Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art


Griselda Pollock - 1988
    Its introduction of a feminist perspective into this largely male-oriented discipline made shockwaves that are still felt forcefully today. Drawing upon feminist cultural theory previously little applied to the visual arts, Griselda Pollock offers concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art. Crucially, she not only provides a feminist re-reading of the work of canonical male Impressionist and Pre-Raphaelite artists including Edgar Degas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but also re-inserts into art history their female contemporaries - women artists such as Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Casting her critical eye over the contemporary art scene, Pollock discusses the work of women artists such as Mary Kelly and Yve Lomax, highlighting the problems of working in a culture where the feminine is still defined as the object of the male gaze.Now published with a new introduction by Griselda Pollock, 'Vision and Difference' remains as powerful and as essential reading as ever for all those seeking not only to understand the history of the feminine in art but also to develop new strategies for representation for the future.

Chasing Light: Michelle Obama Through the Lens of a White House Photographer


Amanda Lucidon - 2017
    In Chasing Light, former White House photographer Amanda Lucidon, who spent four years covering the First Lady, shares a rare insider’s perspective, from documenting life at the White House to covering domestic and overseas travel. This collection of 150 candid photos—many previously unreleased—and Amanda’s narrative reflections reveal just what makes Mrs. Obama so special. From an affectionate moment with her daughters atop the strikingly empty Great Wall of China to exuberant moments with schoolchildren and quiet moments between the First Lady and President Obama, the photos are a vibrant, candid, and beautiful celebration of the First Lady, capturing the qualities and strengths that have made Mrs. Obama so beloved.

Walt Disney's Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation


John Canemaker - 2001
    Think of your favorite moments and characters in Disney films from the thirties to the seventies and chances are most were animated by one of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men." Through the span of their careers, these nine highly skilled animators exhibited an unparalleled loyalty to their employer. This book explores their artisitic breakthroughs, failures, and rivalries, and their individual relationships with each other and with Walt.

Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits


Mark A. Vieira - 1993
    The book traces his immense impact on the portrayal of the leading stars year by year, from his arrival in California in 1925 until his departure in 1943. During that time he photographed all of the greatest personalities, at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, and Columbia as well as independently. The prints come from the Chapman Collection, one of the most extensive archives of original Hurrell photographs in the world, and they include a number of rarities and surprises. Although some photos by Hurrell are familiar and frequently reproduced, most of the images in this book will come as a revelation, since they have not been published in over half a century. The genesis of the pictures is examined in a remarkable text by Mark A. Vieira, himself a highly regarded portrait photographer, who came to know Hurrell well during the photographer's later years. Vieira explains in detail Hurrell's technical feats of lighting and retouching. And drawing on firsthand accounts, he vividly re-creates the lively interplay between the photographer and his subjects at the shooting sessions in which these portraits were taken.

Frida


Jonah Winter - 2002
    This stunning picture book is the perfect gift for art enthusiasts of all ages.When her mother was worn out from caring for her five sisters, her father gave her lessons in brushwork and color. When polio kept her bedridden for nine months, drawing saved her from boredom. When a bus accident left her in unimaginable agony, her paintings expressed her pain and depression - and eventually, her joys and her loves. Over and over again, Frida Kahlo turned the challenges of her life into art. Now Jonah Winter and Ana Juan have drawn on both the art and the life to create a playful, insightful tribute to one of the twentieth century's most influential artists. Viva Frida!

The Woman Who Says No: Françoise Gilot on Her Life With and Without Picasso


Malte Herwig - 2016
    In her early nineties, she generously shared her hospitality and wisdom with writer Malte Herwig, who started out as an interviewer but found himself drawn into the role of pupil as Gilot, whom he called “a philosopher of joy,” introduced him to different ways of seeing the world.

How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters


Patrick de Rynck - 2004
    The intimate knowledge of Christian theology, Greek and Roman mythology, and folklore that was so vivid in the minds of viewers during the Renaissance is rarely part of the preparation the contemporary viewer brings to a painting. This insightful, anecdotal, portable book, with 1,000 gorgeous color illustrations, helps to fill in those gaps by decoding th imagery of more than 150 of the most influential and admired artworks of all time. Covering the works of the Italian, Netherlandish, German, and Spanish Old Masters, from 1450 to 1750, paintings by artists such as Giotto, Botticelli, El Greco, Bruegel, Holbein, Rubens, and Vermeer, all held in public collections, How to Read a Painting" not only helps the viewer to understand the significant details of a picture but also explains the relationship with similar imagery in other works. The guide to Old Master paintings that every art lover has always wanted, this indispensable museum companion will open the reader to a whole new experience of Western art's most praised and visited paintings.

