Art & Architecture

Tree houses are no longer just for children. With the growing excitement surrounding tree house architecture, adults around the world are building their own treetop hideaways -- savoring the childhood memories, feelings of nostalgia, and images of fantasy that are evoked by these almost dreamlike constructions. TreeHouses: Living a Dream brings together the most innovative ideas of today's architects and designers, providing readers with a comprehensive exploration of the unique construction methods that allow these amazing structures to adapt to their changing environments.

From Nebraska and Georgia to France and Germany, this book features a variety of projects that include playrooms, weekend retreats, home offices, dining rooms, and more. Each case study includes interior and exterior photography, as well as detailed site and floor plans accompanied by concise, informative text. With more than 350 full-color illustrations, TreeHouses: Living a Dream is sure to help every reader make a reality out of their tree house fantasy.

Utamaro's world was that of teahouse girls and courtesans whose fame and popularity can only be compared, in modern terms, to those of a movie actress whose name is on every man's lips. His was a world of popular literature and art, of publishers competing for the work of the most talked-about writers and artists. This world, however, was under the constant scrutiny of the authorities, and near the end of his career, Utamaro fell afoul of the government's proscription of certain subject matter, and he was sentenced to three days in prison and fifty days in hand chains.

But Utamaro's life is only one theme of this book. The other is the development of his art, the perfection of his depictions of women that enabled him to capture subtle moods and differences of character. The prints of women produced by the ukiyo-e artists preceding Utamaro showed expressionless beauties of little individuality. It was against this that Utamaro rebelled, creating such prints as that of the kashi, one of the lowest ranking of courtesans-in fact, a mere prostitute. Recognizing within himself the power to see and depict the individual behind the outward appearance, Utamaro added to some of his prints the notation "Studies in Physiognomic Judgment of Character by Utamaro." Modem opinion tends to agree with Utamaro's assessment of himself, and his reputation as an artist of the inner woman has firmly established him in the top ranks of the ukiyo-e world.

Though numbering just 35 known works, the oeuvre of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is hailed as one of the most important and inspiring portfolios in art history. His paintings have prompted a New York Times best seller, a film starring Scarlett Johansson, and record visitor numbers at art institutions from Amsterdam to Washington.

Vermeer's subjects focus on daily domestic activities, from letter writing to music playing to preparations in the kitchen. The scenes astound with their meticulous detail, majestic planes of light, and with Vermeer's extraordinary ability to draw out narrative intrigues. In such beloved paintings as Lady Standing at a Virginal, A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid and, most famously, the enigmatic, wide-eyed, and enchanting Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer evokes not only the effects of substance and texture, but also the many stories and secrets that reside beneath the surface.

Featuring all Vermeer's known works and succinct, accessible texts, this essential introduction explores Vermeer's leading place in art history and his unique ability to transform oil paint into a living, breathing scene of human life.

The photographs, together with Farber's extensive captions, take us to the temples, monasteries, and colorful streets of Los Angeles, Kyoto, and Bangkok, and travel onward to China, India, Nepal, South Korea, and Taiwan. They depict Buddhists alone and in crowds, in cities rich and poor, in meditation and in conversation. They also picture some of the great teachers of our day--the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Kalu Rinpoche. These images capture some of the last Tibetan masters to have received their training before the Chinese invasion and are a vital documentation of a tradition in danger of vanishing forever.

A study in the human face, in the art of spiritual devotion, in the evocative power of landscape, this collection of images provides an essential context for understanding Buddhism. Visions of Buddhist Life is also a visual and spiritual journey into a realm where the doctrine of nonviolence is paramount and where peace begins with the thoughts and actions of the individual.

But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier's true achievements, as well as her intentions. Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. In Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife, Bannos contrasts Maier's life with the mythology that strangers--mostly the men who have profited from her work--have created around her absence. Bannos shows that Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it. She places Maier's fierce passion for privacy alongside the recent spread of her work around the world, and she explains Maier's careful adjustments of photographic technique, while explaining how the photographs have been misconstrued or misidentified. As well, Bannos uncovers new information about Maier's immediate family, including her difficult brother, Karl--relatives that once had been thought not to exist.

