How can your institution do it and do it well? The Participatory Museum is a practical guide to working with community members and visitors to make cultural institutions more dynamic, relevant, essential places. Museum consultant and exhibit designer Nina Simon weaves together innovative design techniques and case studies to make a powerful case for participatory practice. "Nina Simon's new book is essential for museum directors interested in experimenting with audience participation on the one hand and cautious about upending the tradition museum model on the other. In concentrating on the practical, this book makes implementation possible in most museums. More importantly, in describing the philosophy and rationale behind participatory activity, it makes clear that action does not always require new technology or machinery. Museums need to change, are changing, and will change further in the future. This book is a helpful and thoughtful road map for speeding such transformation." -Elaine Heumann Gurian, international museum consultant and author of Civilizing the Museum "This book is an extraordinary resource. Nina has assembled the collective wisdom of the field, and has given it her own brilliant spin. She shows us all how to walk the talk. Her book will make you want to go right out and start experimenting with participatory projects." -Kathleen McLean, participatory museum designer and author of Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions "I predict that in the future this book will be a classic work of museology." --Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the Future of Museums

    In "The Art Detective," Philip Mould, one of the world's foremost authorities on British portraiture and an irreverent and delightful expert for the "Roadshow," serves up his secrets and his best stories, blending the technical details of art detection and restoration with juicy tales peopled by a range of eccentric collectors, scholars, forgers, and opportunists. Peppered with practical advice, each chapter focuses on one particular painting and the mystery that surrounds it. Mould is our trusty detective, tracking down clues, uncovering human foibles and following hunches until the truth is revealed. Mould is known for his ability to crack the toughest puzzles and whether he's writing about a fake Norman Rockwell, a hidden Rembrandt, or a lost Gainsborough, he brings both the art and the adventure to life. "The Art Detective" is memoir, mystery, art history, and brilliant yarn all rolled into one.

    Today artists routinely dissolve the old boundaries of art by creating works that neither hang on walls nor adorn pedestals, and often willfully overturn conventions of aesthetic value, permanence and optical reward. Curator and educator Weintraub has researched and/or interviewed 35 prominent radical artists and here explores their common concerns, creative processes and media. Devoting one essay to each artist, Weintraub offers a primer for museum and gallery goers who may be confronting such works for the first time, discussing Andres Serrano's photo of a crucifix submerged in urine, the half ton of dirty clothes Christian Boltanski piled on a museum floor worn by children of the Holocaust, Janine Antoni's mammoth blocks of chocolate and lard, Chuck Close's computer art and David Hammon's detritus constructions.

    People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:The Palace The Classroom The Memorial The Playground Each section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as 'art objects'; and Kara Walker's controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about 'appropriate' interactions with art. Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world.The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

    Having finally earned the money and gained the respect he sought in his early days as a struggling painter, Monet designed and built the home and gardens in the village on the Seine that would be the site of the famous "Grain Stacks" and "Water Lilies" paintings that would secure his reputation. A good, affordable introductory study of the pioneer of modern art.

    He had good grounds for the confidence palpable in his statement, for in the history of 20th century art, his name stands out over all the others. In Picasso's paintings, drawings, lithographs, ceramics, and sculptures, he was tirelessly inventive and innovative, exhibiting an aesthetic bravado that kept him one step ahead of his contemporaries. From subject matter to new forms and techniques to new media, Picasso got there first. The Spanish artist's enormous output, from the eight-year-old's beginnings to the late work of a man of ninety-one, is surely one of the most diverse and creatively energetic in the whole history of art, and it is no exaggeration to see him as the genius of the century. Carsten-Peter Warncke's study is a thorough review of Picasso's entire oeuvre, from the early Blue and Rose Periods, through the analytic and synthetic cubism and classicist phase all the way up to the art of the old savage Picasso. Our study of Picasso, the most exhaustive record of his work to date, contains almost 1500 illustrations'from his earliest drawings to the master's very last painting. Extensive bibliography section as well as illustrated section about Picasso's life and work Index of Names

    First published in English in 1995, with an excellent introduction by Robin Kinross, this new edition includes a foreword by Rich Hendel, who considers current thinking about Tschichold's life and work.

    Whether you’re enraged by Ikea’s Verdanagate, want to know what the Beach Boys have in common with easy Jet or why it’s okay to like Comic Sans, Just My Type will have the answer. Learn why using upper case got a New Zealand health worker sacked. Refer to Prince in the Tafkap years as a Dingbat (that works on many levels). Spot where movies get their time periods wrong and don’t be duped by fake posters on eBay. Simon Garfield meets the people behind the typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts – like men – are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers, to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.

