Art: Books

In recent years Africa's booming art scene has gained substantial global attention, with a growing number of international exhibitions and a stronger-than-ever presence on the art market worldwide. Here, for the first time, is the most substantial survey to date of modern and contemporary African-born or Africa-based artists. Working with a panel of experts, this volume builds on the success of Phaidon's bestselling Great Women Artists in re-writing a more inclusive and diverse version of art history.

"Art interprets the visible world, physics charts its unseen workings- making these two realms seen in complete opposition. But in art & physics, Leonard Shlain tracks their development side by side throughout the centuries to reveal an astonishing correlation of visions. From the classical Greek sculptors to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and from Aristotle to Einstein, artists have often foreshadowed the theories and discoveries of scientists. In this lively and colorful narrative, Leonard Shlain explores how major artistic breakthroughs have prefigured the visionary insights of physicists throughout history. Provocative and original, Art & Physics is a seamless integration of the romance of art and the drama of science-an exhilarating history of ideas."

In pictures and words, David tells the story of this mysterious world of decorated caves, from the oldest known "painting kits", found virtually intact after their use 100,000 years ago in South Africa, to the magnificent murals of the European Ice Age that are so famous today. Showcasing the most astounding discoveries made in the past 150 years of archaeological exploration, Cave Art explores these creative achievements, from our remotest ancestors to recent times, and what they tell us about the human past and ourselves today.

"This comprehensive monograph explores the conceptual complexity and diversity of Claes Oldenburg's early work to reveal this influential artist's extraordinary inventiveness. Accompanying an exhibition of Oldenburg's seminal early work, this publication examines the breadth of his artistic career from the late 1950s to 1970. It features works including the landmark installations The Street and The Store and their accompanying performances; the highly influential spectacular sculptures of everyday objects as well as drawings and preparatory collages for public projects from the 1960s. The book traces the development of Oldenburg's practice as it follows his work up to the Mouse Museum. Also included in the publication is an extensive chronology, alongside notes as well as a variety of installation views that showcase the careful consideration given to modes of presentation. In addition to imagery of his Pop icons, this richly illustrated book contains an extensive selection of drawings, collages, and magazine and newspaper clippings as well as a wealth of previously unpublished notebook pages, preparatory studies, and photographs taken by the artist. This volume probes diverse aspects of his work to offer fresh perspectives on Oldenburg's artistic development and unprecedented insights into the conceptual process of his artistic explorations"-- Provided by publisher.

Accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh from June to October 2019. Collage is one of the defining subjects in Modern Art. It is as important and popular today as it has ever been. This definitive survey of collage and 3-D sculpture (made from bits and pieces stuck and nailed together) spans the whole period from about 1600 to the present day. Each page of this book is filled with fascination. The lavish illustrations include images of items such as books with fold-out flaps, Victorian collage, Valentine and greeting cards, double exposure photographs, album covers such as Sgt Peppers, and many curiosities and items from Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop, 70s counterculture, video and computerised collage. -- Exhibition: Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, UK (29.06.-27.10.2019).

Filled with a naturalist's masterful paintings and delightful observations chronicling the English countryside throughout 1906. As one of the few true records of the time in print, the handwritten thoughts and paintings contained in The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady transport readers to a more refined, romantic, and simpler time. Capitalizing on the current Downton Abbey inspired appetite for Edwardian-era ephemera, fashions, and society, this reproduction brings readers back to a time in which propriety, civility, and an appreciation for the natural world reigned. This souvenir of a bygone era serves not only as a calming touchstone, but a reminder that as long as we choose to see it, we are still surrounded by beauty and grace. Presented to retain the charm and beauty of the original volume filled with Holden s hand-drawn illustrations of the English countryside s flora and fauna through the changing seasons of the year, as well as handwritten notes, observations, and quotations.

