Americans came late to the game of art collecting and raced to catch up. Soon, America’s new industrial tycoons began to compete for Europe’s extraordinary Old Master pictures, laying claim to works by Vermeer, Titian, Rembrandt, and others, and causing a major migration of art across the Atlantic. Cynthia Saltzman recounts the fierce competition to acquire some of the greatest paintings in the world and the boom in the market. At the center of this enterprise were the steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the sugar king Harry Havemeyer and his wife Louisine, as well as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the Metropolitan’s president, Henry Marquand. Old Masters, New World is the story of beauty, aesthetics, and taste; money, trade, and power. It is a backstage look at the part played in American collecting by experts like Bernard Berenson and dealers like Colnaghi, Knoedler, and Duveen—who raced around Europe to negotiate purchases and sales of the rarest and most costly masterpieces.

    Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions.Madly transfixing details—noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars—become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel of literary discourse ever presented. Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting.Picked for American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels

    Warner tells the unexpected and often disturbing story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self in modern times. She probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception, and uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture.

    Introducing art in its international context, this accessible book explores core issues about how art is made, interpreted, and displayed, without any of the unnecessary terminology. Divided into themes, A Short Book About Art presents new ways of thinking about the relationship between artists and their work, as well as fresh comparisons between works of art from different periods and places. Thought-provoking and stimulating, it is the ideal companion for anyone who wants to learn about art without a dictionary in their hands.

    This book ranges over the trial of Oscar Wilde, the public furore over prostitution and syphilis, moral outrage over the breakdown of the family, abortion rights and AIDS. High and low culture, from male quest romances to contemporary male bonding movies, Freud to Fatal Attraction, are all included in his study.

    The Samurai spirit, Bushido, is an integral component of Japanese tattooing that is traced through the imagery and interpersonal dynamics of this veiled subculture. The eloquent text is based largely on Takahiro Kitamura's experiences as client and student of the famed Japanese tattoo master, Horiyoshi III. Over 200 beautiful photos by Jai Tanju capture the breathtaking tattoo artistry of Horiyoshi III. Five original, unpublished prints by Horiyoshi III, like those in his acclaimed book, 100 Demons of Horiyoshi III, are included here. Bushido: Legacies of the Japanese Tattoo is certain to fascinate everyone with an interest in tattoo culture.

    Each image in Talking Pictures reveals a singular, frozen moment in a person’s life, be it joyful, quiet, or steeped in sorrow. Yet the book’s unique depth comes from the writing accompanying each photo: as with the caption revealing how one seemingly random snapshot of a dancing couple captured the first dance of their 40-year marriage, each successive inscription shines like a flashbulb illuminating a photograph’s particular context and lighting up our connection to the past.

    Clayton Eshleman's translations have won widespread acclaim, including a National Book Award. Now in its second printing.

    This concise edition captures the ageless and absorbing quality of Georgia O'Keefe's highly distinctive paintings of flowers, each of which draws the viewer into the most minute of details and, in turn, into another world.

    1 SOFTCOVER BOOK

    He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

    This profusely illustrated book surveys the opportunities and the challenges of using images to understand other times. In a thorough and compelling defense of the importance of the visual to history, Burke argues that images should not be considered mere reflections of their time and place, but rather extensions of the social contexts in which they were produced. The author describes and evaluates the methods by which art historians have traditionally analyzed images, and finds them insufficient to deal with the complexities of visual imagery. In developing a richer mode of visual interpretation, Burke devotes much attention to religious icons and narratives and political propaganda posters, caricatures, and maps. Eyewitnessing also addresses the economics of images--some, such as films, are commodities in themselves, and others are created to advertise other products. Concentrating on the representation of social groups, the author explores stereotypes as well as notions of foreignness and gender. In this wide-ranging, highly accessible volume, Burke helps us to understand the promise and the pitfalls of using visual evidence in the writing of history.

    George Kubler draws upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics and replaces the notion of style with the idea of a linked succession of works distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same action. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the ecstatic concept of style--the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

    Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.

    It covers all the major cutting-edge technologies of production automation and material handling, and how these technologies are used to construct modern manufacturing systems. Manufacturing Operations; Industrial Control Systems; Sensors, Actuators, and Other Control System Components; Numerical Control; Industrial Robotics; Discrete Control Using Programmable Logic Controllers and Personal Computers; Material Transport Systems; Storage Systems; Automatic Data Capture; Single Station Manufacturing Cells; Group Technology and Cellular Manufacturing; Flexible Manufacturing Systems; Manual Assembly Lines; Transfer Lines and Similar Automated Manufacturing Systems; Automated Assembly Systems; Statistical Process Control; Inspection Principles and Practices; Inspection Technologies; Product Design and CAD/CAM in the Production System; Process Planning and Concurrent Engineering; Production Planning and Control Systems; and Lean Production and Agile Manufacturing. For anyone interested in Automation, Production Systems, and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing.