Pop Art was one of the most important artistic movements of the late twentieth century. Its adaptation of mediated, popular-culture imagery continues to influence artists, but until now, little attention has been paid to the important contributions that women made to the movement. Pop Art by women dealt less with direct consumerist critiques, instead subversively combating the stereotypical perceptions of women via advertising and film cliches. Work by women Pop artists ranges from Rosalyn Drexler's surreal film-noir riffs, Idelle Weber's New Realism office workers, and Niki de Saint Phalle's exuberant Nanas to the more controversial and blatantly political statements of Faith Ringgold and Martha Rosler. Pauline Boty and Axell explored female desire, while the innovative soft structures stitched by Yayoi Kusama, Jann Haworth, Patty Mucha, and others form an important contribution to the history of sculpture. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 is the catalogue of the first exhibition to expand Pop Art's narrow critical definition to reflect the significant role of these women artists. The culmination of six years of research by Sid Sachs, this exhibition, organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery of the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, is touring nationally. The essays in this catalogue span from London's Independent Group in the early 1950s to the end of classic Pop in 1968. Written by the art historians Linda Nochlin, Sid Sachs, Kalliopi Minioudaki, Bradford R. Collins, Annika Ohrner, and Sue Tate and the artists Martha Rosler and Patty Mucha, these texts will be revelations and will remain a vital reference for artists, art and cultural historians, and feminists alike. Artworks by more than twenty artists are reproduced, including Pauline Boty, Chryssa, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Yayoi Kusama, and Marisol, as well as now lesser-known figures such as Barbro Ostlihn and Dorothy Grebenak. Numerous works are discussed in depth from a number of vantage points.

A new and revised edition of this most comprehensive book on the life and work of Caravaggio published to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio`s birth in July 2010.

With hundreds of photographs and an informative text, 80 Years of the Oscar takes readers behind the scenes, from the first awards show in 1928 to this year's 80th anniversary.

«Ancient Egyptian civilization developed its own highly individual manner of expressing visible and invisible worlds — earth and the domain of the gods — through distinctive «languages». This book presents an art, language, and culture of extraordinary richness.»

Features 25 frescoe cycles including works by Domenichino, Ricci, Guercino and Tiepolo. This work presents such celebrated sights as the Barberini Palace in Rome and the Pitti Palace in Florence, as well as lesser known gems. Each chapter offers a descriptive and interpretive essay on various aspects of the frescoe cycle.

Few parents can resist the urge to photograph every adorable stage of their children's lives, but most do it more lovingly than well. No matter how doting they are, too often the results are blurry, overexposed, and uninspired snapshots. Guide to Photographing Children offers practical, detailed, unintimidating advice to help transform parents' enthusiasm into memorable photographs that capture the child's own distinctive spirit (and involve the child in the process). After gently guiding the amateur photographer through such technical basics as which camera, film, and exposure to use, the authors offer specific suggestions for shooting indoors and out, as well as invaluable advice on working with children at each age (useful words of wisdom: respect the child's moods and don't always demand a smile). The book concludes with handy information about how to get the best work out of the photofinisher, even if it's just the local one-hour mini-lab, plus ideas for scrapbooks and other projects geared to putting the photos to good use. Throughout, sidebars offer additional help on everything from film speeds to smile getters, and the 200 photographs provide clear examples of what — and what not — to do when photographing children of every age and temperament.

Hieronymus Bosch is a stunningly illustrated, groundbreaking exploration of the work of Hieronymus Bosch, the Low Countries great visionary painter. Four hundred little people frolic au naturel with overgrown songbirds and raspberries; a pudgy blue demon serenades a fashionable young couple with a tune piped through his own elongated nose; a knife-wielding set of disembodied ears stalks the damned through hell. The phantasmagoric imagery of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516) has been the source of widespread interest ever since the painter's lifetime, and is still so enigmatic that scholars have theorized that it contains hidden astrological, alchemical, or even heretical meanings. Yet none of these theories has ever seemed to provide an adequate understanding of Bosch's work. Moreover, the considerable professional success that the artist enjoyed in his native Hertogenbosch, not to mention his membership in a traditional religious organization, suggests that he pursued not a sinister secret agenda but simply his personal artistic vision. Hieronymus Bosch, an intriguing new book by noted art historian Larry Silver, interprets that artistic vision with admirable lucidity: it explains how Bosch's understanding of human sin, morality, and punishment, which was conceived in an era of powerful apocalyptic expectation, shaped his dramatic visualizations of hell and of the temptations of even the most steadfast saints. Silver's account of Bosch's artistic development is one of the first to benefit from recent technical investigations of the paintings, as well as from the reexamination of the artist's drawings in relation to his paintings. Hieronymus Bosch is also unique in how securely it places its subject's work in the broader history of painting in the Low Countries: Silver identifies sources of Bosch's iconography in a wide range of fifteenth century panel paintings, manuscript illuminations, and prints, and describes how, despite their own religiousness, Bosch's pictures helped inspire the secular landscape and genre scenes of later Netherlandish painters. Augmented by 310 illustrations, most in colour, including many dramatic close-ups of Bosch's intricately imagined nightmare scenes, Hieronymus Bosch is the definitive art book on a perennially fascinating Dutch painter.

Offers a way to appreciate the history of art and to understand that a self-portrait is more than merely a portrait of the artist. Presenting a definition of the self-portrait genre, this book focuses on the turning point for the establishment of the genre during the Renaissance when the status of the painter was raised from artisan to artist.

«When Hesiod, the Greek poet of the eighth century B.C., recounted the history of the world as he understood it, he described the legendary first generation of mortal men, who lived in peace and ease, as the «people of gold». Nearly three millennia later, we still refer to a particularly happy or prosperous era as a «golden age». The reason Hesiod’s metaphor translates so perfectly into our own idiom is that the mystique of gold, the quintessential precious metal, is truly universal. The very scarcity of gold accounts for part of its allure and much of its monetary value: the total volume of gold ever mined, from prehistory to the present day, would probably fit inside a cube with sides just twenty yards (18 m) long. Yet gold’s incredible material properties also contribute to its appeal. Gold does not corrode, so it never loses its brilliant luster, and it can be chased, embossed, punched, drawn into wires, hammered foil-thin, and shaped in countless other ways. This engaging book reveals that the ways in which gold, in turn, has shaped humanity are no less numerous. Since prehistory, for example, artisans have fashioned gold into ritual objects and high-status ornaments; beginning in the sixth century B.C., gold served as currency; and even in the modern era it has encouraged wars of conquest and triggered frantic gold rushes. Each chapter is devoted to one historical epoch, explaining how people of that time mined and refined gold, and how they used it for cultural and economic purposes. Two hundred gorgeous color photographs illustrate golden objets d’art as diverse as the funerary masks of Tutankhamen; intricate Celtic jewelry; a figurine of «El Dorado», a pre-Columbian chief said to ritualistically cover his entire body in gold dust; bejeweled medieval reliquaries and crucifixes; and even Gustav Klimt’s gold-drenched canvas The Kiss. With its authoritative yet lively text and these arresting illustrations, The Lure of Gold sets, as it were, the gold standard for books on material culture.»

An elegantly produced volume which illustrates celebrated American metal sculptor Joel Perlman's finest works and relates them to his fascinating life story This handsomely illustrated book is the first monograph devoted to the work of Joel Perlman, an acclaimed sculptor in steel and bronze, whose works are represented in the permanent collections of America's top museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Perlman's best works from the 1970s to the present day — from the austerely abstract Chevy Short (For Jeannie Day), shown at the 1973 Whitney Biennial, to the lyrical Sky Spirit, a monumental commission completed in 2004 — are depicted in here in stunning full-page photographs, most in full color. All readers with an interest in contemporary sculpture will appreciate not only the book's striking illustrations but also its thoughtfully written text, which relates Perlman's art to his life. This thoughtful narrative, which seamlessly synthesizes Perlman's intimate art-world anecdotes and Palmedo's own keen critical observations, is beautifully complemented by an insightful foreword by renowned art dealer Andre Emmerich, whose gallery represented Perlman for twenty years.

The fourth, but the earliest volume chronologically, of the only comprehensive survey in modern times of the surviving Italian frescoes from the end of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Mannerism, this groundbreaking oeuvre is an achievement in scholarship and publishing of the same magnitude as Abbeville's Art of Florence and Art and Spirit of Paris . Following the success of the previous volumes in this extraordinary series: Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance , Italian Frescoes: The Flowering of the Renaissance , and Italian Frescoes: The High Renaissance and Mannerism — Italian Frescoes: The Age of Giotto, 1280 — 1400 presents twenty-two outstanding fresco cycles. Created during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, these cycles set new standards for painting and an innovative vision of man, paving the way for the monumental achievements of the Renaissance. It was at this time that fresco painting was not only commissioned for churches and chapels, but also for such secular places as town halls and royal residences with humanist in addition to religious themes. The fresco cycles featured here include brilliant works by Giotto in Assisi, Padua, and Florence; dramatic paintings by Cimabue, thought to be Giotto's teacher; Pietro Cavillini in Rome; and the Sienese artists Simone Martini and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — all of these works still visible on walls and ceilings of palaces and churches spanning Italy from the Veneto to Rome. The authors describe and illustrate such celebrated sites as the Church of Saint Francis in Assisi, the Chapel of the Scrovegni in Padua, the Public Palace in Siena, and the papal chapel, the Sancta Sanctorum, in Rome. Each of the twenty-two chapters is concise and authoritative, offering a descriptive and interpretive essay on all aspects of fresco painting, covering the artists and their patrons in the context of their cultural and political history. Each essay concludes with a diagram of the site, followed by a series of full- and double-page color plates showing the entire cycle, many reproduced from new photographs of recently restored frescoes. No publisher until now has attempted to gather together and document all the important fresco cycles of Italian art from the late thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. While this volume is the predecessor to the previous books, Italian Frescoes: The Age of Giotto, 1280 — 1400 easily stands alone as a masterpiece of art and scholarship which will be welcomed by art historians and art lovers alike.

This sparkling edition of Audubons Birds of America displays all 435 of Audubons hand-colored engravings, graced with an illuminating introduction by Roger Tory Peterson that places Audubon in his ornithological and art historical context. Issued with the full endorsement and cooperation of the Audubon Society, the stunning Baby Elephant Folio — here reproduced in a miniature, gem-like version-was the first work ever to arrange Audubons plates in scientific order.

This book has long satisfied the ever-growing passion for American Impressionism. It is the definitive study of the subject, filled with information and insight garnered through many years of far-ranging research. All the masterworks are here, from Childe Hassam's sun-drenched gardens to John Twachtman's snow-silenced landscapes, from Edmund Tarbell's coolly elegant ladies in dim, luxurious parlors to Frederick Friseke's voluptuous, sun-dappled nudes. Documentary photographs of the artists and quotations from their private letters and journals complement the text and provide a vivid sense of their lives and times. The fascinating text is now updated and expanded with a new chapter discussing in detail the themes particular to the American artists of the Impressionist movement. Twenty-five new illustrations have been added, nineteen in color. Three hundred entries have been added to the bibliography, bringing it up to date with the most current research in the field.

The name of John Singer Sargent evokes paintings of marvelously gowned Edwardian belles, of brooding aristocrats and princes of industry-insightful portraits executed with dazzling virtuosity. Sargent's enduring popularity has prompted a thoughtful reappraisal by prominent art critic Carter Ratcliff, who shows us the surprising breadth of the artist's work. Never before has a book so thoroughly represented that variety: 110 lavish color plates and more than 200 halftones convey the brillance of his portraits, the exuberance of his watercolors, the stately pomp of his murals. It is perhaps the watercolors that are most exciting to contemporary eyes-bold, spontaneous, and vividly hued, they have a breathtaking immediacy. Born in Florence in 1865 to American parents, Sargent spent a nomadic childhood before going to Paris to study painting. He learned quickly and by the 1880s had begun the steady climb to fame that ultimately placed him at the center of his world, with a circle of friends and rivals that included Henry James, Claude Monet, and James McNeill Whistler. When Sargent died in 1925, a childhood companion wrote in her memorial that the summing up of a would-be biography must, I think be: He painted.