"This book explores the variety of ways in which contemporary artists from around the world have come to approach drawing as the primary, sometimes the sole, element of their practice, and one which is autonomous: an end in itself rather than a means to an end in another, more substantial medium. In an era of advanced technologies where image production has accelerated, potentially beyond the capacity of human attention, what values can be attributed to the slow, deliberate process of drawing by hand. The artworks featured in this volume are not confined to traditional tools, one can also draw on a computer, tablet or smartphone, and examples of digital drawing are incorporated into the narrative not as a separate category but as one medium among many. Grouped thematically by specific approaches, including abstraction and figuration, nature and artifice, social observation and critique, with essays and feature spreads for each section, this selection of international artists of diverse backgrounds and experience includes not only recognizable names such as Michael Armitage, Camille Henrot, Robert Longo, Amy Sillman and Kara Walker, but also a host of emerging talents."-- Provided by publisher.

"A new study of the early Renaissance portrait"-- Provided by publisher."In fourteenth-century Italy, ever more women and men—not only clergy but also laity—introduced their own portraits into sacred paintings. Images of modern supplicants, submissive and prayerful, shared space with the holy narratives. The portraits mimicked the first worshippers of Christ: Mary, the Three Magi, Mary Magdalene. At the same time, they modeled, for modern viewers, ideal involvement in the emotion-laden stories. In The Embedded Portrait, Christopher S. Wood traces these incursions of the real and profane into Florentine sacred painting between Giotto and Fra Angelico." -- Publisher.

"Envisioning Evil is an accompaniment to the exhibition of Mauricio Lasansky's The Nazi Drawings, thirty-three monumental drawings examining the horrors of the Holocaust, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2021"-- Provided by publisher.

"In 1921, New York newspapers declared artist Ethel Wallace (1886-1968) a pioneer a batik portraits, the "newest rage in art," and Vogue Paris described her portraits as "personal and original" and "modern and unexpected" in its July issue. Wallace also created designs for fashion, and her adaptation of batik, a Javanese method of dyeing cloth, became a coveted trend among New York's elite in the 1910s and '20s. Her clothing designs and batik paintings aligned with the feminism of the New Woman and resonated with the Roaring Twenties obsession with wealth and opulence. After the onset of the Great Depression, Wallace returned to her hometown of Lambertville, New Jersey, near the artistic community of New Hope, Pennsylvania, where she immersed herself in modernist art circles but struggled to maintain her career's momentum amid economic upheaval. Since her death in 1968, Wallace's body of work has remained behind the closed doors of private collections. Ethel Wallace: Modern Rebel marks the first comprehensive study of the artist's career and is published in conjunction with the first exhibition of her work in decades, curated by Tara Kaufman and held at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. With essays by fashion historians Kaufman and Dr. Michael Mamp, this book investigates how Wallace's work--from her writings to her paintings and clothing designs--traces the development of two centers of modernism in the United States, New Hope, and New York, and the progression and reception of feminism in the early twentieth century." -- Publisher.

Fashioned by Sargent explores the complicated relationship of painting and dress through reproductions of portraits and other works by Sargent, alongside costumes of the period - including garments actually worn by his sitters. Essays illuminate topics such as portraits and performance, gender expression, the New Woman, and the pull of history and the excitement of new ideas.

"For more than 2,000 years the art of Greece and Rome has lain at the heart of western civilization. This book recaptures the excitement of the artists who first created it. It traces the daring innovations of those who, defying traditional wisdom, explored new ideas; it describes the valiant struggles of sculptors and painters to portray - for the first time - both the complexities of the human form and the richness of human emotions. So much has been destroyed by the ravages of time that Greek and Roman art seems to consist only of impressive ruins and broken fragments. Yet the creative achievements of the Greeks and their legacy, as adapted by the Romans, have never lost their power."--Page [2] of cover.

