Nature has all but disappeared in her world, but no one notices because of the antidepressants they're on. Lulu (who never takes her medicine) feels an increasing sense of dread and despair, until her fate changes one cold day when she finds a magic bottle containing a map. Drawn by pirates long ago, this map shows the way to the lost world of the Peppermint Islands, sunk to the bottom of the sea 400 years ago in the great battle between the pirates and the capitalists. Suddenly, Lulu has the chance to save the last remaining wild animals on earth, but she'll have to battle the Peppermint Man and the Great Trading Company in order to defeat the capitalist machine out to ruin the natural world. With the help of her new octopus friend, Mr. Blue, they start their journey to save the Peppermint Islands from annihilation.This is the latest Blab! storybook, a series of graphic novels showcasing artists from Monte Beauchamp's annual BLAB! anthology, presented in a faux-children's book format, though aimed squarely at adults and young adults.

    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 In addition, there is a lengthy excerpt from an unpublished manuscript by Maxfield Parrish, Jr., explaining step-by-step his father's glazing technique and use of photography in his work. This definitive study also contains numerous revealing excerpts from Parrish's unpublished correspondence with family, friends, and clients.

    As she delved deeper into their engrossing lives, questions emerged. What was the deep secret May had confided to Edward? And what was the tragic truth behind Amy’s wayward, wandering life, her strange marriage, and her unexplained early death?Weaving together the threads of this tale, Dimbleby takes us through a turbulent period in English history and visits the most far-flung corners of the Empire. William Morris, Rudyard Kipling, William Gladstone, and prominent members of the Souls also play a part in this sweeping, often funny, and sometimes tragic story. Richly detailed and exquisitely told, May and Amy is a stunning account of hidden love and family secrets.

    This volume, prepared by an expert in the field, is devoted exclusively to just that. With its clear, concise text, its almost 200 excellent illustrations, and its overall life-drawing approach, the book provides valuable guidelines on how best to portray faces, features, and heads. There is probably no better instructor to turn to than George B. Bridgman. He brings to the subject both his expertise as an artist and his fifty years' experience as lecturer and teacher at the Art Students League of New York. Throughout the book, he places as much emphasis on perspective and planes as on anatomy. In this way, you'll develop a more precise understanding of each feature, the head and face in general, the relationship between features, and the relationship between a specific feature and the face or head. Mr. Bridgman's consideration of the head includes such topics as the head at eye level and below eye level; planes of the head; and round and square forms. Four features — eye, nose, mouth, ear — are dealt with in detail. Sections on light and shade, comparative measurements, and principles of cube and oval construction further enhance the scope of the book. The finely executed drawings complement the textual material, illustrating all important concepts.  Of special value is the author's inclusion of the work of famous portrait artists. Vermeer, Hals, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Louise Elisabeth LeBrun — these are the people who made portraiture a master art; and you'll be able to study, up close and at your leisure, the qualities that let their work achieve the status it did.

    Comparing modern art not only to pizzas but also to traditional and children's art, Heller shows us how we can refine analytical tools we already possess to understand and enjoy even the most unfamiliar paintings and sculptures.How is a painting like a pizza? Both depend on visual balance for much of their overall appeal and, though both can be judged by a set of established standards, pizzas and paintings must ultimately be evaluated in terms of individual taste. By using such commonsense examples and making unexpected connections, this book helps even the most skeptical viewers feel comfortable around contemporary art and see aspects of it they would otherwise miss. Heller discusses how nontraditional works of art are made--and thus how to talk about their composition and formal elements. She also considers why such art is made and what it means.At the same time, Heller reassures those of us who have felt uncomfortable around avant-garde art that we don't have to like all--or even any--of it. Yet, if we can relax, we can use the aesthetic awareness developed in everyday life to analyze almost any painting, sculpture, or installation. Heller also gives concise answers to the eight questions she is most frequently asked about contemporary art--from how to tell when an abstract painting is right side up to which works of art belong in a museum.This book is for anyone who agrees with art critic Clement Greenberg that All profoundly original art looks ugly at first. It's also for anyone who disagrees. It is for anyone who wants to get more out of a museum or gallery visit and would like to be able to say something more than just yes or no when asked if they like an artist's work.

    The Barnes Collection has been conservatively valued at more than $6 billion and includes some 69 Cézannes (more than in all the museums of Paris combined), 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus, 14 Modiglianis, and no fewer than 180 Renoirs. Yet the Barnes is in crisis. Its founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872), grew up in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia only to become first a physician and later a pharmaceutical king. By 1920, this self-made man was already well on his way to becoming one of the great art collectors of his day. But this is also the story of Richard Glanton, who escaped poverty in rural Georgia to become a high-flying, politically powerful Philadelphia lawyer. It was Glanton who took the Barnes art on its celebrated worldwide tour, renovated the galleries-and presided over a decade of expensive litigation. The most famous of these court cases—this one in federal court—pitted the Barnes against its wealthy neighbors. The goal: A 52-car parking lot for the Barnes. The cost: more than $6 million in legal fees. Today, Glanton is no longer president of the Barnes, and the new board is seeking to move the collection into the city. Yet another court case will decide whether they can or not. The battle of the Barnes has only just begun. "Here, at long last, is the whole truth about the Dickensian legal tug-of-war—unimaginably tangled, unsparingly vicious, unprecedentedly cynical—that threatens the survival of one of the greatest private art collections of the twentieth century. From now on, anyone who seeks to understand the desperate plight of the Barnes Collection will have to start by reading this important book." —Terry Teachout, author of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken "John Anderson has produced a riveting account of curators, trustees, and lawyers fighting for control of the world-famous Barnes Collection of French impressionist art from the 1950s to the present. Based on hundreds of revealing interviews, Art Held Hostage reads like a superb mystery novel: This gem of investigative reporting is a sure contender for the national best-seller lists." —Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University