Lavishly illustrated with more than 400 paintings by 125 different atrists, this luscious book will thoroughly satisfy the ever-growing passion for American Impressionism. The fascinating text — written by Dr. William H. Gerdts, the preeminent scholar in the field — is the definitive study of the subject, filled with many years of far-ranging research. Documentary photographs of the artists and quotations from their private letters and journals complement the text and provide a vivid sense of their lives and times.

«Sun-dappled carp, radiant blossoms, and tumultuous waters are among the wonders and mysteries of nature captured in Joseph Raffaels brilliant close-up paintings. At a time when beauty is much out of favor in the art world, Joseph Raffael has taken what some would consider the highly radical step of daring to paint beautiful pictures. Long one of contemporary arts most highly regarded painters, Raffael transforms intense observations of nature into color-drenched, deeply felt works of art. He often works on a very large scale, using either watercolor, oil, or acrylic to achieve the painstaking detail of his dazzling images. Amei Wallachs warmly perceptive introduction, inspired by a visit to the artists home and studio in the south of France, explores Raffaels life history, his sources, and his ideas about art. Her individual chapter openers address the predominant subjects within the artists work, including water and shore scenes, flowers, animals, fish and lilies, sacred symbols, and Raffaels wife, Lannis. A thought-provoking essay by Donald Kuspit places Raffaels painting within the larger context of twentieth-century art, psychology, and philosophy. Complementing these texts are the paintings themselves-sun-dappled carp, luminous iris, tumultuous rivers, and other wonders of nature captured in radiant visual meditations. The artist has also contributed two engaging written pieces, both of which illuminate the pleasures and occasional terrors of the creative process. His «Diary of a Painting» traces the evolution of one major work over several months, from the original slide to the finished wall-size watercolor, providing insight into the emotional and technical demands of creating a work of art. His informative and revealing «Autobiographical Chronology» provides a personal look back, from his Brooklyn childhood to his art-making career in New York, California, and the south of France, where Joseph Raffael lives and works today.»

Founded in 1824, the National Gallery houses a rich and comprehensive range of European painting from the Middle Ages to the 1920s. Among the works represented in this colorful and compact survey of the Gallerys collection are masterpieces by Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne, as well as some lesser-known delights. Located on Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London, the original Wilkins Building has recently been extended by the handsome new Sainsbury Wing, which contains some of the worlds greatest paintings.

With masters such as William Blake, William Hogarth, George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney, the Tate Gallery offers work to please every taste. The gallery, which was opened in London in the summer of 1897 by the Prince of Wales, is best known for its modern art collections, but-as this little compendium makes wonderfully clear-it encompasses the full sweep of British art, from ornate aristocratic portraits and vivacious hunting scenes to the Pre-Raphaelites languid femmes fatales.

Glorious works of art as well as chronicles of a past age, illuminated manuscripts supply perhaps the finest and best-preserved evidence of what life was like during the medieval and Renaissance periods. Illuminated Manuscripts: Treasures of The Pierpont Morgan Library draws on one of the most extraordinary collections of painted books in the world to illustrate the angels, demons, and everyday denizens of the Middle Ages.

«With its lively narrative and profuse illustrations, this volume captures the visual riches of a remarkable era. Born in controversy, christened in scorn by a sarcastic critic, and developed amid a continuing struggle for recognition and solvency, French Impressionism finally emerged as a powerful and immensely popular artistic movement whose appeal remains undiminished today. «The Great Book of French Impressionism» celebrates the richness and exuberance of the Impressionists world — a world of light and color, of sunlit fields and shimmering waterscapes, of bustling city views and intimate domestic scenes. This handsomely designed Tiny Folio packs over 200 full-color illustrations, faithfully capturing the subtle nuances of light and keen perception that make French Impressionist painting unique. The text traces the development of Impressionism from its roots in landscape and Realist painting through its focus on modern urban life to its ultimate goal: to fix on canvas the fleeting moods and effects of nature in a world that stands still for no one. The works of the major Impressionists and Post Impressionists, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Cézanne, are featured and show how they influenced others in the movement, ultimately giving rise to the new art of the twentieth century.»