Search results for ""Author Painters"

This fascinating new account of what happened in Greece from c.800 to 323 bc shows how sculptors and painters responded to the challenges they faced in the extremely formidable and ambitious world of the Greek city-state. The numerous symbols and images employed by their eastern Mediterranean neighbours on the one hand, and the explorations of what it was to be human embodied in the narratives with which Greek poets worked on the other, helped produce the rich diversity of forms apparent in Greek art. The drawings and sculptures of this period referred so intimately to the human form as to lead both ancient and modern theorists to talk in terms of the 'mimetic' role of art. The importance of what occurred still affects the way we see today. Ranging widely over the fields of sculpture, vase painting and the minor arts, this book provides a clear introduction to the art of archaic and classical Greece. By looking closely at the context in which and for which sculptures and paintings were produced, Robin Osborne demonstrates how artistic developments were both a product of, and contributed to, the intensely competitive life of the Greek city. 'brilliantly illustrates the purpose of this new series by focusing on the social and political context of Greek art . . . a different approach suggesting new perspectives and original connections . . . eye-opening and thought-provoking' Professor François Lissarrague, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris 'brings all that is best in the 'new' Classical art history to this exciting interpretation . . . No reader of Osborne's stimulating and engaging book will come away with their vision of Greek art unchanged' Jeremy Tanner, Institute of Archaeology, University of London

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American artist Sam Francis (1923-1994) brought vivid colour and emotional intensity to Abstract Expressionism. He was described as the "most sensuous and sensitive painter of his generation" by former Guggenheim Museum director James Johnson Sweeney, and curator Howard Fox called him "one of the acknowledged masters of late-modern art." Francis's works, whether intimate or monumental in scale, make indelible impressions; the intention of the artist was to make them felt as much as seen. At the age of twenty, Francis was hospitalised for spinal tuberculosis and spent three years virtually immobilised in a body cast. For physical therapy he was given a set of watercolours, and, as he described it, he painted his way back to life. The exuberant colour and expression in his paintings celebrated his survival; his five-decade career was an energetic visual and theoretical exploration that took him around the world. Francis' idiosyncratic painting practices have long been the subject of speculation and debate among conservators and art historians. Presented here for the first time in this volume are the results of an in-depth scientific study of more than forty paintings from the late 1940s to early 1990s, which reveal new discoveries about his creative process, inventive techniques, and specially formulated paints and binders. The data provides a key to the complicated evolution of the artist's work and informs original art historical interpretations.

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Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.

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Comprising essays specially commissioned for the volume, leading scholars who have shaped the field of corporate law and governance explore and critique developments in this vibrant and expanding area and offer possible directions for future research. This important addition to the Research Handbooks in Law and Economics series provides insights into subjects such as the role of directors, shareholders, creditors and employees; empirical studies of litigation and shareholder activism; executive compensation; corporate gatekeepers; comparative law; and behavioral approaches to law and finance. Topics are organized within five sections: corporate constituencies, insider governance, gatekeepers, jurisdiction, and new theory. Taken as a whole, the volume serves as an introduction for those new to the field and as a reference for those unfamiliar with some of the topics discussed. Authoritative and accessible, the Research Handbook on the Economics of Corporate Law will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners of corporate law and economics. Contributors: R.B. Ahdieh, V. Atanasov, S.M. Bainbridge, B. Black, M.M. Blair, M.T. Bodie, C.S. Ciccotello, D.C. Clarke, L.A. Cunningham, A. Darbellay, S.M. Davidoff, L.M. Fairfax, F. Ferri, J.E. Fisch, T. Frankel, R.J. Gilson, S.J. Griffith, C.A. Hill, R. Kraakman, D.C. Langevoort, I.B. Lee, B.H. McDonnell, R.W. Painter, F. Partnoy, D.G. Smith, R.S. Thomas, R.B. Thompson, D.I. Walker, C.K. Whitehead

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A revealing new portrait of J.M.W. Turner and the man behind the art, uncovering fresh material and shedding new light on this complicated and secretive artistic figure. Joseph Mallord William Turner is arguably Britain's greatest and most mysterious painter, whose range of work encompasses seascape and landscape, immensely powerful oil paintings and intimate watercolours. His friend and colleague C.R. Leslie remembered him thus: 'Turner was short and stout, and had a sturdy, sailor-like walk. He might be taken for the captain of a river steamboat at first glance; but a second would find more in his face than belongs in any ordinary mind. There was that peculiar keenness of expression in his eye that is only seen in men of constant habits of observation'. The son of a Covent garden barber and a woman who died in Bethlehem Hospital, Turner achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime. Although he possessed a wide-ranging imagination, he was an often incoherent speaker and writer, and his muddled will produced much discord – it is a wonder that, despite avaricious relatives and incompetent lawyers, so many of his works are now in the hands of the nation, and publicly proclaim his genius. In this riveting and revelatory biography, Anthony Bailey has drawn upon archival material, scholarly literature and research, as well as studying many of Turner's sketchbooks, paintings and watercolours, to shed new light on this complicated and secretive artistic figure.

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Megan Howard used to be a successful painter—but that was a long time ago. These days she’s struggling to move forward, convinced her heart is permanently broken after her last relationship and grief stricken over the loss of her father. Clinging to memories of happier times, she holds tight to her father’s most cherished possession: a 1958 DeSoto Adventurer. Though she needs the money, she’ll never sell it—even loaning the prized automobile to her best friend on the day of her wedding stirs up painful memories. Avowed bachelor and car collector Noah Black has never seen a car he can live without…or a woman he can live with. Reluctant to see his best friend condemned to matrimony, he flies to Boot Creek from California to be the best man in the wedding. But after discovering that the gorgeous maid of honor owns the car of his dreams, Noah makes a pricey bet that he’ll add the DeSoto to his collection, no matter what it takes. Despite their determination to stay single, Noah and Megan soon find they can’t resist each other. His attention turns from getting the car to getting the girl, and thanks to Noah, Megan can imagine a life in the present. But when the truth about Noah’s wager comes to light, will it threaten to throw Megan’s new perspective into reverse?

