Banner Message
Please note: We are working on getting our inventory accurately represented on our site while we are in our temporary location. There might be items that appear online that are not currently accesible to us to ship to you. If you order these items, you will be refunded and the rest of your order will ship. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
Art & Architecture
In the domain of visual images, those of fine art form a tiny minority. This original and brilliant book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects--painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking--to the vast array of "nonart" images, including those from science, technology, commerce, medicine, music, and archaeology. Such images, James Elkins asserts, can be as rich and expressive as any canonical painting. Using scores of illustrations as examples, he proposes a radically new way of thinking about visual analysis, one that relies on an object's own internal sense of organization.Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt, instead, the far broader criteria of the young field of image studies. After analyzing the philosophic underpinnings of this interdisciplinary field, he surveys the entire range of images, from calligraphy to mathematical graphs and abstract painting. Throughout, Elkins blends philosophic analysis with historical detail to produce a startling new sense of such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Wall Street Journal--One of Five Best Artist Biographies Edward Hopper's canvasses are filled with stripped-down spaces and unrelenting light, evocative landscapes, and the lonely aspects of men and women seemingly isolated in their surroundings. What kind of man had this haunting vision, and what kind of life engendered this art? No one is better qualified to answer these questions than art historian Gail Levin, author and curator of the major studies and exhibitions of Hopper's work. In this intimate biography she reveals the true nature and personality of the man himself--and of the woman who shared his life, the artist Josephine Nivison.
How science changed the way artists understand reality
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects--radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism--abstract, non-objective art--to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.
From Snow White to Cinderella, Rapunzel to Rumpelstiltskin, the Brothers Grimm bequeathed a canon of stories which have become literary and childhood classics. The most widely read story collection after the Bible, their magical tales are stalwarts of early learning and imagination, listed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register as a vital part of our history and culture.
This beautiful hardback anthology is based on the Grimm's popular 1857 edition and features 27 of their best-loved stories in a vibrant and meticulous new translation commissioned for this publication. The tales are accompanied by exquisite vintage illustrations from the past 200 years, including masterpieces from the legendary Kay Nielsen, British artists Walter Crane and Arthur Rackham, and giants of 19th-century German illustration Gustav Süs, Heinrich Leutemann, and Viktor Paul Mohn. Additional historic and contemporary silhouettes dance across the pages like delicate black paper lace.
In addition to the tales and illustrations, the book contains a foreword on the Grimms' legacy, brief introductions to each fairy tale, and extended artists' biographies in the appendix. For adults and children alike, this precious edition brings the eternal magic of the Grimms' stories to the heart of every home.
The following fairy tales are featured in the book:
The Frog Prince, The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats, Little Brother and Little Sister, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, The Fisherman and His Wife, The Brave Little Tailor, Cinderella, Mother Holle, Little Red Riding Hood, The Bremen Town Musicians, The Devil with Three Golden Hairs, The Shoemaker and the Elves, Tom Thumb's Travels, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, The Three Feathers, The Golden Goose, Jorinde and Joringel, The Goose Girl, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Star Coins, Snow White and Red Nose, The Hare and the Hedgehog, Puss n' Boots, The Golden Key
This volume aims to uncover the many reasons why the Middle Ages have proven so applicable to a variety of modern moments from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century. These "medieval" worlds are often the perfect ground for exploring contemporary cultural concerns and anxieties, saying much more about the time and place in which they were created than they do about the actual conditions of the medieval period. With over 140 color illustrations, from sources ranging from thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts to contemporary films and video games, and a preface by Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages will surprise and delight both enthusiasts and scholars.
This title is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from June 21 to September 11, 2022.
Of the many treatises written in Italy during the Counter-Reformation, none is more illustrative of the intellectual fermentation of the period than Comanini's work on the purpose of painting, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura (1591). Although the importance of Il Figino has long been recognized, the text has remained largely inaccessible to many scholars throughout the world. This first complete English translation will make the work available to those readers for the first time.
In Il Figino, Comanini addresses all of the most hotly debated aesthetic issues of the time, drawing on an array of classical, medieval and Renaissance sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Mazzoni, Tasso and Paleotti. The editor and translator provide copious notes which clarify Comanini's aesthetic and theological references, as well as a lucid introduction that places the issues and debates in context. Comanini's impressive erudition makes his treatise an excellent barometer of the state of scholarship in the Counter-Reformation era. This translation is a long-overdue addition to the field of Renaissance studies.
Judy Chicago is America's most dynamic living artist. Her works comprise a dizzying array of media from performance and installation to the glittering table laid for thirty-nine iconic women in The Dinner Party (now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum), the groundbreaking Birth Project, and the meticulously researched Holocaust Project. She designed the monumental installation for Dior's 2020 Paris couture show and, in 2019, established the Judy Chicago Portal, which will help to accomplish her lifelong goal of overcoming the erasure that has eclipsed the achievements of so many women.