    His photographic sketchbook and personal visual diary, comprising photographs from the mid-1880s until the end of his life, constitutes a unique and profound artistic statement. This mosaic of captured moments reveals the intimate and personal basis of both Mucha's own life as an artist and the time period in which he lived. The behind-the-scenes glimpses of his studio provided here prove that Mucha--the creator of the ideal of Art Nouveau beauty--was one of the pioneers of the classic nude in Czech photography. This is the first time such a large selection of Mucha's extensive photographic work has been assembled as a book. Many of the photos in this book, never before published, reveal hitherto unknown aspects of Mucha's work, which will be of interest to the general reader and the photographic connoisseur alike.

    Passionately argued, brilliantly written, and filled with Paglia’s trademark audacity, Glittering Images takes us on a tour through more than two dozen seminal images, some famous and some obscure or unknown—paintings, sculptures, architectural styles, performance pieces, and digital art that have defined and transformed our visual world. She combines close analysis with background information that situates each artist and image within its historical context—from the stone idols of the Cyclades to an elegant French rococo interior to Jackson Pollock’s abstract Green Silver to Renée Cox’s daring performance piece Chillin’ with Liberty. And in a stunning conclusion, she declares that the avant-garde tradition is dead and that digital pioneer George Lucas is the world’s greatest living artist. Written with energy, erudition, and wit, Glittering Images is destined to change the way we think about our high-tech visual environment.

    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.

    It features a compelling and accessible design, beautiful color reproductions, and up-to-date descriptions written by the Museum's own experts.More than a simple souvenir book, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide provides a comprehensive view of art history spanning five millennia and the entire globe, beginning with the Ancient World and ending in contemporary times. It includes media as varied as painting, photography, costume, sculpture, decorative arts, musical instruments, arms and armor, works on paper, and many more. Presenting works ranging from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur to Canova's Perseus with the Head of Medusa to Sargent's Madame X, this is an indispensable volume for lovers of art and art history, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of lingering over the most iconic works in the Metropolitan's unparalleled collection.Now available as an eBook!The guide is now available to read on your tablet, mobile phone or personal computer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide eBook provides the same features as the printed version along with digital enhancements such as a linked table of contents for easy navigation, a double-click to zoom on works of art, and additional views of artworks. Like the print version, this eBook features a compelling and accessible design, beautiful photography, and up-to-date descriptions written by the Museum's own experts.The eBook is now available on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks and Google Play.

    The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary--one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock's uninhibited style of "action painting" triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock's sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend's mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain's most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen.Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one's own as an artist--finding one's voice--almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate's expectations of who you are or ought to be.Praise for The Art of Rivalry"Gripping . . . Mr. Smee's skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas."--The New York Times"With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority."--The Boston Globe"Bacon liked to say his portraiture aimed to capture 'the pulsations of a person.' Revealing these rare creators as the invaluable catalysts they also were, Smee conveys exactly that on page after page. . . . His brilliant group biography is one of a kind." --The Atlantic "Perceptive . . . Smee is onto something important. His book may bring us as close as we'll ever get to understanding the connections between these bristly bonds and brilliance."--The Christian Science Monitor"In this intriguing work of art history and psychology, The Boston Globe's art critic looks at the competitive friendships of Matisse and Picasso, Manet and Degas, Pollock and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon. All four relationships illuminate the creative process--both its imaginative breakthroughs and its frustrating blocks."--Newsday

    0-8109-4964-4$60.00 / Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

    C. Leyendecker captivated audiences throughout the first half of the 20th century. Leyendecker is best known for his creation of the archetype of the fashionable American male with his advertisements for Arrow Collar. These images sold to an eager public the idea of a glamorous lifestyle, the bedrock upon which modern advertising was built. He also was the creator instantly recognizable icons, such as the New Year’s baby and Santa Claus, that are to this day an integral part of the lexicon of Americana and was commissioned to paint more Saturday Evening Post covers than any other artist. Leyendecker lived for most of his adult life with Charles Beach, the Arrow Collar Man, on whom the stylish men in his artwork were modeled. The first book about the artist in more than 30 years, J. C. Leyendecker features his masterworks, rare paintings, studies, and other artwork, including the 322 covers he did for the Post. With a revealing text that delves into both his artistic evolution and personal life, J. C. Leyendecker restores this iconic image maker’s rightful position in the pantheon of great American artists.