This authoritative and engrossing biography shows that the real story of Vivian Maier, a true visionary artist, is even more compelling than the myth.

This richly illustrated book makes the Barnes Foundation's exceptional collection of Native American art from the Southwest available to the public for the first time. Collector and educator Albert C. Barnes traveled to the U.S. Southwest in 1930 and 1931 and, deeply impressed by the generative art practices he saw there, formed a collection of Pueblo and Navajo pottery, textiles, and jewelry. Water, Wind, Breath illuminates the materials, forms, and designs of the objects as they relate to Pueblo and Navajo histories and ideas. The book blends postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives, introducing readers to living artistic traditions filled with purpose, intention, and a deeply embedded spirituality that connects places, practices, and Native identities. Works by contemporary Native American artists are juxtaposed with historic pieces, illuminating the connections between heritage traditions and modern practices.

Distributed for the Barnes Foundation

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How to find compassion, hope and perspective in the arts.

Many people search for the meaning of life through music, film, literature and the visual arts. But how can we synthesize the emotions we feel through art?

This book looks at how works of culture were made - that is, to improve the way we live. Connecting a range of (Western) cultural masterpieces with our own pains and dilemmas, we learn to better see culture as a resource, a way to address the agonies of being human.

It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.

Using common themes - such as companionship, hope balance, compassion, knowledge, encouragement, appreciation, and perspective - and combining them with works from Bach to Renoir, The Beatles to Mel Gibson's Braveheart, Hamlet, Anselm Kiefer, and writers like Proust and Virginia Woolf, this book provides the key to unlocking culture. Indeed, the keys to transforming our lives.

A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.

"Mr. Stilgoe does not ask that we take his book outdoors with us; he believes that reading and experiencing landscapes are activities that should be kept separate. But, as I learned in his book, the hollow storage area in a car driver's door was once a holster, the 'secure nesting place of a pistol.' I recommend you stow your copy there."

--The Wall Street Journal

Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape's essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children's picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. ("What is that?" "Well, it's not really a slough, not really, it's a bayou...") He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries.

What Is Landscape? is an invitation to walk, to notice, to ask: to see a sandcastle with a pinwheel at the beach and think of Dutch windmills--icons of triumph, markers of territory won from the sea; to walk in the woods and be amused by the Elizabethans' misuse of the Latin silvaticus (people of the woods) to coin the word savages; to see in a suburban front lawn a representation of the meadow of a medieval freehold.

Discovering landscape is good exercise for body and for mind. This book is an essential guide and companion to that exercise--to understanding, literally and figuratively, what landscape is.

From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of the color white in visual culture, from antiquity to today

As a pigment, white is often thought to represent an absence of color, but it is without doubt an important color in its own right, just like red, blue, green, or yellow--and, like them, white has its own intriguing history. In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, a celebrated authority on the history of colors, presents a fascinating visual, social, and cultural history of the color white in European societies, from antiquity to today.

Illustrated throughout with a wealth of captivating images ranging from the ancient world to the twenty-first century, White examines the evolving place, perception, and meaning of this deceptively simple but complex hue in art, fashion, literature, religion, science, and everyday life across the millennia. Before the seventeenth century, white's status as a true color was never contested. On the contrary, from antiquity until the height of the Middle Ages, white formed with red and black a chromatic triad that played a central role in life and art. Nor has white always been thought of as the opposite of black. Through the Middle Ages, the true opposite of white was red. White also has an especially rich symbolic history, and the color has often been associated with purity, virginity, innocence, wisdom, peace, beauty, and cleanliness.

With its striking design and compelling text, White is a colorful history of a surprisingly vivid and various color.

"Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads." In Why Architecture Matters, he shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the vast, flowing Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Guggenheim Bilbao. He eloquently describes the Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome as a work that "embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination."

In his afterword to this new edition, Goldberger addresses the current climate in architectural history and takes a more nuanced look at projects such as Thomas Jefferson's academical village at the University of Virginia and figures including Philip Johnson, whose controversial status has been the topic of much recent discourse. He argues that the emotional impact of great architecture remains vital, even as he welcomes the shift in the field to an increased emphasis on social justice and sustainability.