Emily Porterfield is a conservator of paintings in 21st century Chicago. He made her fall in love with art when she was nine years old and yet Emily was the muse of Edouard's greatest artwork 150 years before she was born. Their story begins with a letter. While x-raying a painting for an upcoming Edouard Manet exhibition at the Art Institute, Emily stumbles upon a hidden letter painted in lead white beneath the layers of oil and varnish. Through the mysterious properties of the letter, Emily is raptured to the past where she becomes the muse who influences Manet's greatest works. As their relationship grows between each new letter and she discovers that his confusing iconography can finally be explained through their story, an underlying plot of murder and art forgery is uncovered in the present. With the exhibition gala approaching, a connection between the murderer and the forgeries reveals itself and Emily is forced to ask how their love can withstand the test of time when only a few letters remain.

    Inspired by a unique artistic vision grounded in the deliberate irrationality of Dada and the incongruous vision of Surrealism, Ray created a gallery of striking photographs: unforgettable images that etch themselves into the mind and transform our perceptions of reality. This beautiful large-format volume reproduces on coated stock a rich selection of these works, created amid the intellectual and artistic ferment of the 20's and 30's.To achieve his remarkable effects, Ray experimented with various techniques: over and under exposure, shooting through different fabrics, superimposing images, and zeroing in on tiny details. In his words: "The removal of inculcated modes of presentation, resulting in apparent artificiality or strangeness … is to be welcomed." To preserve the full dramatic impact of his ground-breaking work, Dover has carefully and painstakingly reproduced these photographs from a rare gravure edition. The photographs are divided into 5 groupings:Photos 1–24: general subjects (still lifes, rooms, landscapes, cityscapes, flowers)Photos 25–42: female figures, mainly nudesPhotos 43–66: women's faces (including Gertrude Stein)Photos 67–84: celebrity portraits (Ray, Dalí, Tzara, Sinclair Lewis, Joyce, Eluard, Breton, Derain, Braque, Matisse, Picasso, and others)Photos 85–104: rayographs, "cameraless" compositions created by resting objects on unexposed film Also included in this edition are acclamatory texts by Eluard, Breton, and Tzara in the original French with English translations; a German text by Rrose Sélavy (pseudonymous) with English translation; an Introduction by Ray with French translation, and a portrait of Ray by Picasso.Today, Ray's individual photographs command high prices on the collector's market. Indeed, the original edition of this book sells for hundreds of dollars. The publication of this inexpensive Dover edition thus allows photographers, artists, designers, and students of art and photography an unparalleled opportunity to savor and study these iconoclastic masterpieces. Most of the photos are full page, or nearly so, and reveal the profoundly original vision of a man for whom the violation of convention was "far preferable to the monstrous habits condoned by etiquette and estheticism."

    In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.It's 1950. A lone surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts - and by the forces of hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties - to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.

    The letters vividly show the artist's life was no bed of roses. Whereas Van Gogh perfectly knew what was sellable, he continued to produce what he considered as honest, 'truthful' art, regardless of current taste. He did not expect the art-buying public to understand the rough appearance of his work. Van Gogh acknowledged that being an artist simply involved struggle, but he believed that one would benefit from adversity, both personally and professionally. "No victory without a battle, no battle without suffering." In Van Gogh's case it seems to have been a never ending battle against poverty, isolation and adversity. Given his circumstances - being financially dependent upon his brother Theo, not selling any work, and getting minimal recognition - his achievements are utterly amazing. This is not a book about Van Gogh's art, but about his life as an artist and human being. By reading it, you will appreciate and understand his work even better. "Van Gogh's Inner Struggle" belongs to the series 'Secrets of Van Gogh'.

    How to Read is a new sort of introduction--a personal master class in reading--that brings you face to face with the work of some of the most influential and challenging writers in history. In lucid, accessible language, these books explain essential topics such as Nietzsche's thinking on beauty, truth, and memory.Nietzsche's thinking revolves around a new and striking concept of humanity—a humanity that has come to terms with the death of God and practices the art and science of living well, free of the need for metaphysical certainties and moral absolutes. How, then, are we to live? And what do we love?Keith Ansell Pearson introduces the reader to Nietzsche's distinctive philosophical style and to the development of his thought. Through a series of close readings of Nietzsche's aphorisms he illuminates some of his best-known but often ill-understood ideas, including eternal recurrence and the superman, and he brings to light the challenging nature of Nietzsche's thinking on key topics such as beauty, truth, and memory. Extracts are taken from a range of Nietzsche's work, including Human, All Too Human; The Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and On the Genealogy of Morality.

    Art in Theory, 1815–1900 provides the most wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents ever assembled on nineteenth-century theories of art.

    More than a tale of possession, the novel probes disturbing depths of guilt, paranoia, and sexual obsession with an unsparing detachment.

    Yet few of them are aware of the remarkable history of that place and of the buildings themselves—a fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly chronicles in the first full-length history of the Louvre in English.More than 7,000 years ago, men and women camped on a spot called Le Louvre for reasons unknown; a clay quarry and a vineyard supported a society there in the first centuries AD. A thousand years later, King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191, just outside the walls of a city far smaller than the Paris we know today. Intended to protect the capital against English soldiers stationed in Normandy, the fortress became a royal residence under Charles V two centuries later, and then the monarchy’s principal residence under the great Renaissance king François I in 1546. It remained so until 1682 when Louis XIV moved his entire court to Versailles. Thereafter the fortunes of the Louvre languished until the tumultuous days of the French Revolution when, during the Reign of Terror in 1793, it first opened its doors to display the nation’s treasures. Ever since—through the Napoleonic era, the Commune, two World Wars, to the present—the Louvre has been a witness to French history, and expanded to become home to a legendary collection, including such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, whose often-complicated and mysterious origins form a spectacular narrative that rivals the building’s grand stature.

    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.

    Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes, and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. The original handbook of decadence, Against Nature exploded like a grenade (in the words of Huysmans) and has enjoyed a cult readership from its publication to the present day.

    John Leonard, New York Times: What emerges from Mr. Lottman's tireless devotions is a portrait of the artist, the outsider, the humanist and skeptic, that breaks the heart. John Sturrock, The New York Times Book Review: Herbert Lottman's life (of Camus) is the first to be written, either in French or English, and it is exhaustive, a labor of love and of wonderful industry.This new edition includes a specially written preface by the author revealing the challenges of a biographer, of some of the problems that had to be dealt with while writing the book and after it appeared.

    Contemplate the mysteries of centuries-old stone circles in England, dangle from a cliff in the Swiss Alps, and hear a French farmer’s defense of foie gras.With a brand-new, original introduction from Rick reflecting on his decades of travel, For the Love of Europe features 100 of the best stories published throughout his career. Covering his adventures through England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and more, these are stories only Rick Steves could tell.Wry, personal, and full of Rick’s signature humor, For the Love of Europe is a fond and inspirational look at a lifetime of travel.

    In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom o f narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.

    

    as beautiful, and yet we know also that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. concrete and the sublime. also to celebrate its mysterious and at times mythical power. complementary interpretations, leading us from Hogarth's belief that the essence of beauty lies in shapely curves, to Kant's discourses on the meaning of pleasure. response both to beauty and to happiness. As he shows, the ability to truly recognise the beauty that surrounds us in the everyday could enable us to deepen the enjoyment of our lives.