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Nineteenth Century British Painting provides a succinct and informative chronological survey of a century of British painting which produced a great variety of work. It progresses from the beginnings of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century to the British adoption of Impressionism in the late nineteenth, dividing this prolific period into nine parts. In each part the work of the major figures in particular movements or genres is discussed and analysed, and each painter is presented in a biographical context. The artists are set in the framework of their historical, social and economic background. The majority of the paintings and drawings that are examined in detail are reproduced in the 323 plates, 82 of them in colour. The book is intended to be used more as an introduction, and where appropriate as a textbook, than as a work of reference, although its arrangement will enable readers to obtain fuller information about individual artists, with longer sections devoted to such major figures as Lawrence, Turner, Constable, Rossetti, Leighton and Whistler. The last decade has seen a growing interest in nineteenth century British art in this country, and also in the United States and on the Continent. During this time much has been published in the field and there has been a succession of important exhibitions. Even so, there is no up-to-date and comprehensive survey of the whole century on the market. Nineteenth Century British Painting fills the gap, meeting the need for such a book among undergraduate and graduate students, and among connoisseurs and collectors. It will also have a strong appeal for people with a general interest in the period.

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In this book, Johnny Ball tells one of the most important stories in world history – the story of mathematics. By introducing us to the major characters and leading us through many historical twists and turns, Johnny slowly unravels the tale of how humanity built up a knowledge and understanding of shapes, numbers and patterns from ancient times, a story that leads directly to the technological wonderland we live in today. As Galileo said, ‘Everything in the universe is written in the language of mathematics’, and Wonders Beyond Numbers is your guide to this language. Mathematics is only one part of this rich and varied tale; we meet many fascinating personalities along the way, such as a mathematician who everyone has heard of but who may not have existed; a Greek philosopher who made so many mistakes that many wanted his books destroyed; a mathematical artist who built the largest masonry dome on earth, which builders had previously declared impossible; a world-renowned painter who discovered mathematics and decided he could no longer stand the sight of a brush; and a philosopher who lost his head, but only after he had died. Enriched with tales of colourful personalities and remarkable discoveries, this book also has plenty of mathematics for keen readers to get stuck into. Written in Johnny Ball’s characteristically light-hearted and engaging style, it is packed with historical insight and mathematical marvels; join Johnny and uncover the wonders found beyond the numbers.

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The 18th-century painter Johan Zoffany (1733–1810) was an astute observer of the many social circles in which he functioned as an artist over the course of his long career. This catalogue investigates his sharp wit, shrewd political appraisal, and perceptive social commentary (including subtle allusions to illicit relationships)—all achieved while presenting his subjects as delightful and sophisticated members of polite society. A skilled networker, Zoffany established himself at the court of George III and Queen Charlotte soon after his arrival in England from his native Germany. At the same time, he befriended the leading actor David Garrick and through him became the foremost portrayer of Georgian theater. His brilliant effects and deft style were well suited to theatricality of all sorts, enabling him to secure patronage in England and on the continent. Following a prolonged visit to Italy he travelled to India, where he quickly became a popular and established member within the circle of Warren Hastings, the governor-general. Zoffany's Indian paintings are among his most spectacular and allowed him to return to England enriched and warmly welcomed. This volume provides a sparkling overview of his finest works.Published for the Yale Center for British Art and the Royal AcademyExhibition Schedule:Yale Center for British Art(10/27/11-02/12/12)Royal Academy(03/10/12-06/10/12)

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The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait—Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives—is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti—and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England—takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.

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Kawai Koume (1804–1889) was an accomplished poet and painter and a wife, mother, and grandmother in a lower-ranking samurai family in the provincial castle town of Wakayama. She was an eyewitness to many of the key events leading up to the Meiji Restoration and the radical changes that followed, including the famine of 1837, the great earthquake of 1854, the cholera epidemic of 1859, and the departure of samurai to fight in the civil wars of the 1860s. For more than fifty years, she kept a diary recording her family’s daily life—meals and expenses, visitors and the weather, small-town gossip and news of momentous events.Through Koume’s eyes and words, Simon Partner opens a window on social, economic, and cultural life amid some of the most dramatic periods of Japan’s transformative nineteenth century. Koume’s World vividly portrays the everyday activities, social interactions, information networks, cultural production, and household economy of a samurai family across the Tokugawa-Meiji divide. Partner’s narrative offers a remarkably detailed portrait of the dynamic working life of a female artist and household manager while also giving a regional perspective on the upheavals surrounding the Meiji Restoration. A compelling microhistorical study of gender, economy, and society in nineteenth-century Japan, Koume’s World is a compelling account of how one woman experienced both mundane routines and drastic social transformations.

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Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists today. It is perhaps not surprising that this artist who defined the baroque should have a personal life that itself was, well, baroque. As Franco Mormando's dazzling biography reveals, Bernini was a man driven by many passions, possessed of an explosive temper and a hearty sex drive, and he lived a life as dramatic as any of his creations. Drawing on archival sources, letters, diaries, and - with a suitable skepticism - a hagiographic account written by Bernini's son (who portrays his father as a paragon of virtue and piety), Mormando leads us through Bernini's many feuds and love affairs, scandals and sins. He sets Bernini's raucous life against a vivid backdrop of baroque Rome, bustling and wealthy, and peopled by churchmen and bureaucrats, popes and politicians, schemes and secrets. The result is a seductively readable biography, stuffed with stories and teeming with life - as wild and unforgettable as Bernini's art. No one who has been bewitched by the baroque should miss it.

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This new publication from the Swiss art theorist Peter Stohler unites solo and group interviews with five women artists, who for various reasons no longer live and work in their native countries. With questions relating to the importance of their origins, their migrant status, their role as women working in art and the effect of their (in some cases traditional) training in art on their work, Peter Stohler proceeds like 'tomography', exposing section by section layers, which - viewed as a whole - reveal what is special about each artist's work as well as the links between them. Peter Stohler has discovered what they all have in common: a refusal to be distracted by the trend towards working on an individual oeuvre, an approach which might, in the positive sense of the term, be called 'anachronistic' in the context of the contemporary art scene. Photographs by Judith Schonenberger (b. 1977 in Zurich, lives in Bern), who took them during the interviews, complete the book. Interviewed artists: Katja Loher (Video, b. 1978 in Schaffhausen, CH, lives in New York), Joulia Strauss (Conceptual artist, b. 1974 in St Petersburg, lives in Berlin), Jung-Yeun Jang (painter, b. 1968 in Seoul, lives in Basel), Nicole Ottiger (painting/drawing, b. 1968 in Cliftonville, UK, lives in Lucerne and Zurich), and Irina Polin (photography, b. 1975 in Moscow, lives in Berne).

