Street Photographer


Vivian Maier - 2011
    It is hard enough to find thesequalities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.It wasn’t until local historian John Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from a Chicago auction house and began collecting and championing her marvelous work just a few years ago that any of it saw the light of day. Presented here for the first time in print, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer collects the best of her incredible, unseen body of work.

Color: A Natural History of the Palette


Victoria Finlay - 2003
    Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.

Art of the Twentieth Century


Ingo F. Walther - 1998
    For what Ingo Walther and his international team have done is to make sense of this most explosive of artistic centuries. Who could possibly have forecast on New Year's Eve 1899 that, one hundred years later, painting and sculpture would be only options, not prerequisite disciplines for modern artists, constantly questioning both the technical and thematic definitions of their work? The infinite laboratory of experiment that the visual arts have become over the last decades highlights not only the inherent potential for human creativity and representation, but also shows the way individuals and groups have responded to the huge social, political and technological changes of this most turbulent of times. Ranging across the full spectrum of disciplines available, including photography and new media, and thematically chaptered to highlight relationships between works and movements, this readable and encyclopaedic masterwork does just what it says on the cover. Whether you want Surrealism or Land Art, Fluxus or Bauhaus, your art book purchases can stop once you buy this. Warning: it will not fit on your coffee table!

Confessions of an Art Addict


Peggy Guggenheim - 1979
    Here is a book that captures a valuable chapter in the history of modern art, as well as the spirit of one of its greatest advocates. 13 photos.

The Art Spirit


Robert Henri - 1929
    While it embodies the entire system of his teaching, with much technical advice and critical comment for the student, it also contains inspiration for those to whom the happiness to be found through all the arts is important.No other American painter attracted such a large, intensely personal group of followers as Henri, whose death in 1929 brought to an end a life that has been completely devoted to art. He was an inspired artist and teacher who believed that everyone is vitally concerned in the happiness and wisdom to be found through the arts. Many of his paintings have been acquired by museums and private collectors. Among them are the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Wichita Art Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery.

Surrealism


Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy - 2004
    Introduction with 30 photographs plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural, scientific and sporting events that took place during the movement; 35 most important works and artists included.

This is Monet


Sara Pappworth - 2015
    During the eighty-six years of his life, Monet never rested, and was always driven by the urge to paint. And more than two thousand paintings survive from six highly creative decades. Despite being a celebrity among France's political and cultural elite, Monet never became complacent. Even in his seventies and eighties he was still producing paintings that astounded the art world. Monet's work remains highly influential—his abstraction, gestural strokes and expressive color capturing the imagination of generation after generation of artists.This title is appropriate for ages 14 and up

Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel


Annie Cohen-Solal - 2013
    . . . A rewarding close-up of Rothko’s . . . experience as a Jewish immigrant.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him to a new phase in his life. Early in his career, Annie Cohen-Solal writes, “he became a major player in the social struggle of American artists, and his own metamorphosis benefited from the unique transformation of the U.S. art world during this time.” Within a few decades, he had forged his definitive artistic signature, and most critics hailed him as a pioneer. The numerous museum shows that followed in major U.S. and European institutions ensured his celebrity. But this was not enough for Rothko, who continued to innovate. Ever faithful to his habit of confronting the establishment, he devoted the last decade of his life to cultivating his new conception of art as an experience, thanks to the commission of a radical project, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Cohen-Solal’s fascinating biography, based on considerable archival research, tells the unlikely story of how a young immigrant from Dvinsk became a crucial transforming agent of the art world—one whose legacy prevails to this day.About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award.More praise for Jewish Lives: “Excellent.” – New York times “Exemplary.” – Wall St. Journal “Distinguished.” – New Yorker “Superb.” – The Guardian

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer


Anne-Marie O'Connor - 2012
    Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron. The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered "degenerate” in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine "nature"). The author describes how Adele inspired the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her-simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper. And O'Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic heretic in his time, a genius in ours. She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers' grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele's Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, "The Lady in Gold" and proudly exhibited it in Vienna's Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution. The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine. We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court's decision had profound ramifications in the art world. In this book listeners will find riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, The Lady in Gold-the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.

Art as Therapy


Alain de Botton - 2013
    Art as Therapy is packed with 150 examples of outstanding art, with chapters on Love, Nature, Money, and Politics outlining how these works can help with common difficulties. For example, Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter helps us focus on what we want to be loved for; Serra's Fernando Passoa reminds us of the importance of dignity in suffering; and Manet's Bunch of Asparagus teaches us how to preserve and value our long-term partners.De Botton demonstrates how art can guide and console us, and along the way, help us to better understand both art and ourselves.

The Art Book


Phaidon Press - 1997
    Each artist is represented by a full-page colour plate of a definitive work, accompanied by explanatory and illuminating information on the image and its creator. Glossaries of artistic movements and technical terms are included, making this a valuable work of reference as well as a feast for the eyes. By breaking with traditional classifications, The Art Book presents a fresh and original approach to art: an unparalleled visual sourcebook and a celebration of our rich and multi-faceted culture.

Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel


Lucinda Hawksley - 2004
    Saved from the drudgery of a working-class existence by a young Pre- Raphaelite artist, Lizzie Siddal rose to become one of the most famous faces in Victorian Britain and a pivotal figure of London's artistic world, until tragically ending her life in 1862.

The Best of Norman Rockwell


Norman Rockwell - 1984
    Rockwell senior, who said he depicted life “as I would like it to be,” chronicled iconic visions of American life: the Thanksgiving turkey, soda fountains, ice skating on the pond, and small-town boys playing baseball-not to mention the beginning of the civil rights movement. Now, the best-selling collection of Rockwell’s most beloved illustrations, organized by decade, is available in a refreshed edition. With more than 150 images-oil paintings, watercolors, and rare black-and-white sketches--this is an uncommonly faithful Rockwell treasury. The original edition has sold nearly 200,000 copies.

Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art


Phoebe Hoban - 1997
    Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat, the first biography of this charismatic figure, charts the trajectory from the artist's troubled childhood to his volatile passage through the white art world of dealers and nouveau-riche collectors, chronicling the meteoric success and overnight burnout that made him an instant art-world myth.As much the portrait of an era as the portrait of an artist, Basquiat is an incisive expose of the eighties art market that paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, the East Village art scene, and the out-of-control auction houses. Ten years after the artist's death, Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time.

Pocket Frida Kahlo Wisdom: Inspirational Quotes and Wise Words from a Legendary Icon


Hardie Grant - 2018
    From a young age, Kahlo forged her own path, overcoming polio as a child, and stoically battling the after-effects of a tragic road accident that left her with lifelong injuries. Pocket Frida Kahlo Wisdom is an inspiring collection of some of her best quotes on love, style, life, art and more, and celebrates the Mexican icon's immense legacy."Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.""The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.""I am my own muse, I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better."