"In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue and Black presents a fascinating and revealing history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric times to today. Examining the evolving place of green in art, clothes, literature, religion, science, and everyday life, Michel Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception and meaning of the color over millennia--and how we misread cultural, social, and art history when we assume that colors have always signified what they do today. Filled with entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, Green shows that the color has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. Chemically unstable, green pigments were long difficult to produce and even harder to fix. Not surprisingly, the color has been associated with all that is changeable and fleeting: childhood, love, and money. Only in the Romantic period did green definitively become the color of nature. Pastoureau also explains why the color was connected with the Roman emperor Nero, how it became the color of Islam, why Goethe believed it was the color of the middle class, why some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks couldn't see green, and how the color was denigrated by Kandinsky and the Bauhaus. More broadly, Green demonstrates that the history of the color is, to a large degree, one of dramatic reversal: long absent, ignored, or rejected, green today has become a ubiquitous and soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes and the mission to save the planet. With its striking design and compelling text, Green will delight anyone who is interested in history, culture, art, fashion, media, or design"--Publisher's description.

Modern matters: A blow-by-blow account of groundbreaking modernism The modern art adventure began roughly 150 years ago in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, often impasto, strokes. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the establishment salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions. After this first assault on standard academic practice, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Abstract Art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art. This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards, and broke down barriers. Each of these stand-out pieces is accompanied by a text profiling the artist and discussing the importance of their work. Introductory essays, meanwhile, explain the most significant modernist movements.

"A powerful symbol of self-reliance, strength, and determination, the Black cowboy is a figure commonly overlooked in the histories of the American West. Held annually in cities across the United States, the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo (BPIR) honors the historic accomplishments of Black cowboys and fosters a vibrant community dedicated to continuing that legacy. Bay Area photographer Gabriela Hasbun has spent more than a decade photographing this beloved event in the Oakland hills. Her images capture the joy and excitement of performers and audience members, showcasing the daring feats, spectacular outfits, and welcoming atmosphere that make the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo an unmissable experience. In addition to Hasbun's photographs, THE NEW BLACK WEST features quotes and stories from the cowboys themselves, and a foreword from the Oakland rodeo's regional manager, Jeff Douvel"-- Provided by publisher.

The rebel hero of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) careened through his life like a firework across the American art landscape. Channeling ideas from sources as diverse as Picasso and Mexican surrealism, he rejected convention to develop his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Pollock's most famous works are his drip paintings, where he dripped and poured household enamel paint over the canvas with a variety of instruments, from sticks to syringes, hardened brushes to broken bits of glass. The splattered results pulsate with energy, replacing the refinement of easel and brush with something altogether more immediate, vivid, and physical. To evade the viewer's search for figurative elements in his paintings, Pollock abandoned titles and identified each work with a neutral number only.

"A photographic celebration of contemporary Native American life and an examination of important issues the community faces today by the creator of Project 562, Matika Wilbur"-- Provided by publisher"In 2012, Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and set out on a Kickstarter-funded pursuit to visit, engage, and photograph people from what were then the 562 federally recognized Native American Tribal Nations. Over the next decade, she traveled six hundred thousand miles across fifty states--from Seminole country (now known as the Everglades) to Inuit territory (now known as the Bering Sea)--to meet, interview, and photograph hundreds of Indigenous people. The body of work Wilbur created serves to counteract the one-dimensional and archaic stereotypes of Native people in mainstream media and offers justice to the richness, diversity, and lived experiences of Indian Country."--Inside front cover

"The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege in the Western world. For many cultures, red was not just one color of many but rather the only color worthy enough to be used for social purposes--in some languages, the word for red was the same as the word for color. The first color developed for painting and dying, red became associated in antiquity with war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period, red held both religious significance, as the color of the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell, and secular meaning, as a symbol of love, glory, and beauty. Yet during the Protestant Reformation, red began to decline in status. Viewed as indecent and immoral and linked to luxury and the excesses of the Catholic Church, red fell out of favor. After the French Revolution, red gained new respect as the color of progressive movements and radical left-wing politics. In this beautifully illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, the acclaimed author of Blue, Black, and Green, now masterfully navigates centuries of symbolism and complex meanings to present the fascinating and sometimes controversial history of the color red. Pastoureau illuminates red's evolution through a diverse selection of captivating images, from the cave paintings of Lascaux, the works of Renaissance masters, to modern paintings and stained glass by Mark Rothko and Josef Albers"--Inside front jacket flap.