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In recent years, painter and legendary art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi has opened a new chapter of his career. The core of his latest work is an extensive series of paintings, titled The Greats, that have been put on sale as digital artworks using NFT technology. Its starting point was the Salvator Mundi, a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and sold in 2017 in an auction at Christie’s in New York for $450m to an unknown buyer. Beltracchi studied the picture meticulously and created several hundred versions of the motif in a variety of styles, ranging from high renaissance to pop art, or depicting Jesus in the personification of Mick Jagger or Mao Zedong. The result is a fascinating game of deception with the disputed painting and its symbolism. This large-format book combines photographic insights into Beltracchi's everyday life in the studio by renowned Swiss photographer Alberto Venzago with a documentation of The Greats collection. Texts are contributed by Stanford University professor emeritus Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, German philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Markus Gabriel, German journalist Ulrike Posche, German finance executive Leonhard Fischer, Swiss-based cryptocurrency and NFT expert Hansen Wang, Swiss art dealer Guido Persterer, and Alberto Venzago. A conversation between Beltracchi and Swiss writer and philosopher René Scheu rounds out this volume that describes and interprets the phenomenon of this extraordinary artist from a range of perspectives.

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William Kurelek (1927–1977) is a beloved figure in Canadian art, a revered Ukrainian-Canadian painter whose works express his deeply felt immigrant experience and his compassionate vision of humanity. In 1975, he created a suite of 16 jewel-toned paintings titled Jewish Life in Canada in homage to his Jewish art dealer and friend Avrom Isaacs and as a gesture across the cultural divide. Relying on archival documents and photographs from communities across the country, Kurelek foregrounded the role of tradition, community, and family at the core of the Jewish experience in mid-twentieth century Canada. He portrayed Prairie farm colonies; businesses and schools in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg; and celebrations of festivals and community events at home and in the synagogue. William Kurelek: Jewish Life in Canada includes essays by McMichael Chief Curator Sarah Milroy considering Kurelek’s articulation of the Canadian ideal of multiculturalism and by Executive Director Ian A.C. Dejardin exploring Kurelek’s distinctive framing strategies. The book also includes pieces by David S. Koffman on Jewish life in 1970s Canada and John Geoghegan on Kurelek’s use of photographic sources, as well as an artistic response by Ukrainian Canadian artist Natalka Husar. The volume features more than 50 images, including reproductions of the full suite of Kurelek paintings as well as previously unpublished archival source material, offering a complete record of Kurelek’s working process.

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At the start of the nineteenth century, Passenger Pigeons were perhaps the most abundant birds on the planet, numbering literally in the billions. The flocks were so large and so dense that they blackened the skies, even blotting out the sun for days at a stretch. Yet by the end of the century, the most common bird in North America had vanished from the wild. In 1914, the last known representative of her species, Martha, died in a cage at the Cincinnati Zoo. This stunningly illustrated book tells the astonishing story of North America's Passenger Pigeon, a bird species that--like the Tyrannosaur, the Mammoth, and the Dodo--has become one of the great icons of extinction. Errol Fuller describes how these fast, agile, and handsomely plumaged birds were immortalized by the ornithologist and painter John James Audubon, and captured the imagination of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. He shows how widespread deforestation, the demand for cheap and plentiful pigeon meat, and the indiscriminate killing of Passenger Pigeons for sport led to their catastrophic decline. Fuller provides an evocative memorial to a bird species that was once so important to the ecology of North America, and reminds us of just how fragile the natural world can be. Published in the centennial year of Martha's death, The Passenger Pigeon features rare archival images as well as haunting photos of live birds.

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A joyful and celebratory gift book devoted to the work of the much-loved English artist Eric Ravilious (1903–1942) and the influence of natural forms and themes in his work. Eric Ravilious was a designer, painter, printmaker and illustrator best known for his depictions of the English landscape, particularly the South Downs. Often described as a particularly ‘English’ artist, key to his style was an ability to convey in watercolour the mild vagaries of the British climate. His engagement with nature, though romantic rather than precise, pervades his works in many different techniques. This book explores his appreciation of the natural world and the techniques he used in a variety of media to convey those elements. Drawing on the V&A’s collections, more than 100 beautiful images capture Ravilious’s deep enjoyment of everything in nature, from dewponds, cockerels, grassy hills, owls, greenhouse geraniums, cornsheaves and snow, to the rainy seas, airport-runway puddles and tideswept beaches of his later work as a war artist. The book includes sections on weather, plants, landscape, animals and birds, and ends with a section devoted to man in the landscape, showcasing Ravilious’s love of rusting machinery and other signs of human presence within nature, not least his famous depictions of hillside chalk figures. This book will appeal to those with a love of English landscapes, flora and fauna or an interest in British art and design in the interwar period.

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A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. Lucy Innes Williams is a painter and illustrator with an artistic interest in highly ornate textiles, patterns, and the decorative arts of the early-mid twentieth century. She uses a combination of gouache, watercolour and printmaking. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) was a Polish painter who spent most of her working life in France and the United States. Best known for her Art Deco portraits and highly stylized paintings, her artworks are instantly recognisable. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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Wanting to understand how her path is tied to her mother tongue, Anne, a young, multiracial American woman, travels through China, the country of her mother’s birth. Along the way, she tries on different roles—seeker, teacher, student, girlfriend, artist, and daughter—and continually asks herself: Why do I feel called to make this journey?Whether witnessing a Tibetan sky burial, teaching English at a university in Chengdu, visiting her grandmother in LA, or falling in love with a Chinese painter, Anne is always in pursuit of intimacy with others, even as she is all too aware of her silences and separation. For two years, she settles into a comfortable routine in her boyfriend’s apartment and regains fluency in Chinese, a language she spoke as a young child but has used less and less as an adult. Eventually, however, her desire to know herself in other ways surfaces again. She misses speaking English, she feels suffocated by urban, polluted China, and she starts to fall for another man. Ultimately, Anne realizes that to live her truth as a mixed-race, bilingual woman she must embrace all of her influences and layers. In a world that often wants us to choose a side or fit an ideal, she learns that she can both belong and not belong wherever she is, and that home is ultimately found within.

