David Hockney has worked in almost every medium - painting, drawing, stage design, photography and printmaking. He has undertaken an ambitious experiment with ways of seeing and ways of representing sight - ranging from his paintings, with their challenges to perspective and brilliant colours, to his vivid multi-dimensional photo-collages and his fax art, computer printings and coloured laser prints.

    

    The title essay, which is in essence a presentation of the underlying thesis of his The Primacy of Perception, is followed by two courses given by Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne on phenomenological psychology. "Eye and Mind" and the concluding chapters present applications of Merleau-Ponty's ideas to the realms of art, philosophy of history, and politics. Taken together, the studies in this volume provide a systematic introduction to the major themes of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy.

    This wide spread mood in literature had a major effect on 19th-century poets and painters, and the affinities between them and their 20th-centurycounterparts makes this account of the Romantic-Decadents an indispensible guide to the study of modern literature.

    Calasso ranges through Baudelaire's life and work, focusing on two painters—Ingres and Delacroix—about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turns to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay "The Painter of Modern Life." In Calasso's lavishly illustrated mosaic of stories, insights, close readings of poems, and commentaries on paintings, Baudelaire's Paris comes brilliantly to life. In the eighteenth century, a folie was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Following Baudelaire, Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic "Folie Baudelaire"—a place where the reader can encounter the poet himself, his peers, his city, and his extraordinary likes and dislikes, finally discovering that that place is situated in the middle of the land of "absolute literature."

    Her "floating abstractions," in which lines and free bands of color emerge almost imperceptibly, can be reproduced only with difficulty. Her writings, on the other hand--although certainly not intended as programmatic statements--offer valuable clarity regarding her own works and poetic insight about art in general. Since its original publication in 1991, this volume of Martin's writings has been a fundamental document for libraries of artists, collectors, and critics. Rather than identifying herself with her Minimalist peers, Martin has aligned herself with the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and Chinese, asserting that "the function of art work is . . . the renewal of memories of moments of perfection." In combination with illustrations of her works, these texts--including lectures, stories recorded by critic Ann Wilson, passages ostensibly arranged in associative sequences, and "fragmentary ideas"--form an eloquent artist's statement by the creator of "silent paintings."

    It is considered a pioneering essay for both feminist art history and feminist art theory.In this essay, Nochlin explores the institutional – as opposed to the individual – obstacles that have prevented women in the West from succeeding in the arts. She divides her argument into several sections, the first of which takes on the assumptions implicit in the essay's title, followed by "The Question of the Nude," "The Lady's Accomplishment," "Successes," and "Rosa Bonheur." In her introduction, she acknowledges "the recent upsurge of feminist activity" in America as a condition for her interrogation of the ideological foundations of art history, while also invoking John Stuart Mill's suggestion that "we tend to accept whatever is as natural". In her conclusion, she states: "I have tried to deal with one of the perennial questions used to challenge women's demand for true, rather than token, equality by examining the whole erroneous intellectual substructure upon which the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is based; by questioning the validity of the formulation of so-called problems in general and the "problem" of women specifically; and then, by probing some of the limitations of the discipline of art history itself."

    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.

    Donald Richie looks at how perceptual values in Japan were drawn from raw nature and then modified by elegant expressions of class and taste. He explains aesthetic concepts like wabi, sabi, aware, and yugen, and ponders their relevance in art and cinema today.Donald Richie is the foremost explorer of Japanese culture in English, and this work is the culmination of sixty years of observing and writing from his home in Tokyo.

    As with every art, love demands practice and concentration, as well as genuine insight and understanding.In his classic work, The Art of Loving, renowned psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm explores love in all its aspects—not only romantic love, steeped in false conceptions and lofty expectations, but also brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, the love of God, and the love of parents for their children.

    According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he goes on to contend, have failed to engage this underside, where images harbor limits and contradictions, because their discipline is based upon the assumption that visual representation is made up of legible signs and lends itself to rational scholarly cognition epitomized in the "science of iconology."To escape from this cul-de-sac, Didi-Huberman suggests that art historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork," not for a code of interpretation, but rather to begin to think of representation as a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction. Confronting Images also offers brilliant, historically grounded readings of images ranging from the Shroud of Turin to Vermeer's Lacemaker.

    Introducing students to a variety of established theories of art, he presents the traditional sets of criteria of Realism, Expressionism, and Formalism, which are in turn updated by recent sources of Poststructuralism. Barrett applies each of these theories to challenging works of contemporary art, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each mode of interpretation. He encourages students to consider many criteria when evaluating an artwork, to critically examine judgments made by others, and to make informed judgments of their own. Ideal for courses in aesthetics, art theory, art criticism, and the philosophy of art, Why Is That Art? is organized chronologically according to the history of aesthetics. It features sixty-seven illustrations (twenty-six in a full-color insert), discusses a wide range of American and European artists, and includes an exceptional overview of postmodern pluralism. This unique book will provide students with a newfound appreciation for contemporary art, scholarship, and reasoned argumentation, giving them the confidence to join the fascinating discourse on contemporary art.

    Seeing Voices is, as Studs Terkel has written, "an exquisite, as well as revelatory, work."

    Describes the principles of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic associated with Japanese tea ceremonies and based on the belief that true beauty comes from imperfection and incompletion, through text and photographs.

    John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--here cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgments about art are anything more than personal opinion. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that anyone seriously interested in the arts should read (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post).