Monet's Years at Giverny : Beyond Impressionism


Daniel Wildenstein - 1978
    It includes examples of the Haystacks, Poplars, Morning on the Seine, Japanese Footbridge and Water Lilies series, an account of Monet's life at Giverny and photographs of Monet and his house and garden.

Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation


Judith Mackrell - 2013
    Flappers is in part a biography of that restless generation: starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion just before the Great War, and continuing through to the end of the decade when the Wall Street crash signal led another cataclysmic world change. It focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation’s spirit.Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Although they danced the Charleston, wore fashionable clothes and partied with the rest of their peers, they made themselves prominent among the artists, icons, and heroines of their age. Talented, reckless and willful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they re-wrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways. And between them they blazed the trail of the New Woman around the world.

Raphael: 1483-1520


Christof Thoenes - 1999
    Though Raphael painted many important works in his Florence period, including his famous Madonnas, it was his mature work in Rome that cemented his place in history, most notably the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican featuring his School of Athens and Triumph of Religion murals. This overview traces the life's work of this Renaissance master who achieved the height of greatness in only two decades of creation and whose influential work paved the way for the Mannerist and Baroque movements.

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939


Virginia Nicholson - 2002
    They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats.They were the bohemians.Virginia Nicholson -- the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf -- explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Titian: His Life


Sheila Hale - 2012
    Brilliant in its interpretation of the 16th-century master's paintings, this monumental biography of Titian draws on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research and scholarship, some of it previously unpublished, providing an unparalleled portrait of the artist, as well as a fascinating rendering of Venice as a center of culture, commerce, and power. Sheila Hale's Titian is destined to be this century's authoritative text on the life of greatest painter of the Italian High Renaissance.

The Secret Lives of Color


Kassia St. Clair - 2016
    From blonde to ginger, the brown that changed the way battles were fought to the white that protected against the plague, Picasso's blue period to the charcoal on the cave walls at Lascaux, acid yellow to kelly green, and from scarlet women to imperial purple, these surprising stories run like a bright thread throughout history.In this book, Kassia St. Clair has turned her lifelong obsession with colors and where they come from (whether Van Gogh's chrome yellow sunflowers or punk's fluorescent pink) into a unique study of human civilization. Across fashion and politics, art and war, the secret lives of color tell the vivid story of our culture.

Frida Kahlo


Luis-Martín Lozano - 2001
    She endured a catastrophic set of physical calamities as a child and young woman, was an active member of the Communist Party, and survived a tempestuous marriage to the artist Diego Rivera. This book includes many photographs of her life alongside her extraordinary paintings, and presents commentary by leading Mexican art historians, stunning reproductions of her most seminal works -- some never before reproduced, and nine gate-folds allowing the reader to examine in detail aspects of her larger works.

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs


Nicholas Cullinan - 2014
    The result of research conducted on two fronts--conservation and curatorial--the catalogue offers a reconsideration of the cut-outs by exploring a host of technical and conceptual issues: the artist's methods and materials and the role and function of the works in his practice; their economy of means and exploitation of decorative strategies; their environmental aspects; and their double lives, first as contingent and mutable in the studio and ultimately made permanent, a transformation accomplished via mounting and framing. Richly illustrated to present the cut-outs in all of their vibrancy and luminosity, the book includes an introduction and a conservation essay that consider the cut-outs from new theoretical and technical perspectives, and five thematic essays, each focusing on a different moment in the development of the cut-out practice, that provide a chronicle of this radical medium's unfolding, and period photographs that show the works in process in Matisse's studio.One of modern art's towering figures, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker before turning to paper cut-outs in the 1940s. From the clashing hues of his Fauvist works made in the South of France in 1904-05, to the harmonies of his Nice interiors from the 1920s, to this brilliant final chapter, Matisse followed a career-long path that he described as construction by means of color.