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A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. Angela Harding is a fine art painter and illustrator based in Rutland, UK. She specialises in lino prints and her work is inspired by British birds and the countryside. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. Angela Harding is a fine art painter and illustrator based in Rutland, UK. The Salt Path was featured on the cover of the bestselling book (of the same name) by Raynor Winn, shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize and the 2018 Costa Book Awards in the biography category. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

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An important reconsideration of landscape photography in 19th-century America, exploring crucial but neglected geographies, practitioners, and themes Although pictures of the West have dominated our perception of 19th-century American landscape photography, many photographers were working in the eastern half of the United States during that period. Their pictures, with the exception of Civil War images, have received relatively scant attention. Redressing this imbalance is East of the Mississippi, the first book to focus exclusively on the arresting eastern photographs that helped shape America’s national identity. Celebrating natural wonders such as Niagara Falls and the White Mountains as well as capturing a cultural landscape fundamentally altered by industrialization, these works also documented the impact of war, promoted tourism, and played a role in an emerging environmentalism. Showcasing more than 180 photographs from 1839 to 1900 in a rich variety of media and formats—from daguerreotypes, salted paper prints, tintypes, cyanotypes, and albumen prints to stereo cards and photograph albums—this volume traces the evolution of eastern landscape photography and introduces the artists who explored this subject. Also considered are the dynamic ties with other media—for instance, between painters and photographers such as the Bierstadt and Moran brothers—and the distinctive development of landscape photography in America.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.Exhibition Schedule:National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (03/12/17–07/16/17)New Orleans Museum of Art (10/05/17–01/07/18)

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María Izquierdo (1902–1955) and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) were the first two Mexican women artists to achieve international recognition. During the height of the Mexican muralist movement, they established successful careers as easel painters and created work that has become an integral part of Mexican modernism. Although the iconic Kahlo is now more famous, the two artists had comparable reputations during their lives. Both were regularly included in major exhibitions of Mexican art, and they were invariably the only women chosen for the most important professional activities and honors.In a deeply informed study that prioritizes critical analysis over biographical interpretation, Nancy Deffebach places Kahlo’s and Izquierdo’s oeuvres in their cultural context, examining the ways in which the artists participated in the national and artistic discourses of postrevolutionary Mexico. Through iconographic analysis of paintings and themes within each artist’s oeuvre, Deffebach discusses how the artists engaged intellectually with the issues and ideas of their era, especially Mexican national identity and the role of women in society. In a time when Mexican artistic and national discourses associated the nation with masculinity, Izquierdo and Kahlo created images of women that deconstructed gender roles, critiqued the status quo, and presented more empowering alternatives for women. Deffebach demonstrates that, paradoxically, Kahlo and Izquierdo became the most successful Mexican women artists of the modernist period while most directly challenging the prevailing ideas about gender and what constitutes important art.

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A fun and fact-filled introduction to the dismissed Black art masters and models who shook up the world.Elegant. Refined. Exclusionary. Interrupted. The foundations of the fine art world are shaking. Beyoncé and Jay-Z break the internet by blending modern Black culture with fine art in their iconic music video filmed in the Louvre. Kehinde Wiley powerfully subverts European masterworks. Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It’s clear that modern day museums can no longer exist without change—and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings. Quietly held within museum and private collections around the world are hundreds of faces of Black men and women, many of their stories unknown. From paintings of majestic kings to a portrait of a young girl named Isabella in Amsterdam, these models lived diverse lives while helping shape the art world along the way. Then, after hundreds of years of Black faces cast as only the subject of the white gaze, a small group of trailblazing Black American painters and sculptors reached national and international fame, setting the stage for the flourishing of Black art in the 1920s and beyond. Captivating and informative, BLK ART is an essential work that elevates a globally dismissed legacy to its proper place in the mainstream art canon. From the hushed corridors of royal palaces to the bustling streets of 1920s Paris—this is Black history like never seen before.

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Chief of Police Kate Burkholder investigates the brutal death of a young Amish man in An Evil Heart, the latest installment of the bestselling series by Linda Castillo. On a crisp autumn day in Painters Mill, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder responds to a call only to discover an Amish man who has been violently killed with a crossbow, his body abandoned on a dirt road. Aden Karn was just twenty years old, well liked, and from an upstanding Amish family. Who would commit such a heinous crime against a young man whose life was just beginning? The more Kate gets to know his devastated family and the people-both English and Amish-who loved him, the more determined she becomes to solve the case. Aden Karn was funny and hardworking and looking forward to marrying his sweet fiancé, Emily. All the while, Kate's own wedding day to Tomasetti draws near... But as she delves into Karn's past, Kate begins to hear whispers about a dark side. What if Aden Karn wasn't the wholesome young man everyone admired? Is it possible the rumors are a cruel campaign to blame the victim? Kate pursues every lead with a vengeance, sensing an unspeakable secret no one will broach. The case spirals out of control when a young Amish woman comes forward with a horrific story that pits Kate against a dangerous and unexpected opponent. When the awful truth is finally uncovered, Kate comes face to face with the terrible consequences of a life lived in all the dark places.

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The image of St George - the mounted, medieval knight slaying a dragon - seems so familiar to us all that it is tempting to assume this figure is easily understood. He is, in fact, one of the most significant and complex mythic figures in Christian culture, and has played an important role in Eastern Orthodox, Coptic and western European traditions over many centuries. Today St George continues to have a lively and diverse following: his various appearances can be found across many world religions, including Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and the African-Brazilian belief system Candomble. St George's identification with nature, springtime and healing means that he can also be found throughout pagan beliefs. St George: A Saint for All includes firsthand accounts of celebrations in Georgia, Greece, Malta and Belgium, and explores the iconic figure's wide-ranging significance in nations such as Lebanon, Palestine, Ethiopia and Estonia, as well as his totemic role for the Roma people. With or without the dragon, St George has been repeatedly reinvented over the last 1,700 years. This book is an engaging account of the huge potential that artists, poets and painters have found in his myth, discussing the often controversial political uses to which the saint has been put, including many reworkings and reimaginings, and places his current cultural position in its historical context. This is the first book to offer a full overview of the cult of St George, from its beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean to its established presence around the world today.

