"To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius.Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work.Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon.This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement.Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.

    A comprehensive look at the Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900, a bloody uprising in north China against native Christians and foreign missionaries.

    Fold-out pages featuring photographs of their early work, their studios and materials, as well as sketches and finished art create an exuberant feast for the eye that will attract both children and adults. Self-portraits of each illustrator crown this important anthology that celebrates the artists and the art of the picture book. An event book for the ages. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, MA.

    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.

    The impressive photographs of works from all visual arts movements are at the center of these richly illustrated volumes. The books successfully provide an overview of the artistic diversity of the individual periods, and they couldn't have been written and illustrated any more clearly. The informative and interesting texts have been written by renowned authors from the fields of history, architecture and art history, providing a multifaceted view of each period. These books are a real pleasure for anyone with an interest in art.

    But whether they were in the Louvre or the Prado, the Mauritshuis of the Palazzo Pitti, they reveal the pleasures of truly looking.De Montebello shares the sense of excitement recorded by Goethe in his autobiography—"akin to the emotion experienced on entering a House of God"—but also reflects on why these secular temples might nevertheless be the "worst possible places to look at art." But in the end both men convey, with subtlety and brilliance, the delights and significance of their subject matter and some of the intense creations of human beings throughout our long history.

    Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, about other cultures - and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them.Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the Europeanized Americas? Is it possible to include Asian art and Indian art in 'the story?' What happens when one does? To help us find answers, he uses both Western and non-Western artworks, tables of contents from art histories written in cultures outside the centre of Western European tradition, and strangely wonderful diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individual. True multiculturalism may be an impossibility, but art lovers can each create a 'story of art' that is right for themselves.

    China Under Mao narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist revolutionary state from 1949 to 1976--an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.Mao's China, Andrew Walder argues, was defined by two distinctive institutions established during the first decade of Communist Party rule: a Party apparatus that exercised firm (sometimes harsh) discipline over its members and cadres; and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Although a large national bureaucracy had oversight of this authoritarian system, Mao intervened strongly at every turn. The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements--victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life--also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution.Misdiagnosing China's problems as capitalist restoration and prescribing continuing class struggle against imaginary enemies as the solution, Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative. At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided.

    She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age. At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China—behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women’s liberation and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, wars with France and Japan—and an invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs—one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eyewitness accounts, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s—and the world’s—history. Packed with drama, fast paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

    A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer's images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There--with silver mined in Peru--Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer's studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were an inventory of the possible. Vermeer's Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

    After many years of research, Robert Descharnes and Gilles Neret finally located all the paintings of this highly prolific artist. These two volumes represent a one time offer at 29.99 as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Dali's birth. The set will have a sticker indicating the 100th anniversary,

    Governments have sought to control, censor, or bend art to their own purposes; artists have resisted and subverted such efforts. But what happens when artists work on behalf of a political program? When does art become propaganda? Is art tainted, diminished, or elevated by its political content?Toby Clark argues that propaganda art appears in many guises, and that the desire to persuade is not always at odds with aesthetic aims. He examines these many forms: the state propaganda of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin's Soviet Union; democratic governments' representation of enemies in wartime; and anti-government protest art around the world, uncovering the complex rhetoric, high beauty, and ambiguous role of art that dwells in the political realm.

    Much of Indian art is immediately accessible to the outsider, but much is also enigmatic, needing interpretation and guidance before it can be enjoyed in depth: the strange pantheon of the Hindu gods, the subtle insights of Buddhist mysticism, or the complex symbolism of the miniatures. For this edition, the late Professor Craven thoroughly revised the text and incorporated works by contemporary artists, linking their achievements to the traditions of Indian art. A new glossary and time line are also included.

    In this intimate memoir, Shen Fu recounts the domestic and romantic joys of his marriage to Yun, the beautiful and artistic girl he fell in love with as a child. He also describes other incidents of his life, including how his beloved wife obtained a courtesan for him and reflects on his travels through China. Shen Fu's exquisite memoir shows six parallel "layers" of one man's life, loves and career, with revealing glimpses into Chinese society of the Ch'ing Dynasty.

    In 1653, the twenty-one-year-old son of an innkeeper, the artist Jan Vermeer, registered as a master painter with the city's Guild. Vermeer married well, had many children, and enjoyed a respectable local reputation as a painter until his death in 1675. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that his genius was widely appreciated. Today, Vermeer's thirty-five paintings are regarded as masterpieces.In Vermeer, Anthony Bailey presents a compelling portrait of Vermeer's life and character, long lost in history. Bailey re-creates the atmosphere of the times, introduces Vermeer's contemporaries, and portrays his domestic life in vibrant detail. Drawing on period documents and his own intense curiosity, Bailey sheds light on the science and artistry behind the glorious, almost mystical, paintings. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Vermeer will stand as the classic work on Vermeer for years to come.