    1922) has built up a reputation as one of the most distinctive contemporary figurative artists. Freud's startling and disconcerting portraits and nudes have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget. This stunning book -- which accompanies a major retrospective showing at Tate Britain in London, Fundacio"la Caixa" in Barcelona, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles -- brings together key works from Freud's entire career, including over 140 paintings, drawings, and etchings, some new, and many never before exhibited.Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs from the artist's personal archives, this volume contains a detailed analysis of Freud's work by curator William Feaver along with a contribution from the artist's friend, painter Frank Auerbach. Unprecedented in scope and providing an exciting opportunity to view the exceptionally productive period of the last 20 years in the context of earlier decades, this book celebrates the lifetime achievements of a powerful artist, one of the greatest realist painters of our time.

    The writings include text from the infamous performances that brought her to the Supreme Court in Finley vs. NEA, a battle that became a mainstay of the culture wars and which has made Finley an icon in the struggle for freedom of speech. Included in this volume will be the never before published, Obie Award-winning The American Chestnut for which she received a Guggenheim; such works as We Keep Our Victims Ready, A Certain Level of Denial, The Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman, and an excerpt from her forthcoming film Shut Up and Love Me. Also appearing will be previously unpublished short stories, photos, artwork, and an essay on censorship. In 1998 Finley was named Woman of the Year by MS. magazine; she posed for Playboy the following year. She has appeared in numerous films including Philadelphia, and will soon be directing her own first feature film, Shut Up and Love Me, produced by Forensic Films. She has recorded albums including a collaboration with Sinead O'Connor. Finley is a regular on Politically Incorrect and can be seen giving her opinions on Exhale, a new show hosted by Candace Bergen on Oxygen. She will be hosting The Naked Players, a "nude Candid Camera" as well as Shock Video, both on HBO. Finley has written four books: Shock Treatment, Enough Is Enough, Living It Up, and Pooh Unplugged. "We need Finley: she doesn't duck the bullets, she keeps her eyes peeled on the artillery aimed at women, and she continues to push against her own boundaries as an artist" -- MS. Magazine

    Three years later he was in Naples, where he painted The Seven Acts of Mercy. A year later he died at the age of thirty-eight under mysterious circumstances. Exploring Caravaggio's singular masterwork, in The Guardian of Mercy Terence Ward offers an incredible narrative journey into the heart of his artistry and his metamorphosis from fugitive to visionary.Ward's guide in this journey is a contemporary artist whose own life was transformed by the painting, a simple man named Angelo who shows him where it still hangs in a small church in Naples and whose story helps him see its many layers. As Ward unfolds the structure of the painting, he explains each of the seven mercies and its influence on Caravaggio's troubled existence. Caravaggio encountered the whole range of Naples's vertical social layers, from the lowest ranks of poverty to lofty gilded aristocratic circles, and Ward reveals the old city behind today's metropolis. Fusing elements of history, biography, memoir, travelogue, and journalism, his narrative maps the movement from estrangement to grace, as we witness Caravaggio's bruised life gradually redeemed by art.

    There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America. We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four). We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work.Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.” Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”

    The global cast includes Marina Abramovic , Matthew Barney, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Cristina Iglesias, On Kawara, Jeff Koons, Ernesto Neto, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, and Ai Weiwei. Many of the pieces reflect the cultural upheavals of recent times, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the blossoming of the Arab Spring.A daring yet convincing analysis of which artworks best capture the zeitgeist of our time, Grovier’s list also provides a much-needed map through the landscape of contemporary art. Illustrations of key works are supplemented by comparative images, and short texts offer a biography of each artwork, tracing its inception and impact, and offering a view not only into the imagination of the artist but into the age in which we live.

    David Hockney has worked in almost every medium - painting, drawing, stage design, photography and printmaking. He has undertaken an ambitious experiment with ways of seeing and ways of representing sight - ranging from his paintings, with their challenges to perspective and brilliant colours, to his vivid multi-dimensional photo-collages and his fax art, computer printings and coloured laser prints.

    These paintings are among the central attractions for millions of tourists who visit these museums each year. Carefully selected works evoke the glorious light of the French countryside, quiet gardens, and seaside retreats. Includes such popular paintings as Woman with a Parasol, The Japanese Footbridge, and Houses of Parliament, Sunset.

    The professor swears it's a Vermeer -- but why exactly has he kept it hidden so long? The reasons unfold in a gripping sequence of stories that trace ownership of the work back to Amsterdam during World War II and still further to the moment of the painting's inception.

    On the occasion of the centenary of his birth comes the definitive retrospective of the artist's work from his early years. Dali explores the development of the artist's technique and style, his relationship with the Surrealists, and his exploitation of Freudian ideas, as well as the image Dali created of himself as the mad genius artist. This catalogue will be the major reference work for Dali for decades to come. It includes illustrations of all the works loaned to the exhibition, as well as comparative illustrations and photographs. The volume contains an introductory essay by Dawn Ades, with scholarly research incorporated in a "Dali Dictionary," in the entries on individual works, and in the chronology, which includes a quantity of new material. The guide draws upon the best scholarship available on Dali, including that of Hank Hine, Director of the Salvador Dali Museum, Jennifer Mundy, Senior Curator of the Tate Museum, and Michael Taylor, Acting Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.