Art & Architecture
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.
"A collection of more than 70 Goddess figures from cultures throughout the world. Each is a treasure...inspiring us to embody the Goddess's virtues in our lives."--Yoga Journal
This extraordinary compilation of the art, values and living lessons of Goddess culture dating from 30,000 years ago to the present, from Africa to Hawaii, Siberia to North America, is a multicultural tapestry of artwork, historical background, and meditations organized by the themes of creation, transformation and celebration, bringing focus and expression to the myth and spirituality of the feminine.
"A beautiful book...an excellent resource for information and inspiration from many cultures."--Starhawk, author of The Spiritual Dance and
"...a mythical journey to every corner of the Earth...a delightful book of life-affirming legends, rituals, and images that help us envision a more balanced and creative world."--Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade
"What a treasure! Decades of scholarship and oceans of love have been poured into gathering this exquisite collection of goddesses from all the world's wisdom traditions. By gazing at the images and contemplating their stories, I felt myself joyously reclaiming the feminine face of the Holy One.... I love love love this book."--Mirabai Starr, author of God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity & Islam
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.
Produced to accompany the traveling exhibition of the same name, "Human and Divine "highlights the achievements of a dynamic artistic tradition and explains what Indian sculpture means and why it looks as it does. The sculptures--made from stone, bronze, terracotta, marble, ivory, and wood--are drawn from British public and private collections and date from ancient times to the early twentieth century.
Balraj Khanna outlines the early history of Indian sculpture and places it in its cultural and religious context. George Michell describes the various forms and styles that have developed in the different regions of India and explains the significance of specific works.
From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf, children's stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as metaphors, stories, and images--as well as scientific theories--throughout history remind us that humans often act like animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we'd like to pretend.
Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from Kipling's The Jungle Book, exhibit the behaviors of the beasts who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people, and vice versa. Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.
Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale. This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless. Select quotations from the book: This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment. Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era. Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art. I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice.
The extraordinary life story of the celebrated artist and writer, as told through four decades of intimate letters to her beloved mother
Barbara Chase-Riboud has led a remarkable life. After graduating from Yale's School of Design and Architecture, she moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world and living at the center of artistic, literary, and political circles. She became a renowned artist whose work is now in museum collections around the world. Later, she also became an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist. And along the way, she met many luminaries--from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, James Baldwin, and Mao Zedong to Toni Morrison, Pierre Cardin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Josephine Baker. I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud's life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia. By turns brilliant and naïve, passionate and tender, poignant and funny, these letters show Chase-Riboud in the process of becoming who she is and who she might become. But what emerges most of all is the powerful story of a unique and remarkable relationship between a talented, ambitious, and courageous daughter and her adored mother.
The 1904 book that famously declared "Asia is one" was among the first studies in English to reference Zen as it explored the roots of Japanese beauty. Like the author's "The Book of Tea, " this volume emphasized the spiritual ideals of Asian, and especially Japanese, art.
Kakuzo Okakura (1863-1913) was an administrator and scholar whose writings helped shape the West's early views of Japan and Asia.
"[Victoria] Cass brings China's mythic landscape to life. These stories draw the reader into a dimension that hovers over a magical landscape where ordinary mortals confront extraordinary powers. This is a journey into the psyche of eternal China."--Christine Mathieu, co-author of "Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World"
China is a land that has fascinated the world for centuries. Take a journey in this book back to a China that is both stunning and mysterious, back to the places where tales of magic were born. Victoria Cass retells both popular and little-known stories of emperors and empresses, ghosts, spirits, warriors, maidens, and magical realms amid landscapes potent with history.
The stories are arranged by geography, providing an unprecedented look into how folklore and culture were shaped by China's natural surroundings. Cass shows us where mortals, demons, and gods have for centuries belonged, taking the reader on a "grand tour" of China. This is a book that will capture the imagination of a new generation of readers.
"In the Realm of the Gods" also goes where no other book on Chinese folk traditions has gone before by featuring stunning photography from some of China's most critically acclaimed landscape photographers. Their studies of abandoned villas, vertiginous cliffs, nighttime pathways, serene canals, and temples at dusk provide a rich visual complement to the stories.
By presenting the stories and photographs together, Cass has assembled a perfect synthesis of words and images while showing how the physical and cultural geography of China is at the root of its most popular legends and its tales of the natural and supernatural. This book represents a stunning achievement in storytelling.
Victoria Cass is the author of "Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming."
In this innovative work at the intersection of Indigenous studies, literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, Caroline Wigginton tells a story of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, this book argues for the foundational but often-hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history toward Native craftwork. Wigginton knits this narrative to another of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and works of material expression. Ultimately, she reveals that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literature, interwoven throughout its long history.
An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world
I'm often asked, but have no idea why I chose Iceland, why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.--from the introduction Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island's treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn's creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist's lifelong experience of Iceland's natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a meditation on being present. It vividly conveys Horn's experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through powerful evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena--the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety--we come to understand the author's abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn's creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While brilliantly portraying nature's sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. Filled with musings on a secluded region that perpetually encourages a sense of discovery, Island Zombie illuminates a wild and beautiful Iceland that remains essential and new.
"An unflinching memoir . . . [that] offers insight into international events and the challenges faced by the journalists who capture them." --The Washington Post
War photographer Lynsey Addario's memoir is the story of how the relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theater of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life. What she does, with clarity, beauty, and candor, is to document, often in their most extreme moments, the complex lives of others. It's her work, but it's much more than that: it's her singular calling. Lynsey Addario was just finding her way as a young photographer when September 11 changed the world. One of the few photojournalists with experience in Afghanistan, she gets the call to return and cover the American invasion. She decides to set out across the world, face the chaos of crisis, and make a name for herself. Addario finds a way to travel with a purpose. She photographs the Afghan people before and after the Taliban reign, the civilian casualties and misunderstood insurgents of the Iraq War, as well as the burned villages and countless dead in Darfur. She exposes a culture of violence against women in the Congo and tells the riveting story of her headline-making kidnapping by pro-Qaddafi forces in the Libyan civil war. As a woman photojournalist determined to be taken as seriously as her male peers, Addario fights her way into a boys' club of a profession. Rather than choose between her personal life and her career, Addario learns to strike a necessary balance. In the man who will become her husband, she finds at last a real love to complement her work, not take away from it, and as a new mother, she gains an all the more intensely personal understanding of the fragility of life. Watching uprisings unfold and people fight to the death for their freedom, Addario understands she is documenting not only news but also the fate of societies. It's What I Do is more than just a snapshot of life on the front lines; it is witness to the human cost of war.
James Loeb (1867-1933), one of the great patrons and philanthropists of his time, left many enduring legacies both to America, where he was born and educated, and to his ancestral Germany, where he spent the second half of his life. Organized in celebration of the sesquicentenary of his birth, the James Loeb Biennial Conferences were convened to commemorate his achievements in four areas: the Loeb Classical Library (2017), collection and connoisseurship (2019), and after pandemic postponement, psychology and medicine (2023), and music (2025).
The subject of the second conference was Loeb's deep and multifaceted engagement with the material culture of the ancient world as a scholar, connoisseur, collector, and curator. The volume's contributors range broadly over the manifold connections and contexts, both personal and institutional, of Loeb's archaeological interests, and consider these in light of the long history of collection and connoisseurship from antiquity to the present. Their essays also reflect on the contemporary significance of Loeb's work, as the collections he shaped continue to be curated and studied in today's rapidly evolving environment for the arts.