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The first monograph on the sinuous, exhilaratingly colorful and pattern-filled portraiture of Amoako Boafo Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo has built a practice synthesizing the ways that art both reflects and perpetuates the power of representation. Amoako Boafo is the first monograph to comprehensively examine the artist's career to date. Heavily illustrated and featuring original contributions by Osei Bonsu, Rachel Cargle, Mutombo Da Poet and Aja Monet, the book also presents an insightful and expansive conversation with the artist by Paul Schimmel. Exclusively portraying individuals from the diaspora and beyond, Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, diversity and complexity. His portraits, notable for their bold colors and patterns, celebrate his subjects as a means to challenge portrayals that objectify and dehumanize Blackness. As Boafo has stated, “the primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness.” Amoako Boafo (born 1984) studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Ghana, in 2007, before attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, for his MFA. His first solo exhibition in the US, entitled I See Me, opened at Roberts Projects in 2019. That same year, Boafo was the first artist-in-residence at the new Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida. In 2020, he collaborated with Kim Jones, Dior Men’s creative director, for Dior’s Spring/Summer 2021 Men’s Collection. In 2021, Boafo was selected by the Uplift Art Program to create the inaugural “Suborbital Triptych” on the exterior panels of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, launched August 2021.

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This beautiful publication presents a catalogue raisonné of Léon Bonvin’s work published in both French and English. Introduced by several illuminating essays and accompanying an exhibition at the Fondation Custodia, this book enriches our understanding of the previously overlooked, yet immensely talented, French artist. Léon Bonvin never enjoyed the same notoriety as his half-brother, Francois (1817–1887), who was a well-regarded realist painter in the nineteenth century. He is characterised from the few remaining sources as misunderstood and ill-fated. As he was struggling to make a living, Bonvin took over his father’s inn in Vaugirard, while continuing to paint watercolours. His work, depicting wild flowers, still lifes and views of the still rural and working-class plain exhibit a deep sincerity.This catalogue raisonné is introduced by a series of essays, the outcome of intensive research that sheds new light on the life and art of Bonvin. Weisberg delivers two essays, a study of his career, and an exploration of contemporary receptions to his art. Luijten’s essay questions the artistic inspiration that Bonvin drew upon. Briggs considers the transatlantic appeal of Bonvin’s works whilst Guichané and Quentin explore his character and artistic practice. The catalogue documents all known works by the artist, which are scattered throughout public and private collections, mainly in the United States of America and France. Among these are many drawings which have never been published before. Together, the essays and comprehensive catalogue of his works, provide an essential foundational knowledge upon which an appreciation of Bonvin’s magnificent oeuvre may be built.

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A fascinating exploration of the life and work of one of America’s most famous and enigmatic postwar visual artists Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him to a new phase in his life. Early in his career, Annie Cohen-Solal writes, “he became a major player in the social struggle of American artists, and his own metamorphosis benefited from the unique transformation of the U.S. art world during this time.” Within a few decades, he had forged his definitive artistic signature, and most critics hailed him as a pioneer. The numerous museum shows that followed in major U.S. and European institutions ensured his celebrity. But this was not enough for Rothko, who continued to innovate. Ever faithful to his habit of confronting the establishment, he devoted the last decade of his life to cultivating his new conception of art as an experience, thanks to the commission of a radical project, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Cohen-Solal’s fascinating biography, based on considerable archival research, tells the unlikely story of how a young immigrant from Dvinsk became a crucial transforming agent of the art world—one whose legacy prevails to this day.

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Paris... so familiar and yet surprising. In pastel shades and dazzling details like the palette of French Impressionism, Serge Ramelli presents a unique and personal photo homage to the City of Lights. With romance and history in her blood, Paris shows her tender side as never seen before. Only Paris offers the inimitable stage that can turn every photo into a film still. In its architectural splendor, its wealth of churches, palaces, parks, and grand boulevards, the city is peerless in its beauty and allure. Add to that a long, rich, and influential history, and this coveted capital is art in its purest form. From the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, to Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the traces of painters and photographers and echoes of actors and movie directors can be found all over the city. In this exquisite Paris photo book, Serge Ramelli pays tribute to this unique legacy of art and culture, capturing the city's poetic flair. As in vintage postcards, with glowing street lights or only certain details in colour in a black and white panorama, Ramelli accentuates particular picture elements to create a modern, 3D effect, while retaining a close connection to Parisian history. Vivid in one's memory or perhaps imagination, Ramelli collects rapturous moments with his camera — a brilliant firework display in front of the Eiffel Tower or the sight of the Pont Neuf amidst freshly fallen snow. In the beguiling blue hour, or a nuit (the magical light at sunrise and sunset), the photographer shows a kaleidoscope along the Seine that will delight all who have lived and loved in Paris. Text in English, German and French.

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Best Art Book and Best of Show - 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book AwardBorn in San Diego in 1946 and raised in the American Southwest, painter Paul Pletka has created a body of work that owes much to the West of his childhood, and more to the West of his imagination. Infused with an operatic sense of theater and drama, his paintings conjure scenes from the cultures, history, and religions of the American West and Mexico - diffused, as Pletka writes, ""through the lens of personal experiences, dreams, research, and ancestral memory."" In Paul Pletka: Imagined Wests, the first book on this major American artist in over thirty years, readers will encounter the full range of Pletka's oeuvre through more than eighty color reproductions of his best-known and most influential works. Images of warriors and shamans are paired with depictions of George Armstrong Custer, Christian saints, and the lost gods of North and South America, their forms rendered in a distinctive style that mixes classical drawing and expressionist distortion with elements of surrealism and European symbolism. An artist statement and notes on selected paintings provide rare insight into Pletka's creative process, and an introductory essay by art historian Amy Scott discusses how Pletka's studies of indigenous cultures of the American West and Mexico, as well as art historical and critical influences, have informed his work. Complex, mysterious, and mesmerizing, Pletka's paintings are designed to make it almost impossible to look away. In their boldly conceived subject matter, vivid color, and ethnographic detail, these works - and their creator - are true originals in the rich artistic landscape of the American West.