This dazzling, unconventional biography shows us why, more than three centuries after his death, Rembrandt continues to exert such a hold on our imagination. Deeply familiar to us through his enigmatic self-portraits, few facts are known about the Leiden miller's son who tasted brief fame before facing financial ruin (he was even forced to sell his beloved wife Saskia's grave). The true biography of Rembrandt, as Simon Schama demonstrates, is to be discovered in his pictures. Interweaving of seventeenth-century Holland, Schama allows us to see Rembrandt in a completely fresh and original way.

"Johannes Vermeer's intensely quiet and enigmatic paintings invite the viewer into a private world, often prompting more questions than answers. Who is being portrayed? Are his subjects real or imagined? And how did he create such an unrivaled sense of intimacy? Bringing together diverse strands of the Dutch master's professional and private worlds, this is the first major authoritative study of Vermeer's life and work for many years shedding light on all thirty-seven of his paintings. With a wide selection of contextual illustrations, commentaries and up-to-date research by distinguished international Vermeer scholars, here is the definitive volume on the most admired of all seventeenth-century Dutch masters, one of the world's greatest artists." -- Back cover.

A quarter of a century after her memoir, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin— “an anthropologist on Mars,” as Oliver Sacks dubbed her—transforms our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired. Do you have a keen sense of direction, a love of puzzles, the ability to assemble furniture without crying? You are likely a visual thinker. With her genius for demystifying science, Grandin draws on cutting-edge research to take us inside visual thinking. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously believed, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the photo-realistic “object visualizers” like Grandin herself, with their intuitive knack for design and problem solving, to the abstract, mathematically inclined “visual spatial” thinkers who excel in pattern recognition and systemic thinking. She also makes us understand how a world increasingly geared to the verbal tends to sideline visual thinkers, screening them out at school and passing over them in the workplace. Rather than continuing to waste their singular gifts, driving a collective loss in productivity and innovation, Grandin proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers. In a highly competitive world, this important book helps us see, we need every mind on board--Publisher's description.

SummaryCollage is an artistic language comprising found images, fragmentary forms, and unexpected juxtapositions. While it first gained status as high art in the early twentieth century, the past decade has seen a fresh explosion of artists using this dynamic and experimental approach to image making. Organised in an A-Z sequence by artist, the book features both well-known collagists including Njideka Akunyili Crosby; Ellen Gallagher; Peter Kennard; Linder, Christian Marclay; Wangechi Mutu; Deborah Roberts; Martha Rosler; and Mickalene Thomas, and a plethora of lesser-known names deserving of greater attention. Taking a broad definition from analog cut-and-paste compositions and photomontages to digital composed imagery and animations Vitamin C+ showcases 108 living artists who employ collage as a central part of their visual-art practice, as selected by 69 leading experts, including museum directors, curators, critics, and collectors. The survey also features an engaging and informative introduction by Yuval Etgar, an internationally renowned expert in the area. The 69 expert nominators include: Cecilia Alemani; Iwona Blazwick; David Campany; Raphael Chikukwa; Patrick Elliott; Max Hollein; Hettie Judah; Christine Macel; Roxana Marcoci; Duro Olowu; Scott Rothkopf; Russell Tovey; Zoe Whitley; and Heidi Zuckerman--Publisher's description.

Remains the definitive source of information on modern art, from its mid-nineteenth-century European beginnings to today's divergent trends.

"The Compelling Image will delight the art-lover who does not yet realize that Chinese painting can be as original and moving as El Greco or Cézanne. With a graceful authority, James Cahill explores the radiant painting of that tumultuous era when the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and the Manchu conquest of China dramatically changed the lives and thinking of artists and intellectuals." - Publisher description

A history of the development of art from 1776 to 1900 includes discussions of the careers of distinguished artists such as David, Manet, Renoir, and Rodin.

