Setting Realism in its social and historical context, this title discusses the crucial paradox posed by Realist works of art - notably in the revolutionary paintings of Courbet, the works of Manet, Degas and Monet, of the Pre-Raphaelites and other English, American, German and Italian Realists.

    Each work is accompanied by a detailed description to enhance the appreciation of the artist's creation.

    The book has remained continuously in print through many editions and has some more than a quarter of a million copies. It is, as American Artist Magazine calls it, the "artist's bible," an invaluable reference for the painter, sculptor, and printmaker. During the past few years, however, new art movements and new research have led to many changes in the technology of artist's materials. With the assistance of Mayer's window, Bena, and his colleagues, Viking and Steven Sheehan, Director of the Ralph Mayer Center at Yale University, have prepared this latest revision of the book, which is now completely updated and expanded.

    Today, museums are staging exhibitions of encaustic art, workshops in the technique are thriving, and art collectors and dealers are assimilating encaustic art into their collections and galleries. The word encaustic is taken from the Greek and means “to burn in.” In the encaustic process, pigmented wax is applied and then fused to a surface with heat. The result is a broad range of surface effects and a luminous translucency that is unique to the encaustic medium. Encaustic Art is a complete resource for artists who wish to learn to create fine art with wax. It features step-by-step techniques with easy-to-understand instructions and detailed illustrations, stunning examples of encaustic works of art (including sculpture), along with practical advice and thoughtful aesthetic observations from more than 60 professional artists working in the encaustic medium.

    With four hundred color photos, including exclusive portraits and all-new stories, Humans of New York is a stunning collection of images that showcases the outsized personalities of New York.Surprising and moving, Humans of New York is a celebration of individuality and a tribute to the spirit of the city.

    With detailed analytical captions and diagrams, every lesson is clearly delineated and illustrated. Throughout, also, is commentary that sheds light on the creative process of drawing and offers deep insight into the unsurpassed achievements of the masters.

    So detailed and so accurate are these drawings that this book has long been a classic work of its kind. The animals are shown in three ways: external full views and dozens of details (paws, head, eyes, legs, etc.); beneath-the-skin drawings of musculature and of the positions and insertions of each muscle; and skeleton drawings of the bone structures that support and determine surface contours and configurations. In addition, special cross-sections dissect those portions of the animal — such as the head and limbs — that are most important to the artist. For this edition, Lewis S. Born of the American Museum of Natural History collected 25 plates from George Stubbs's Anatomy of the Horse, long unavailable; Straus-Durckheim's Anatomie Descriptive et Comparative du Chat; and Cuvier and Laurrillard's Anatomie Comparée. These plates, as fully annotated as the plates that make up the original book, supplement Ellenberger, Baum and Dittrich with anatomical drawings of the monkey, the bat, the flying squirrel, the rat kangaroo, the seal, and the hare. Mr. Lewis also provided a new preface and added to the annotated bibliography, which now contains 66 items.

    Wissman offers astute and illuminating insights into the art, career, and family life of this great artist--whose beautiful paintings of a better, purer time an place continue to find favor with contemporary viewers. Over fifty full-color reproductions and several black-and-white illustrations exemplify Bouguereau's precision in creating timeless works of sensual, emotional, and intellectual appeal.

     In The Essence of Watercolour Hazel shows how wonderfully versatile and beguiling the medium of watercolour is and how to get the most out of it. Hazel stresses how important it is to understand the characteristics of the medium in order to exploit it to the full.  She encourages the reader to explore the properties of watercolour and to be unafraid of strength of colour and brushstroke.Hazel shows through demonstration and projects that tone is king in watercolour and illustrates how to paint light with the use of shade. Armed with this understanding she demonstrates that watercolour is not such an unforgiving medium after all: accidents and mistakes can be disguised, overridden and corrected.The Essence of Watercolour is a culmination of many years of Hazel's teaching and demonstrating, in which she offers inspirational insights into the secrets of watercolour painting and encourages artists to take their art to the next level.

    Readers will learn the basic anatomy, fundamentals of storycraft and how the medium works as a means of expression.

    It explores basic materials and instruments; fundamental properties of strokes and pen control; key elements of shading; and indispensable techniques for creating vibrant textures. As a bonus, a chapter is devoted to what the author refers to as, the secret Line of Balance. This book is not just written to instruct but also to intrigue and inspire enthusiasts of pen and ink drawing.

    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.

    While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with sweet sounds or battered them with dissonance, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. The narrative goes from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.

    Who put all those naked men in the classical section of museums? What were the "do's" and "don'ts" for female artists as "civilization" marched across Europe? Why did nuns have more fun in medieval times? This wisecracking but cleverly wise story of art is guaranteed to turn history on its head - and maybe a few historians too. Sprinkled throughout are "believe it or not" quotations from so-called experts; useful facts (consider how many prostitutes and how few suffragettes were painted in the nineteenth century); and reproductions of famous art works "enhanced" for historical accuracy and revenge.

    Since then, critics and scholars have largely ignored him. Wyeth, however, who is age 88 at the date of publication, has continued to paint, to the delight of his admirers, collectors, and the art-loving public. Now, in association with the High Museum exhibition, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic takes a fresh look at the work of one of America's most beloved artists.In examining his entire oeuvre, the book celebrates the artist's ongoing love affair with everyday life-domestic, natural, and architectural. Found throughout Wyeth's work, these objects form patterns that illuminate core themes and reveal the artist wrestling with issues of memory, temporality, embodiment, and the metaphysical. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book explores how the artist's approach to these subjects was formed in his early career, and has been revisited in new and surprising ways in recent years.Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic comprises 150 tempera paintings and 50 drawings and watercolors-including his most-famous works, but also many published here for the first time.