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Around 1505 Goossen Van der Weyden, Rogier's grandson, painted a monumental altarpiece depicting the various phases of Saint Dymphna's insane life. This Irish princess, who fled her incestuous father in the sixth century, was beheaded in the Kempen village of Geel. On account of her tragic end and uncompromising chastity, the princess was venerated from that moment on as the patron saint of the mentally ill. From the late Middle Ages, pilgrims flocked to Geel in large numbers to catch a glimpse of Saint Dymphna. They paid homage to the local celebrity in the hope that she would alleviate their mental problems. To this day, Geel is known for its unique treatment of the mentally ill, who are cared for at home by locals. Goossen Van der Weyden's altarpiece came into being at the height of Dymphna's popularity. The masterpiece was intended for the church of Tongerlo Abbey. Today this work is characterised by a remarkable iconography and an eventful history: a panel was lost and the triptych was even sawn into pieces. It ultimately came into the hands of a team of specialists from Belgium and abroad who subjected the altarpiece to a meticulous conservation over a period of three years, a colossal undertaking during which new techniques were used. This gave the conservators unprecedented insight into the mind, and workshop, of an early 16th century painter. This richly illustrated book is the result of years of research and contains essays by Till-Holger Borchert (Musea Brugge), Stephan Kemperdick (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), Katharina Van Cauteren (The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp), Lucinda Timmermans (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Patrick Allegaert (Dr. Guislain Museum, Ghent) and many others.

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The Art of Mary Linwood is the first book on Leicester textile artist Mary Linwood (1755-1845) and catalogue of her work. When British textile artist and gallery owner Mary Linwood died in 1845 just shy of 90 years old, her estate was worth the equivalent of £5,199,822 in today’s currency. As someone who made, but did not sell, embroidered replicas of famous artworks after artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Stubbs, and Morland, how did she accumulate so much money? A pioneering woman in the male-dominated art world of late Georgian Britain, Linwood established her own London gallery in 1798 that featured copies of well-known paintings by these popular artists. Featuring props and specially designed rooms for her replicas, she ensured that her visitors had an entertaining, educational, and kinetic tour, similar to what Madame Tussaud would do one generation later. The gallery’s focus on picturesque painters provided her London visitors with an idyllic imaginary journey through the countryside. Its emphasis on quintessentially British artists provided a unifying focus for a country that had recently emerged from the threat of Napoleonic invasion. This book brings to the fore Linwood's gallery guides and previously unpublished letters to her contemporaries, such as Birmingham inventor Matthew Boulton and Queen Charlotte. It also includes the first and only catalogue of Linwood’s extant and destroyed works. By examining Linwood’s replicas and their accompanying objects through the lens of material culture, the book provides a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on women and cultural agency in the early 19th century.

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In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed. Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation’s collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power—past, present, future—in Russia.

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Ever innovative and predictably diverse in their physical formats, artists' books occupy a creative space between the familiar four-cornered object and challenging works of art that effectively question every preconception of what a book can be. Many artists specialize in producing self-contained art projects in the form of books, like Ken Campbell and Susan King, or they establish small presses, like Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn's Coracle Press or Harry and Sandra Reese's Turkey Press. Countless others who are primarily known as sculptors, painters, or performance artists carry on a parallel practice in artists' books, including Anselm Kiefer, Annette Messager, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Tuttle. Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists includes eighty important examples selected from the Getty Research Institute's Special Collections of more than six thousand editions and unique artists' books. This elegant catalogue also presents precursors to the artist's book, such as Joris Hoefnagel's sixteenth-century calligraphy masterpiece; single-sheet episodes from Albrecht DuIA rer's Life of Mary, designed to be either broadsides or a book; early illustrated scientific works; and avant-garde publications. Twentieth-century works reveal the impact of artists' books on Pop art, Fluxus, Conceptual, feminist art, and postmodernism. The selection of books by an international range of artists who have chosen to work with texts and images on paper provokes new inquiry into the nature of art and books in contemporary culture.

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Rembrandt van Rijn’s early years are as famously shrouded in mystery as Shakespeare’s, and his life has always been an enigma. How did a miller’s son from a provincial Dutch town become the greatest artist of his age? How in short, did Rembrandt become Rembrandt? Seeking the roots of Rembrandt’s genius, the celebrated Dutch writer Onno Blom immersed himself in Leiden, the city in which Rembrandt was born in 1606 and where he spent his first twenty-five years. It was a turbulent time, the city having only recently rebelled against the Spanish. There are almost no written records by or about Rembrandt, so Blom tracked down old maps, sought out the Rembrandt family house and mill, and walked the route that Rembrandt would have taken to school. Leiden was a bustling center of intellectual life, and Blom, a native of Leiden himself, brings to life all the places Rembrandt would have known: the university, library, botanical garden, and anatomy theater. He investigated the concerns and tensions of the era: burial rites for plague victims, the renovation of the city in the wake of the Spanish siege, the influx of immigrants to work the cloth trade. And he examined the origins and influences that led to the famous and beloved paintings that marked the beginning of Rembrandt’s celebrated career as the paramount painter of the Dutch Golden Age. Young Rembrandt is a fascinating portrait of the artist and the world that made him. Evocatively told and beautifully illustrated with more than 100 color images, it is a superb biography that captures Rembrandt for a new generation.

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A visionary scientist, a supreme painter, a man of eccentricity and ambition: Leonardo da Vinci had many lives. Born from a fleeting affair between a country girl and a young notary, Leonardo was never legitimized by his father and received no formal education. While this freedom from the routine of rigid and codified learning may have served to stimulate his natural creativity, it also caused many years of suffering and an insatiable need to prove his own worth. It was a striving for glory and an obsessive thirst for knowledge that prompted Leonardo to seek the protection and favour of the most powerful figures of his day, from Lorenzo de’ Medici to Ludovico Sforza, from the French governors of Milan to the pope in Rome, where he could vie for renown with Michelangelo and Raphael. In this revelatory account, Antonio Forcellino draws on his expertise – both as historian and as restorer of some of the world’s greatest works of art – to give us a more detailed view of Leonardo than ever before. Through careful analyses of his paintings and compositional technique, down to the very materials used, Forcellino offers fresh insights into Leonardo’s artistic and intellectual development. He spans the great breadth of Leonardo’s genius, discussing his contributions to mechanics, optics, anatomy, geology and metallurgy, as well as providing acute psychological observations about the political dynamics and social contexts in which Leonardo worked. Forcellino sheds new light on a life all too often overshadowed and obscured by myth, providing us with a fresh perspective on the personality and motivations of one of the greatest geniuses of Western culture.