The Flowering is her vivid and revealing autobiography, fully illustrated with photographs of her work, as well as never-before-published personal images and a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Chicago has revised and updated her earlier, classic works with previously untold stories, fresh insights, and an extensive afterword covering the last twenty years. This powerful narrative weaves together the stories behind some of Chicago's most significant artworks and her journey as a woman artist with the chronicles of her personal relationships and her understanding, from decades of experience and extensive research, of how misogyny, racism, and other prejudices intersect to erase the legacies of artists who are not white and male while dismissing the suffering of millions of creatures who share the planet.
With the first career retrospective of her work forthcoming at the de Young Museum in 2021, Chicago reinforces her message of resilience for a new generation of artists and activists. The Flowering is an essential read for anyone interested in making change.
A visual feast of flowers, abstractions, cityscapes and landscapes from American modernism's most iconic painter
Offering a complete survey of Georgia O'Keeffe's illustrious career, this magnificent new book ranges from the works produced between 1910 and 1920 that made her a pioneer of abstraction to her celebrated flower paintings and views of New York, which led to her recognition as one of the key figures in modern American art, and culminating with her paintings of New Mexico.
The selection of color plates is accompanied by quotes from O'Keeffe on her art and additional photographic material pertaining to the paintings. The sense of reverence for the world and its forms emerges vividly through O'Keeffe's words. "The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding--to understand maybe by trying to put it into form," she writes. "To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill." Also featured are a biography and texts by contributing curators from the venues to which the show travels, by scholars at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and by acclaimed French art writer Catherine Millet. Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) began her art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York. She moved to New York in 1918, and in 1924 married Alfred Stieglitz. From 1929, O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes. After Stieglitz's death, she lived permanently in New Mexico, in Abiquiú, later moving to Santa Fe.
- From paper to wall, a start-to-finish approach for creating graffiti in various styles
- 5 on-site step-by-step demonstrations show the creation of various types of compositions, from throw ups to full-blown pieces
Complete with a glossary and a timeline tracing graffiti history, Graff is the bible for street artists looking to elevate their work, graphic designers wanting to expand their vocabulary, and anyone interested in giving their work an edgy, urban look.
In our current screen-saturated culture, we take in more information through visual means than at any point in history. The computers and smart phones that constantly flood us with images do more than simply convey information. They structure our relationship to information through graphical formats. Learning to interpret how visual forms not only present but produce knowledge, says Johanna Drucker, has become an essential contemporary skill.
Graphesis provides a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge. In an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Drucker outlines the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content. Among the most significant of these formats is the graphical user interface (GUI)--the dominant feature of the screens of nearly all consumer electronic devices. Because so much of our personal and professional lives is mediated through visual interfaces, it is important to start thinking critically about how they shape knowledge, our behavior, and even our identity. Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production.
In addition, the book offers cogent and stimulating commentaries by H. Arthur Klein that provide details of Bruegel's life and influences as well as his techniques. Many of these prints served as models for subsequent Bruegel canvases, and each image is accompanied by an essay that places it within its historical context. A unique survey of the best and most magical work of one of history's greatest printmakers, this volume offers a prized addition to the collections of all connoisseurs, especially those interested in the art of engraving.
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, or media.
Acknowledging how architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts reflect the culture and society of their time, this latest addition to the Art Essentials series invites the reader to experience and appreciate the entirety of Western art from prehistory to today.
Focusing on the history in art history, each of The History of Western Art's twelve chapters opens with a question to ponder, followed by a summary of the major historical developments of the period, touching on social structure, political organization, migration, race, beliefs, scientific advances, and customs. An exploration of these themes in the visualarts reveals how art and architecture from the Great Pyramids and Hagia Sophia, as well as pieces by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Andy Goldsworthy, Guerrilla Girls, and Faith Ringgold simultaneously shape, reflect, and document the culture of the time and place they were created. A secondary focus explores the constantly evolving aesthetic preferences that swing between naturalism and abstraction, with each era and style either rebelling against the previous or seeking to improve it.
Richly illustrated, this introductory survey by expert art historian and museum lecturer Janetta Rebold Benton offers a succinct and engaging introduction to some of the most important works of architecture, sculpture, and painting in the Western tradition, reinterpreted for a twenty-first-century audience.
Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese artist born in 1760 whose legacy remains, some 150 years after his death, as important as ever. His work influenced Impressionism and Art Nouveau, and a range of contemporary artists working today.
Realized in jewel-like colors, Hokusai's simple views of everyday scenes in Japan, his sense of balance and harmony, and his highly stylized but ever-changing techniques seem to capture the spirit and traditions of his homeland. Hokusai Pop-Ups brings this stunning art to life. Noted works such as Ejiri in Suruga Province, Chrysanthemums and Horsefly, Phoenix, Kirifuri Waterfall at Kurokami Mountain in Shimotsuke, The Poem of Ariwara no Narihira, and the iconic, instantly recognizable The Great Wave are accompanied by explanatory text as well as complementary quotes from writers and artists such as Degas and Van Gogh.
Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.
How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle's incisive essay collection illuminates these questions by exploring the work of influential twentieth-century artists. Engaging with a wide range of Salle's friends and contemporaries--from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others--How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres.
Salle writes with humor and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the reader develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result: a master class on how to see with an artist's eye.