On the occasion of the centenary of his birth comes the definitive retrospective of the artist's work from his early years. Dali explores the development of the artist's technique and style, his relationship with the Surrealists, and his exploitation of Freudian ideas, as well as the image Dali created of himself as the mad genius artist. This catalogue will be the major reference work for Dali for decades to come. It includes illustrations of all the works loaned to the exhibition, as well as comparative illustrations and photographs. The volume contains an introductory essay by Dawn Ades, with scholarly research incorporated in a "Dali Dictionary," in the entries on individual works, and in the chronology, which includes a quantity of new material. The guide draws upon the best scholarship available on Dali, including that of Hank Hine, Director of the Salvador Dali Museum, Jennifer Mundy, Senior Curator of the Tate Museum, and Michael Taylor, Acting Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

    Celebrated by some for his naturalism and his revolutionary pictorial inventions, he was considered by others to have destroyed painting. Few other artists have provoked such controversy and so many contradictory interpretations right up to modern times.  On the heels of Caravaggio year 2010, this work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre, with a catalogue raisonné of his works. Five introductory chapters analyze his artistic career from his training in Lombard Milan and his triumphal rise in papal Rome, up to his dramatic final years in Naples, Malta, and Sicily. The spotlight thereby falls upon the radical nature and innovative force of Caravaggio’s art and its influence in all of Europe.   Our understanding of Caravaggio’s work has been substantially broadened in recent decades by major exhibitions, restoration campaigns, new attributions and archival discoveries. The new catalogue raisonné offers a detailed overview of the artist’s entire oeuvre based on the latest research. Every painting is reproduced in large-scale format, with spectacular details that offer dramatic close-ups and set new standards in print quality. A new photographic campaign has been undertaken, enabling the smallest details to be reproduced on a large scale for the first time.They reveal all the more clearly Caravaggio’s virtuosity and his enormous ability to capture the viewer’s attention and to build a communicative bridge between the worlds of picture and viewer. Sequences of spectacular details grouped by subject allow us to experience Caravaggio’s ingenious rhetoric of looks and gestures and their theatrical staging in paint.

    Page after page of rich reproductions capture his use of intense, glowing colors and the unique world he created full of magic, enchantment and fantasy.

    In a body of work spanning over a half-century, he was variously a draughtsman, a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. This short book is both a biography and a guide to his art. It focuses on the extraordinary works that Henri Matisse made during the last period of his life - the large-scale cut-outs on coloured paper, including his famous Blue Nudes, The Snail and Large Composition with Masks.

    Freud—once dubbed "the Ingres of existentialism"—has almost single-handedly redefined the figurative painting of our time. No other living artist possesses his ability to paint the texture and thinness of skin over flesh, and his distinctive portraits have a haunting quality that makes them impossible to forget. This volume, with over one hundred superb reproductions of his greatest paintings, pays tribute to one of the most original and accomplished artists of the twentieth century.

    A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame.Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau's dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home.Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.

    Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Naifeh and Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials to bring a crucial understanding to the larger-than-life mythology of this great artist: his early struggles to find his place in the world; his intense relationship with his brother Theo; and his move to Provence, where he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art. The authors also shed new light on many unexplored aspects of Van Gogh’s inner world: his erratic and tumultuous romantic life; his bouts of depression and mental illness; and the cloudy circumstances surrounding his death at the age of thirty-seven.   Though countless books have been written about Van Gogh, no serious, ambitious examination of his life has been attempted in more than seventy years. Naifeh and Smith have re-created Van Gogh’s life with an astounding vividness and psychological acuity that bring a completely new and sympathetic understanding to this unique artistic genius.

    This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature.The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe—a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China.Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

    This was, without doubt, the most celebrated cohabitation in art history: never, before or since have two such towering artistic talents been penned up in so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history. Predictably, the results were explosive. The dâenouement of their life together has entered into folklore. Two months after Gauguin arrived in Arles, Van Gogh suffered a psychological crisis. He spent most of the rest of his life in a mental institution. Gauguin fled from Arles, and they never saw each other again. But in the brief period during which they worked together a stream of masterpieces was created within the studio they shared. Here, for the first time, the full story of their life together is told.

    nineteen-year-old debutante, she escaped the stultifying demands of her wealthy English family by running away to Paris with her lover Max Ernst. She was immediately championed by Andre Breton, who responded enthusiastically to her fantastical, dark and satirical writing style and her interest in fairy tales and the occult. Her stories were included in Surrealist publications, and her paintings in the Surrealists' exhibitions. ended up in the 1940s as part of the circle of Surrealist European emigres living in Mexico City. Close friends with Luis Bunuel, Benjamin Peret, Octavio Paz and a host of both expatriate Surrealists and Mexican modernists, Carrington was at the centre of Mexican cultural life, while still maintaining her European connections. overview of this intriguing artist's rich body of work. The author considers Carrington's preoccupation with alchemy and the occult, and explores the influence of indigenous Mexican culture and beliefs on her production.

    The Charles of the painting was young—too young to be king—and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible—but what?His research brought him to Diego Velazquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations. Velázquez (1599–1660) was the official painter of the Madrid court, during the time the Spanish Empire teetered on the edge of collapse. When Prince Charles of England—a man wealthy enough to help turn Spain’s fortunes—ventured to the court to propose a marriage with a Spanish princess, he allowed just a few hours to sit for his portrait. Snare believed only Velázquez could have met this challenge. But in making his theory public, Snare was ostracized, victim to aristocrats and critics who accused him of fraud, and forced to choose, like Velázquez himself, between art and family.A thrilling investigation into the complex meaning of authenticity and the unshakable determination that drives both artists and collectors of their work, The Vanishing Velázquez travels from extravagant Spanish courts in the 1700s to the gritty courtrooms and auction houses of nineteenth-century London and New York. But it is above all a tale of mystery and detection, of tragic mishaps and mistaken identities, of class, politics, snobbery, crime, and almost farcical accident. It is a magnificently crafted page-turner, a testimony to how and why great works of art can affect us to the point of obsession.

    Simply constructed, the book explores 50 key works – from the realist painting of Courbet to a contemporary installation by Yayoi Kusama – and then links them to the most important movements, themes and techniques. Accessible, concise and richly illustrated, the book reveals the connections between different periods, artists and styles, giving readers a thorough understanding and broad enjoyment of modern art.

    For easy use, the lists are organized into ten sections, given here with a sample from each: All About Art ("Elements of Art") ... Art History ("Timelines of Art History") ... For the Art Teacher ("The National Visual Arts Standards") ... Art Materials ("Things to Do with Collage") ... Painting, Drawing & Printmaking ("All About Color Pigment") ... Sculpture ("Master Sculptors & Their Work")... Architecture ("Great Architects of the World")... Fine Arts & Folk Art ("African American Crafts") ... Technology & Art ("The Evolution of Photography") ... Museums ("Museums Devoted to the Work of One Artist").

    During the following ten years they were lovers, worked closely together and she became mother to two of his children, Claude and Paloma. Life with Picasso, her account of those extraordinary years, is filled with intimate and astonishing revelations about the man, his work, his thoughts and his friends - Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti, among others. Francois Gilot paints a compelling portrait of her turbulent life with the temperamental (and even abusive) genius that was Picasso. As one of the few intimate witnesses to Picasso as a human being and as an artist, her account of him is invaluable for assessing him on both counts.

    Saved from the drudgery of a working-class existence by a young Pre- Raphaelite artist, Lizzie Siddal rose to become one of the most famous faces in Victorian Britain and a pivotal figure of London's artistic world, until tragically ending her life in 1862.