Drawing on a rich range of sources, from inventories and guild regulations topoetry and chronicles, it examines everything from panel paintings to carved altarpieces.While many little-known works are foregrounded, Susie Nash also presents new ways of viewing and understanding the more familiar, such as the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, by considering the social and economic context of their creation and reception.Throughout, Nash challenges the perception that Italy was the European leader in artistic innovation at this time, demonstrating forcefully that Northern art, and particularly that of the Southern Netherlands, dominated visual culture throughout Europe in this crucial period.

    Drawing on new documentary information, the author recreates the often grueling conditions of an early rock and roll tour, and provides new facts about "the day the music died." With 50 photos.

    She began keeping a journal in 1927, when, after years of her work being derided and ignored, came unexpected vindication and triumph when the Group of Seven accepted her as one of them and encouraged her to overcome the years of despair when she stopped painting. Hundreds and Thousands is the sixth of seven books by Emily Carr to be published by Douglas McIntyre in a completely redesigned edition, each with an introduction by a noted Canadian writer or an authority on Emily Carr and her work.

    Now, ten years after the original film’s release, the full story of this seemingly cursed production can finally be told...  In The Crow’s last days of filming, its star Brandon Lee (son of Bruce Lee) was killed in a strange on-set accident, while filming his character’s death scene. Bridget Baiss describes the chain of events which led from O’Barr’s creation of the graphic novel, up to this fateful day, and beyond, to the film’s final, triumphant release. The definitive account of The Crow’s production and the phenomenon it became, packed with scores of interviews with the film’s cast and crew.

    Written by J. Jason Horejs, owner of Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ, Starving to Successful will give you pragmatic advice and concrete, actionable steps you can begin implementing immediately to become more successful in marketing your work to galleries.Gain insight into what a gallery owner is thinking as he or she reviews your portfolio. Understand why the most common approaches artists make to galleries are largely ineffective. Learn what most artists fail to do in preparing their work for sale.Starving to Successful will change the way you look at the artist/gallery relationship, and will set your art career on a new path.About the AuthorArt flows through Xanadu Gallery owner J. Jason Horejs veins. Second generation in the art business, (Horejs father is a nationally recognized oil painter John Horejs) Horejs life has always been filled with art. Though not interested in pursuing a life as an artist, Horejs fell in love with the business side of art at an early age. At age 12, the future gallery owner was employed by his father building custom canvas stretchers.In 1991, at the age of 17, Horejs began working for Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ, where he learned the gallery business from the ground up. Horejs handled logistics, shipping and installation, eventually working into a sales position at the western art gallery. Horejs worked in the gallery s Scottsdale and Jackson Hole, WY, locations.In 2001, Jason and his wife, Carrie, opened Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale. In spite of opening on September 11th into a completely changed art world, Horejs built the gallery into a successful venture, showing dozens of artists and selling to collectors from around the world, including major municipal and private collections.In 2008, Horejs developed a series of art marketing workshops designed to help artists better understand the gallery business and better prepare themselves to approach galleries. This series of workshops has helped hundreds of artists get organized to show and sell their work through galleries."I discovered," says Horejs, "there was very little information out there for the aspiring professional artist regarding the business side of art, especially in terms of the crucial relationship between the artists and the fine art gallery. Even artists who have graduated with master s degrees leave school having never heard a word about how to approach galleries."Horejs observes that artists approaching his gallery are making many of the same mistakes, not because their work isn t gallery-ready, but simply because they don t have a clear idea of how to proceed. Horejs designed his workshops working closely with his parents and other artists who have learned the ropes of working with galleries by trial and error. The clear-headed advice the gallery owner gives is designed to give the artists concrete steps they can take to prepare their work, research galleries and approach galleries for representation.

    Topics range from expressive hand gestures to patron saints, pasta, parmesan, shoes, opera, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, gelato, gondolas, and more. History, folklore, superstitions, traditions, and customs are tossed in a delicious sauce that also includes a wealth of factual information for the sophisticated traveler:• why lines, as we know them, are nonexistent in Italy• why a string of coral beads is often seen around a baby’s wrist• what the unlucky number of Italy is (it’s not thirteen, unless seating guests at a table, when it IS thirteen–taking into account the outcome of the Last Supper)• why red underwear begins to appear in shops as the New Year approaches In addition to the lyrical and poetic, Italianissimo provides useful and indispensable information for the traveler: deciphering the quirks of the language (while English has only one word for “you,†in Italy there are three), the best place to find balsamic vinegar (in Modena, of course), the best gelato (in Sicily, where they first invented it using the snow from Mount Etna). There are also recommendations for little-known museums and destinations (the Bodoni museum, the Pinocchio park, legendary coffee bars).This is a new kind of guidebook overflowing with enlightening and hilarious miscellaneous information, filled with luscious graphics and unforgettable photographs that will decode and enrich all trips to Italy–both real and imaginary.

    Cornell's lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a very personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist's work in twenty-six years.In her essay, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan focuses on the seminal experiences and concepts that shaped Cornell's evolution as an American artist with a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections (Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature's Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time)explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist's source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.

