In his latest series of paintings featuring images of cups, Samuel Bak proves once again that he is a master of the collapsing visual metaphor. His images do not vanish from the canvas, but they lose
"During his career, French artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) used the Seine as his testing ground for documenting on canvas the transformative effects of light and atmosphere. He produced many ethereal,
Featuring thirty-five outstanding abstract paintings made between 1950 and 1975 from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, this fascinating book casts a new glance at a renowned p
" For nearly fifty years the humanities have been confined by a series of critiques: of the subject, of representation, of the visual, of modernism, of autonomy, of intention, of art itself. In their
This is the definitive account of the life and work of Edward Seago (1910-1974), the highly popular, versatile and talented British painter whose work was inspired by John Sell Cotman, John Constable
This first major book on John Altoon, a legendary figure of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, examines the artist's work not only in the context of his peers but also considers his resonance for
"Essays by American and Dutch scholars and museum curators explore the collecting and reception of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in America, from the colonial era through the Gilded Age to today"
"Rembrandt van Rjin (1606-1669) was among the few celebrated old masters who enjoyed considerable freedom in his choice of subject matter. Living and working in the Protestant Netherlands, he painted
The acclaimed French painter Gustave Moreau (1826?1898) strove to renew history painting by creating epic art in a nonacademic manner. In this thought-provoking book, Peter Cooke explains how Moreau essentially created pictorial Symbolism through his novel approach to the genre of history painting. In the process, the author closely examines the artist through some of his major paintings, his ideology and aesthetic, and, for the first time, in relation to other artists of his time and of the previous generations. The narrative follows Moreau’s career from his Neoclassical and academic training through his conversion to Romanticism, his studies in Italy, his experiences as an exhibitor at the Paris Salon, and his subsequent years as a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and as the founder of his own museum. By drawing on unpublished manuscripts from the Musee Gustave Moreau in Paris, Cooke presents fresh insights into how Moreau’s art reflects his spiritualist, Catholic ideology, as w
"This book is the first comprehensive survey of aristocratic art collecting and patronage in Elizabethan England, as seen through the activities of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (ca. 1532-1588). On
Filled with magnificent examples of Chinese paintings from four dynasties, spanning the 8th through the 17th century, this book traces Japan's role in preserving part of China's cultural heritage. Exp
In this book, Conrad Rudolph studies and reconstructs Hugh of Saint Victor's forty-two-page written work, The Mystic Ark, which describes the medieval painting of the same name. In medieval written sources, works of art are not often referred to, let alone described in any detail. Almost completely ignored by art historians because of the immense difficulty of its text, Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark (c.1125–30) is among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture. Depicting all time, all space, all matter, all human history and all spiritual striving, this highly polemical painting deals with a series of cultural issues crucial in the education of society's elite during one of the great periods of intellectual change in Western history.
"The renowned Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) established his career in Catholic Rome, making paintings that placed particular importance on sacred relics and the glorifi
