Considering Indian art within a chronological framework, Vidya Dehejia analyses the great cities of the Indus civilization, the serene Buddha image, the intriguing art of cave sites, the sophisticated temple-building traditions, the luxurious art of the Mughal court, the palaces and pavilions of Rajasthan, the churches of Portuguese Goa, the various forms of art in the British Raj and the issues related to taking Indian art into the twenty-first century.

    But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War. After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open. Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

    Developing out of the graffiti-writing tradition of the 1980s through the work of artists such as Banksy and Futura 2000, it has long since reached the mainstream. Street Art is the first measured, critical account of the development of this global phenomenon.  Tracing street art’s origins in cave painting through the Paris walls photographed by Brassai in the ’20s through the witty, sophisticated imagery found on city streets today, the book also features new and exclusive interviews with key figures associated with street art of the last 35 years, including Lady Pink, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairy, Futura 2000, Malcolm McLaren, Miss Van, and Os Gemeos. Street Art reveals the extent to which the walls and streets of cities around the world have become the birthplace of some of the most dynamic and inspirational art being made today.

    A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek to view her portrait in the Louvre.Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a book of discovery—about the world’s most recognized face, most revered artist, and most praised and parodied painting. Who was she, this ordinary woman who rose to such extraordinary fame? Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model? What became of her? And why does her smile enchant us still?Lisa Gherardini (1479-1542) was a quintessential woman of her times, caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public scandals. Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florence—and of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, with larger-than-legend figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli.Dianne Hales, author of La Bella Lingua, became obsessed with finding the real Mona Lisa on repeated trips to Florence. In Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, she takes readers with her to meet Lisa’s descendants; uncover her family’s long and colorful history; and explore the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife, and a mother. In the process, we can participate in Lisa’s daily rituals; understand her personal relationships; and see, hear, smell, and taste “her” Florence. Hales brings to life a time poised between the medieval and the modern, a vibrant city bursting into fullest bloom, and a culture that redefined the possibilities of man—and of woman.

    To recover the painting, he must repair his strained relationship with his harshly judgmental father, uncover his family history, and restore his connection to his own Judaism. Along the way to illuminating the mysteries of his past, Matt is torn between his doting girlfriend, Tracy, and his alluring attorney, Rachel, with whom he travels to Budapest to unearth the truth about the painting and, in turn, his family.As his journey progresses, Matt's revelations are accompanied by equally consuming and imaginative meditations on the painting and the painter at the center of his personal drama, Budapest Street Scene by Ervin Kalman. By the time Memento Park reaches its conclusion, Matt's narrative is as much about family history and father-son dynamics as it is about the nature of art itself, and the infinite ways we come to understand ourselves through it.Of all the questions asked by Mark Sarvas's Memento Park--about family and identity, about art and history--a central, unanswerable predicament lingers: How do we move forward when the past looms unreasonably large?

    Found everywhere from wine labels and high-end bar accessories to major motion pictures (Teacher's Pet, the upcoming Pink Panther), the visibility of this dynamic work has rapidly increased in the last few years to worldwide recognition and acclaim. Weirdo Deluxe is the first significant manifesto of the genrea riotous blend of pop culture, street culture, pop art, and surrealismand includes profiles of and interviews with 23 leading artists and hundreds of outrageous examples of their work. Special features include an expansive timeline, and peeks at the artists' collections and influences. Weirdo Deluxe is at once a primer and lowbrow art sourcebook as well as a visual homage to pop culture.

    

    MRM5 includes expert advice from more than 60 acknowledged leaders in their disciplines. New with the 5th Edition are special teaching sections that challenge students and seasoned staff alike with questions about the process and procedures of accessioning and caring for objects. Contains bibliography, glossary and multiple sample forms. MRM5 continues a tradition of museum publishing that began with the inaugural edition in 1958.

    She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.

    Catalogue to accompany the "Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings" exhibition at The Mayor Gallery in London (2nd November - 17th December 2011).

    Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable—and largely overlooked—influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century.  Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.Accordingly, Wagstaff became a curator, in 1961, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted both "Black, White, and Gray"—the first museum show of minimal art—and the sculptor Tony Smith's first museum show, while lending his early support to artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. Later, as a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he brought the avant-garde to a regional museum, offending its more staid trustees in the process.After returning to New York City in 1972, the fifty-year-old Wagstaff met the twenty-five-year-old Queens-born Robert Mapplethorpe, then living with Patti Smith. What at first appeared to be a sexual dalliance became their now historic lifelong romance, in which Mapplethorpe would foster Wagstaff's own burgeoning interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff would help secure Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. In spite of their profound class differences, the artistic union between the philanthropically inclined Wagstaff and the prodigiously talented Mapplethorpe would rival that of Stieglitz and O’Keefe, or Rivera and Kahlo, in their ability to help reshape contemporary art history.Positioning Wagstaff's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Philip Gefter's absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.

    A fascinating fantasia on an elementary theme."And Elysabeth Yates Burns McKee, from Design Book Review says that "perhaps the most successful aspect of The ABC's is its ability to elucidate complexand fundamentaltheroetical aspects of the Bauhaus program."

    Her quest leads her to the Manhattan apartment of elderly Isabella Fletcher, a woman who lives in the shadow of a terrible history-years ago her mother was rumored to have collaborated with the Nazis.But as Isabella reveals the events of her mother's life, Lauren finds herself immersed in an amazing story of courage and secrecy as she discovers the extraordinary truth about a priceless piece of art that may have survived the war and the enduring relationship between a mother and a daughter.

    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").

    Tells the complete story: From the Conquest of Mexico and the conversion of the Aztecs through the development of the devotion and on into the modern era. An enthralling story and an essential devotion for our times!