Jim Dine is an American pop artist and sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. This catalog traces the artist's development, presents comments by the artist on how and why he creates his compositions, and includes more the one hundred illustrations.

"Gives a critique of Leonardo's work as well as highlights from his life." - Amazon description

"This colorful monograph features and surveys the 150 best-known works of Paul Klee, an artist famous for the playful complexity of his multi-media images. Klee never ceased his quest for new subjects and sources of inspiration, and he experimented with geometry, materials, and color to represent fauna and flora, music, the diurnal, and the nocturnal. As a teacher at the famous Bauhaus School in Weimar, Klee played an important role in the evolution of applied arts. Author Jean-Louis Ferrier provides an insightful text that explains the complex, often misunderstood work of Klee. In addition, this monograph includes extracts from Klee's theatrical work, including the famous Pedagogical Sketchbook used by his students at the Bauhaus. Comprehensive and fresh, this new study of Paul Klee will delight students and enthusiasts of twentieth-century art." - Publisher description

Over one hundred color reproductions of the preeminent American modernist's paintings are accompanied by her own recollections of and comments on the impulses and experiences that prompted the paintings themselves.

"Published on the occasion of the artist's eightieth birthday and accompanying a major retrospective exhibition, this book brings together 120 of Thiebaud's most important paintings, watercolors, and pastels. Essays by Steven A. Nash and Adam Gopnik trace the course of his career from the 1950s, when he first began to emerge as a significant national artist. They assess Thiebaud's role in the history of American modernism and his place in the tradition of realism, and examine the surprisingly wide variety of art historical sources to which his paintings refer, including Chardin, Sargent, Hopper, Mondrian, Morandi, and Diebenkorn."--Jacket.

Profiles the work of the distinguished German-born artist that reveal her mastery of a wide range of themes, images, and techniques

Viewing Surrealism not as an art movement but as a complete way of life, Maddox provides fresh insight into the enigmatic artist's life and works, including his "objects," films, and happenings.

"This Handbook illustrates a selection of drawings of flowers from the collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The book is arranged chronologically and ranges from the fifteenth century to the present day. Beginning with illustrations from the borders and backgrounds of illuminated manuscripts, the selection traces the form through attempts at accurate delineation of form during the Renaissance to the more scientific approach of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It concludes with several contemporary examples of flower drawings to show that the tradition continues. The illustrations bring out the stunning detail and colour characteristic of the art-form." - Publisher description

This volume surveys the life, career, work and times of Vincent Van Gogh, with background information on other artists of that period, emphasizing the works of Gaugin and Toulouse-Lautrec--Publisher's description.

Sun-dappled carp, radiant blossoms, and tumultuous waters are among the wonders and mysteries of nature captured in Joseph Raffael's brilliant close-up paintings.Joseph Raffael has taken what some would consider the highly radical step of dating to paint beautiful pictures at a time when beauty is much out of favor in the art world. Long one of contemporary art's most highly regarded painters, the 64-year-old American-born artist painstakingly creates each painting based on a photograph. Working on a very large scale -- using either watercolor, oil, or acrylic -- he transforms intensely observed details of nature into color-drenched, deeply felt works of art.Amei Wallach's warmly perceptive introduction, inspired by a visit to the artist's studio in the south of France, explores Raffael's sources, his inspirations, and his ideas about art; her individual chapter openers address the predominant subjects within the artist's work. A thought-provoking text by Donald Kuspit puts Raffael's painting in the context of 20th-century art, psychology, and philosophy. The artist himself has contributed two fascinating elements, both of which illuminate the pleasures and occasional terrors of the creative process: "Diary of a Painting" -- tracing the evolution of one major work over several months, from the original slide to the finished wall-size watercolor-and an informative and revealing 'Autobiographical Chronology".

At a critical time in Canada's history, the Group of Seven revolutionized the country's appreciation of itself by celebrating Canada as a wild and beautiful land.

Realist artists, such as Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, and Joseph Raffael, discuss their paintings, studios, and artistic techniques.