From the 1890s through the turn of the century, there was a flourishing of imaginative art and craft throughout Europe that we now know as Art Nouveau. The Netherlands experienced an inventive variant of this art and design phenomenon, but until now it has been largely overshadowed by its counterparts in other countries, especially France. This richly illustrated book is the first in English to celebrate the Dutch contribution to Art Nouveau through a tour of more than one hundred works on paper posters, decorative calendars, illustrated books, as well as prints and drawings. These innovative works of graphic design reveal the progressive Dutch artists conscious reaction against the past, their inspiration in natural forms and exotic cultures, and their embrace of the principle that art should transform everyday life. It also shows how the New Art, Nieuwe Kunst in Dutch, coexisted and sometimes intertwined in the Netherlands with other artistic strands, including persistent realist trends, Symbolism and the emergence of Modernism. With an introduction and explanatory text about each work of art by Clifford S. Ackley, one of the worlds leading specialists of Dutch prints and drawings, Holland on Paper provides a fascinating and visually rewarding introduction to a rich and creative artistic era.

Wassily Kandinsky was one of the most influential painters of the twentieth century, and this text, in which he laid out the tenets of painting as he saw them and made the case for nonobjective artistic forms, is universally recognized as an essential document of Modernist art theory. A brilliant philosophical treatise and an emphatic avant-garde tract, it provides the theoretical underpinnings for Kandinsky's own work and that of his associates in the Blaue Reiter movement. While Michael Sadler's masterful translation has been available and authoritative since its original publication in 1914, what hasn't been published until now is the significant correspondence between the translator and the artist, who followed the progress of his book's transformation closely, and who offered numerous insights into and explanations of its meanings. These letters, from the archives of Tate Britain, have here been appended to Kandinsky's text to provide the first comprehensively annotated edition of this seminal work. This volume, which supersedes any previous edition, includes the letters, Kandinsky's prefaces and prose poems relating to the period in which the book was written and Sadler's selected writings on art. It is more than an expanded edition — it is a major event, the first full account of a remarkable literary collaboration.

This latest volume in the MFA Highlights series showcases over 100 stunning photographs from the museum's collection. An extensive introductory essay traces the aesthetic and technical history of photography as an art form, from the early days of the camera obscura through the invention of the daguerreotype and calotype and into the present digital age. In the selection of objects that compose the body of this beautifully designed volume, careful juxtapositions emphasize the graphic qualities of the photos, and extended captions compare and contrast images from different times and places, underscoring shared techniques, sensibilities or subjects. A wide range of photographers — from early experimenters such as Eugene Cuvelier, Charles Marville and Anna Atkins to modern giants Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, as well as contemporary practitioners such as James Nachtwey, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Loretta Lux — are represented by portraits and figure studies, city scenes and still lifes, landscapes and seascapes.

For nearly four decades in the sixteenth century, the careers of Venice's three greatest painters — Titan, Tintoretto and Veronese — overlapped, producing mutual influences and bitter rivalries that changed art history. Venice was then among Europe's richest cities, and its plentiful commissions fostered an exceptionally fertile and innovative climate. In it, the three artists — brilliant, ambitious and fiercely competitive — vied with one another for primacy, employing such new media as oil on canvas, with its unique expressive possibilities, and such new approaches as a personal and identifiable signature style. They also pioneered the use of easel painting, a newly portable format that led to unprecedented fame in their lifetimes. With more than 150 stunning examples by the three masters and their contemporaries, this volume elucidates the technical and aesthetic innovations that helped define the uniquely rich Venetian style, as well as the social, political and economic context in which it flourished. Essays range from examinations of seminal new techniques to such crucial institutions as state commissions and the patronage system. Most of all, by concentrating on the lives and careers of Venice's three greatest painters, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese paints a vibrant human portrait--one brimming with savage rivalry, one-upsmanship, humor and passion.

Between 1927 and 1933, as the new Soviet Union emerged and the Communist party struggled to transform an agrarian country into an industrialized state, a group of young artists pitched in by designing fabrics depicting tractors, smokestacks and symbols of collective modernity, cloth with which to mold its buyers into ideal Soviet citizens. Few of these designs ever saw mass production, and the experiment failed as propaganda — comrades clung to their traditional floral motifs — but it yielded bold and intriguing new designs. Soviet Textiles: Designing the Modern Utopia presents some 40 of them, and analyzes the political and artistic context in which they were made. Pamela Jill Kachurin identifies major themes and motifs, including industrialization, transportation, electrification, youth, agriculture and collectivization, and sports and hobbies, and analyzes the work both as propaganda and as graphic art, in this, the only English-language book to treat them from that perspective.

In the decades around 1900, postcards were Twitter, email, Flickr and Facebook, all wrapped into one. A postcard craze swept the world, and billions of cards were bought, mailed and pasted into albums. Many famous artists turned to the new medium, but one of the great pleasures and enigmas of postcards is how some of the most beautiful and interesting examples were made by artists whose names we barely know. Drawing on the riches of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection (probably the finest and most comprehensive collection of its type), this gorgeous book traces the historical and cultural themes — enthralling, exciting, and sometimes disturbing — of the modern age. The first general publication on the postcard as an artistic medium since the mid-1970s, The Postcard Age is organized thematically, with chapters devoted to urban life, the changing role of women, sports, celebrity, new technologies, the stylish collectors' cards of Art Nouveau and World War I. The result is at once a vivid picture of the concerns and pastimes of the turn of the century and a sampler from the Lauder's vast archives.