’s ambitions and led to their ruthless slaughter at Sand Creek.

    Set in the studio, on the stage, and in great cities and small towns across the country, this book captures life on the road for Marsalis and his musicians, evoking its ritual and renewal, energy and spirituality. Describing the art of improvisation, the book's two voices mirror the interplay at the heart of jazz. "On the road and on the bandstand," Marsalis writes, "something great may happen at any moment, something that might even change your life." Alternately luminous and boisterous, often poignant, and always passionate, Marsalis and Vigeland's extraordinary dialogue is a must for fans, musicians, and anyone curious about America's only indigenous art form.

    Frommer paints Shoeless Joe as a baseball natural ("Joe Jackson hit the ball harder than any man ever to play baseball"-Ty Cobb), an illiterate hick (his table untemsils consisted of knife and fingers), and an innocent man snared by the greatest scandal in baseball history.