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A witty introduction to the Louvre’s many masterpieces, told from the perspective of the subjects themselves – including resident superstar Mona Lisa. Millions of people visit the Louvre Museum every year to gaze and gawp at its all-star art collection. But there’s one star who gets a lot more attention than anyone else – and her very own special queuing system, if you can believe it! Well, the Louvre’s many other masterpieces aren’t too happy about being overshadowed – and they’re here to tell everyone what makes them just as worthy of the Mona Lisa’s teeming crowds. With a focus on portraits and other person-centred artworks, Mona Lisa and the Others reveals the stories behind some of the Louvre Museum’s most famous artworks. Napoleon Bonaparte takes readers behind the scenes at his own coronation; the Venus de Milo explains what happened to her missing arms; the Seated Scribe lets slip some gossip about the ancient Egyptian royal family; and Madame le Brun has a polite moan about juggling the demands of being Marie Antoinette’s portrait painter and a working mother. But perhaps most intriguing of all, Mona Lisa reveals that there’s more to her portrait than her mysterious smile… Written in a light-hearted and contemporary style by Alice Harman, and illustrated with the energetic artwork of Sir Quentin Blake, Mona Lisa and the Others is an entertaining introduction to the Louvre Museum’s collection that will appeal to children, parents, guardians and teachers from all walks of life.

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Scottish architect, designer, and painter Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) was one of the earliest pioneers of modern architecture and design. While he did not receive much recognition in his hometown of Glasgow during his lifetime, his bold new blend of simplicity and poetic detail inspired modernists across Europe. Mackintosh’s avant-garde approach embraced a variety of media as well as fresh stylistic devices. His multi-faceted oeuvre incorporated architecture, furniture, graphic design, landscapes, and flower studies. He embraced strong lines, elegant proportions, and natural motifs, combining an adventurous dose of japonisme with a modernist sensibility for function. He preferred bold black typography, restrained shapes, and tall, generous windows suffusing rooms with light. Much of his work was collaborative practice with his wife, fellow artist Margaret Macdonald. The couple made up half of the loose Glasgow collective known as “The Four”; the other two were Margaret’s sister, Frances, and her husband, Herbert MacNair. On the continent, the “Glasgow Style” was met with delight. In Italy, Germany, and, in particular, Austria, artists of the Viennese Secession and Art Nouveau drew much from its rectilinear yet lyrical forms. In this introductory book, we take in Mackintosh’s practice across art, architecture, and design to explore his particular combination of the statuesque and sensual and its vital influence on modernist expression across Europe. Featured projects include his complete scheme for the Willow Tea Rooms and the Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art, widely considered Mackintosh’s masterwork.

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With a deeply-imbedded indebtedness to their father Morimasa Morimoto, a self-made man in post-war Japan, two sisters struggle to uphold a family legacy. Sakiko moves to the fantastically free United States. Fragile and unsure in 1960s San Francisco, she clings to her brazen artist husband for stability. Hiroko, headstrong and irreverent, uses her father's money to move to New York, promising to become a famous artist. Intolerant of weakness in others, she crumbles in the face of her own shortcomings. From catty carpooling moms to manipulative stoners, abortions to adultery, White Elephant is a vivid book from a seasoned artist turned writer. Mako Idemitsu, daughter of Rockefeller-esque petroleum executive Sazo Idemitsu, reconfigures her own family discord to reflect on the binds of being female in this gorgeous English translation. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, Mako Idemitsu immigrated to the United States in 1963 where she met and married abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis. Disillusioned with housewife life she picked up an 8mm camera and became a pioneer in experimental video and the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Internationally acclaimed, her work has been featured in major museums worldwide and is included in the MOMA's permanent collection. This is her debut novel. Award-winning translator Juliet Winters Carpenter has rendered the works of Abe Kobo, Fumiko Enchi, and Minae Mizumura. Within the year she will be the first person to have won the prestigious Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature twice.

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Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is the only Scandinavian painter of modern times to have achieved a world reputation. A tragic childhood – his mother died when he was five and a sister when he was thirteen – wounded him deeply, and much of his early work expresses this in its agonized pessimism. In the first half of his career he lived much of his life in Germany, and became one of the fathers of modern German art. After 1900, however, and particularly after his return to Norway in 1909 following a severe nervous breakdown, his subjects tended to become more extrovert and objective, while his palette assumed increasingly brighter colours. The period 1910-20 was a particularly prolific one, in which he painted mural decorations for Oslo University and many other outdoor subjects, but Munch continued working throughout his life and produced some remarkable sefl-portraits shortly before his death.This introduction to the art of Munch includes forty-eight full-page colour plates, of work from all stages of his career, from the naturalism of the early work, through the symbolic psychological dramas of the 1980s to the brilliant colours of the later works. John Boulton Smith's authoritative essay on Munch has here been revised and updated. The plates are complemented by notes written by art historian James Malpas, discussing each painting in detail, and there is a wealth of black-and-white comparative illustrations.

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Vietnam is an ancient and beautiful land, with a deep history of occupational conflict that remains an enigma in Americans’ collective memory. It is still easy to forget that Vietnam is a country and not a war, even as America’s role in Vietnam inflamed and divided the American citizenry in ways that are still evident today. It is as if Vietnam’s civil war resurrected our own. And if you are a Vietnam War veteran or a family member of a vet, it’s worse, because, even after a half-century, many of the wounds won’t heal. What do you do when you have given up on forgetting? Chuck Forsman is one of a sizable number of aging Vietnam vets who have found deep satisfaction in revisiting Vietnam, supporting charities, orphanages, and clinics, doing volunteer work and more—anything to redeem what the U.S. military did there. He is also a renowned painter and photographer who depicts places and environments in ways that become unforgettable visual experiences for the contemporary viewer. Lost in Vietnam chronicles a journey, not a country. They were taken on visits averaging two months each and two-year intervals over a decade. Forsman traveled largely by motorbike throughout the country—south, central, and north—sharing his experiences through amazing photographs of Vietnam’s lands and people. His visual journey of one such veteran’s twofold quest: the one for redemption and understanding, and the other to make art. The renowned Le Ly Hayslip introduces the book and sets the table for Forsman’s incredible sojourn.