    The quick brushstrokes of the Impressionists suited his temperament, as did his heavy use of impasto. This helpful volume shows many of van Gogh's best loved works, including the famous self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear, painted after he had cut off part of his ear in a fit of madness, Sunflowers, which were to him a symbol of power and beneficence, and The Starry Night, a painting which clearly expresses intensity and mental turbulence.

    We see Leonardo, having just completed The Last Supper, and being celebrated by all of Florence for his miraculous portrait of the wife of a textile manufacturer. That painting—the Mona Lisa—being called the most lifelike anyone had ever seen yet, more divine than human, was captivating the entire Florentine Republic.And Michelangelo, completing a commissioned statue of David, the first colossus of the Renaissance, the archetype hero for the Republic epitomizing the triumph of the weak over the strong, helping to reshape the public identity of the city of Florence and conquer its heart.In The Lost Battles, published in England to great acclaim (“Superb”—The Observer; “Beguilingly written”—The Guardian), Jonathan Jones brilliantly sets the scene of the time—the politics; the world of art and artisans; and the shifting, agitated cultural landscape. We see Florence, a city freed from the oppressive reach of the Medicis, lurching from one crisis to another, trying to protect its liberty in an Italy descending into chaos, with the new head of the Republic in search of a metaphor that will make clear the glory that is Florence, and seeing in the commissioned paintings the expression of his vision.Jones reconstructs the paintings that Leonardo and Michelangelo undertook—Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, a nightmare seen in the eyes of the warrior (it became the first modern depiction of the disenchantment of war) and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, a call to arms and the first great transfiguration of the erotic into art. Jones writes about the competition; how it unfolded and became the defining moment in the transformation of “craftsman” to “artist”; why the Florentine government began to fall out of love with one artist in favor of the other; and how—and why—in a competition that had no formal prize to clearly resolve the outcome, the battle became one for the hearts and minds of the Florentine Republic, with Michelangelo setting out to prove that his work, not Leonardo’s, embodied the future of art. Finally, we see how the result of the competition went on to shape a generation of narrative paintings, beginning with those of Raphael.A riveting exploration into one of history’s most resonant exchanges of ideas, a rich, fascinating book that gives us a whole new understanding of an age and those at its center.

    Early in his career, Hoving was introduced to the "curator's game." Each week, he and his contemporaries met to examine details of larger museum masterpieces. Whoever correctly identified the detail in context won free coffee: the losers paid. In an imaginative adaptation of this exercise, Hoving introduces us to the challenge and the fun of identifying art, and to the rewards of familiarity with the great works. A section of paintings accompanied by brief essays introduces a range of artists, themes, techniques, and styles, while progressively demanding "clues" are provided to help identify visual details in context. No experience is necessary to play this game. Readers at all levels will discover the fun of identifying and remembering great art.

    The Magic Bus is becoming a national shrine, a holy pilgrim site, a modern-day Mecca. And I was determined to see it, too." So writes author and adventurer Ken Ilgunas, who, in the summer of 2011, moved up to Alaska and, like thousands before him, embarked on pilgrimage to explore the storied bus of the Stampede Trail, the very bus in which Chris McCandless of "Into the Wild" died twenty years before. What was supposed to be little more than a "literary tour" to a bus from a book that Ilgunas had "merely enjoyed" would become a humorous, enthralling, and, at times, treacherous journey, leading him to the very heart of Alaska.

    Herein, John Cage recalls the turning point in his career; Ben Johnston criticizes the operas of his teacher Harry Partch; La Monte Young attributes his creative discipline to a Morman childhood; and much more. The results are revelatory conversations with some of America's most radical musical innovators.

    The book features 2,000 images and documents, many previously unpublished. Note: PBS-TV's American Masters will broadcast a 2 hour Warhol documentary by Ric Burns to air in May 2006.

    The author concerns himself not only with art, but also with Chinese philosophy, religion, and the realm of ideas.

    After his death, the contents of his studio, including thousands of glass negatives, were sold off for five dollars. For years the fragile negatives sat forgotten and deteriorating in cardboard boxes in an open carport. How did it happen, then, that the most implausible of events took place? That Disfarmer’s haunting portraits were retrieved from oblivion, that today they sell for upwards of $12,000 each at posh New York art galleries; his photographs proclaimed works of art by prestigious critics and journals and exhibited around the world? The story of Disfarmer’s rise to fame is a colorful, improbable, and ultimately fascinating one that involves an unlikely assortment of individuals. Would any of this have happened if a young New York photographer hadn't been so in love with a pretty model that he was willing to give up his career for her; if a preacher’s son from Arkansas hadn't spent 30 years in the Army Corps of Engineers mapping the U.S. from an airplane; if a magazine editor hadn't felt a strange and powerful connection to the work? The cast of characters includes these, plus a restless and wealthy young Chicago aristocrat and even a grandson of FDR. It’s a compelling story which reveals how these diverse people were part of a chain of events whose far-reaching consequences none of them could have foreseen, least of all the strange and reclusive genius of Heber Springs. Until now, the whole story has not been told.