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Artisan has recently become a buzzword in the developed world, used for items like cheese, wine, and baskets, as corporations succeed at branding their cheap, mass-produced products with the popular appeal of small-batch, handmade goods. The unforgiving realities of the artisan economy, however, never left the global south, and anthropologists have worried over the fate of these craftspeople as global capitalism has again remade their cultural and economic territory. Yet artisans are proving to be surprisingly vital players in contemporary capitalism, as they interlock innovation and tradition to create effective new forms of entrepreneurship. Based on seven years of extensive research in Colombia and Ecuador, veteran ethnographers Jason Antrosio and Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld's Fast, Easy, and In Cash explores how small-scale production and global capitalism are not directly opposed, but are rather essential partners in economic development. Antrosio and Colloredo-Mansfeld demonstrate how artisan trades arrive and flourish in modern Latin American communities. In uncertain economic environments, small manufacturers have adapted to excel at home-based production, product design, technological efficiency, and high-risk investments. Illuminating this process are vivid case studies from Ecuador and Colombia: peasant farmers in Tuquerres, Otavalo weavers, Tigua painters, and the t-shirt industry of Atuntaqui. Fast, Easy, and In Cash exposes how these ambitious artisans, far from being holdovers from the past, are crucial for capitalist innovation in their communities and provide indispensable lessons in how we should understand and cultivate local economies in this era of globalization.

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This extensively revised edition of Thurman Wilkins's masterful and engaging biography - well illustrated in color and black-and-white - draws on new information and recent scholarship to place Thomas Moran more securely in the milieu of the Gilded Age. It also portrays more fully the controversies that surrounded the art of Moran's time, as he became ""the Dean of American Painters.""The American West was the subject of Thomas Moran's greatest artistic triumphs - Yosemite, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, Zion Canyon, the Virgin River, Colorado's Mountain of the Holy Cross, and the Grand Tetons - but his travels with Ferdinand V. Hayden's geological surveys of the Upper Yellowstone were matched by trips to his native Britain and to Venice, Florida, the Spanish Southwest, and Old Mexico. These scenes inspired memorable landscapes and seascapes, as did the sojourns of the Moran family in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and East Hampton, Long Island, when they retreated from the demands of the New York art scene. In the 1880s Moran and his artist wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, also threw themselves into the etching craze of the period, creating some of the finest prints produced in the United States.Moran was an artist happy in his work. He wrote, ""I have always held that the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature, would, in capable hands, make the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful pictures."" The New York Times said of the first edition of this unique account of his life, ""Moran's mastery comes through clearly and awesomely and often, pleasurably."" Readers will find the new edition equally enjoyable.

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Stars as minimalist and maximalist motif in the art of Frank Stella, from his earliest paintings to his most recent sculptures As a painter, sculptor and printmaker, Frank Stella (born 1936) has always paid great attention to geometric lines and patterns in his work, creating pieces that are arrestingly kaleidoscopic in both their form and content with bold lines and shaped canvases. This catalog, published for his 2020 exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, focuses in particular on the enduring use of star shapes in Stella’s oeuvre. Stella’s depictions of stars range from the minimalism of his early career, with lithograph prints of brightly colored polygonal patterns, to the maximalism of his more recent work seen in his towering angular sculptures made from stainless steel. Although he is well aware that his last name is the Latin word for star, Stella maintains that his fixation on the shape is inspired by its form and the endless possibilities that accompany the star, rather than its etymology. Both instantly recognizable and infinitely abstract, stars seem like an obvious choice for an artist who has dedicated his life to experimenting with form. In addition to a plates section of the 60 pieces included in the Aldrich show, this book presents installation shots throughout the museum’s interiors and outdoor gardens, and photographs of the artist’s studio. The curators of the exhibition, Richard Klein and Amy Smith-Stewart, worked closely with Stella on the exhibition installation and contribute major essays that add new dimensions to our understanding of a widely celebrated and influential artist.

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A compelling introduction to the life and artistic output of a trailblazing Norwegian painter, printmaker, and horticulturist Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928) was a highly individual Norwegian Modernist artist known for intensely colored paintings and woodcuts of his native landscape. Astrup received a formal art education in Kristiania (now Oslo), Germany, and Paris, but he later rebelled against certain aspects of his training, such as the traditional conventions of optical perspective. He rejected metropolitan cultural centers in favor of his rural childhood home in western Norway, where he produced a remarkable body of work. This volume brings Astrup’s life and work to a North American audience, situating him within the history and culture of Norway and late 19th- and early 20th-century art. Astrup’s horticultural achievements in the service of his art on the farm where he lived are also explored. The book’s beautiful illustrations highlight the intensity of Astrup’s palette, the innovative nature of his prints, and the magical realism of his landscapes steeped in folklore and local customs. Distributed for the Clark Art Institute in cooperation with KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Savings Bank Foundation DNB, and Prince Eugen’s WaldemarsuddeExhibition Schedule:Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (June 19–September 19, 2021)KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen (October 15, 2021–January 23, 2022)Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde, Stockholm (February 19–May 29, 2022)

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Two contemporary poets from Taiwan, Yang Mu (pen name for Wang Ching-hsien, b. 1940) and Lo Ch’ing (pen name for Lo Ch’ing-che, b. 1948), are represented in this bilingual edition of Chinese poetry ranging from the romantic to the postmodern. Both poets were involved in the selection of poems for this volume, the first edition in any language of their selected work. Their backgrounds, literary styles, and professional lifes are profiled and compared by translator Joseph R. Allen in critical essays that show how Yang and Lo represent basic directions in modern Chinese poetics and how they have contributed to the definition of modernism and postmodernism in China. The book’s organization reflects each poet’s method of composition. Yang’s poems are chronologically arrangd, as his poetry tends to describe a narrative line that closely parallels his own biography. Lo’s poems, which explore a world of concept and metaphor, are grouped by theme. Although each poet has a range of poetic voices, Yang’s work can be considered the peak of high modernism in Chinese poetry, while Lo’s more problematic work suggests the direction of new explorations in the art. In this way the two poets are mutually illuminating. Each group of poems is prefaced by an “illustration” that draws from another side of the poet’s intellectual life. For Yang, who is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, these are excerpts from his academic work (written under the name C.H. Wang) in English. The poems by Lo, a well-known painter living in Taiwan, are illustrated by five of his own ink paintings.

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