For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge , and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo , is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.

St Albans contains one of the most extensive sets of medieval wall paintings to survive in any of the great English churches, ranging in date from the early 12th century to the Tudor period. These provide a unique picture of how the decoration of an abbey church would have functioned in the Middle Ages, as a material expression of a deeply Christian culture where the spaces in the church acted as sites for prayer and devotion. This authoritative and accessible study of the full range of paintings, written by art historian Dr M. A. Michael and illustrated with specially commissioned new photography, offers a detailed discussion of the individual images and sets them in their wider artistic context.

A penetrating reassessment of Munch's memorable painting and profound artistic legacy This engaging book offers a fresh look at the exceptional works of Edvard Munch (1863-1944) by examining them in the light of his precarious mental state. Following a nervous breakdown in 1908, Munch underwent electroshock therapy, which prompted a marked change in his art work. The haunting Self-Portrait between the Clock and the Bed, finished one year before his death, represents a culmination of the themes of mortality, isolation, and anxiety that he explored repeatedly, and provides, in these pages, a perfect lens through which to view the artist's entire oeuvre. Informative essays consider Munch's position in the art world, his conception of self as a means of experimentation, and the psychological content of his paintings, while a previously unpublished foreword by the celebrated Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard offers a new perspective on Munch's life and work. Featuring over 40 masterworks from throughout the painter's career, and an illustrated chronology that traces the progression of his emotional state and its influence on the images he created, this is an intimate, provocative study of an enigmatic artist and his remarkable legacy.

Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary and musical vogues of the period, Robert Slifkin examines the role of history as both artistic medium and creative catalyst to Guston's practice as a painter. Slifkin employs a wealth of visual examples, archival materials, and original scholarship to situate Guston's paintings within broader artistic debates of the time, using the cultural movement of "the sixties" as its orienting foreground. This historical framework provides an interface between the notions of time in art and time in the material world. Lively and edifying, Slifkin's comprehensive text productively complicates the prescribed traditions of postwar art history and, in turn, shifts our perception of Guston and his place in the domain of modern art.

Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, this luxurious week-to-view pocket diary has a foil and embossed cover with magnetic closure. Featuring on its cover a beautiful design based on Vincent van Gogh's Small Pear Tree in Blossom, this diary makes a perfect gift or a special treat just for you.

Magic Off Main chronicles the life and art of Esther Warkov, a visual artist of Jewish heritage who lives in Winnipeg and paints in a surrealistic and postmodern style. It considers Warkov's art through an understanding of her life and the palpable effect her life as a Jewish woman growing up on the Canadian prairies has had on her art. By tracing the development of Warkov's art over forty years, Rasporich addresses aspects of biography, social and cultural history, and art history in a cohesive volume. This biography is not limited to the narrow discipline of art and art history. Rather, it is a contribution to the larger field of Canadian studies, including cultural studies, and social history. Prepared and written with careful consideration, Magic Off Main provides a rare glimpse into the personal insights and explanations of Warkov and is richly illustrated with forty illustrations and photographs.

The artist and scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into a middle-class family of publishers and artists. With her meticulous depictions of insect metamorphosis, she raised the standards of natural history illustration and helped give birth to the field of entomology. At the age of fifty-two, Merian traveled with her younger daughter to Suriname, a Dutch territory in South America, to paint its exotic flora and fauna.
Many of the drawings produced by Merian in the South American jungle were later published as hand-colored engravings in her book Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1705), which brought her widespread fame. A copy of the second edition is held in the collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute.
Insects and Flowers, a delightful gift book that reproduces vivid color details of sixteen plates from the Getty's copy, is a vibrant encapsulation of Merian's book and features an engaging essay on Merian's life and work as well as an insect and plant identification guide. An exhibition of Merian's work will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 10 through August 31, 2008.

Sir Henry Rushbury RA (1889-1968) is a forgotten treasure of twentieth-century British art. Internationally renowned during his lifetime, Rushbury was a modern master of the ancient art of drypoint. With no more than a few minute grooves and flecks cut in the surface of a copperplate, he conjured extraordinary effects of atmosphere in topographical views made throughout Europe, from the churches of London to the ancient hilltop village of Les Baux-de-Provence and the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. This catalogue raisonne of Rushburys prints presents a timely opportunity for the rediscovery and reassessment of this astonishing body of work. A lively introduction by the art historian Felicity Owen places Rushburys highly successful career in the context of the febrile art world of inter-war Britain, while a biography by the artists daughter includes previously unpublished details of his working life to complete a compelling portrait of one of the countrys finest printmakers. Felicity Owen is an art historian specialising in eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century art.

This book reveals that James Ensor did not develop his fantastic and grotesque universe of masks and skeletons out of his melancholic soul, but that he re-used and transformed an old image tradition that was collected and published by the French author and art critic Jules Champfleury in his History of Caricature. A second essay analyses how these weird creatures infiltrate the image borders and the frames of Ensor's paintings in order to disturb the 'normal' world.

Fully illustrated in colour, here is the first introduction in English to one of Korea's outstanding cultural assets - the banchado (painting of the order of guests in a royal event) commemorating the 1795 royal procession to Hwaseong (Gyeonggi Province). It is a fine example of the meticulous record-keeping (uigwe) and the skills of the court painters at that time. Comprising some 1800 people, the eight-day procession was organized by King Jeongjo in order to visit the tomb of his father and to celebrate his mother's sixtieth birthday. The author provides a full analysis of the context, planning, execution and significance of the event.

There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries.
"Rembrandt's Jews" puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam--which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood--Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented--far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictionsof Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Through his close look at paintings, etchings, and drawings; in his discussion of intellectual and social life during the Dutch Golden Age; and even through his own travels in pursuit of his subject, Nadler takes the reader through Jewish Amsterdam then and now--a trip that, under ever--threatening Dutch skies, is full of colorful and eccentric personalities, fiery debates, and magnificent art.

During the First World War the Australian Government established an official war art scheme, sending artists to the front lines to create a visual record of the Australian experience of the war. Around two thousand sketches and paintings were commissioned and acquired between 1916 and 1922. In Painting War, Margaret Hutchison examines the official art scheme as a key commemorative practice of the First World War and argues that the artworks had many makers beyond the artists. Government officials' selection of artists and subjects for the war paintings and their emphasis on the eyewitness value of the images over their aesthetic merit profoundly shaped the character of the art collection. Richly illustrated, Painting War provides an important understanding of the individuals, institutions and the politics behind the war art scheme that helped shape a national memory of the First World War for Australia.

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) is widely regarded as the epitome of realist art. From the very beginning of his career, he captured the beauty and horror of reality with unflinching precision, and he was a consummate master of atmosphere. A man of very short stature, Menzel was excluded from many aspects of life, and so his struggle with reality was also a struggle to assert himself. Werner Busch's comprehensive new study sheds light on the biographical and historical events that shaped Menzel's work and the course it took. Menzel's paintings of the life of Frederick the Great still dominate our image of the monarch. Their modern perspective, however, neither glorified the king nor found favor with the Prussian royal family. After witnessing the horror of war in the aftermath of the Battle of Koniggratz, Menzel abandoned history painting. In Paris, he discovered the energy and bustle of the heroless metropolis; for the remainder of his career, he devoted himself to painting scenes of contemporary life. In this lavishly illustrated book, Werner Busch examines the artist's multifaceted oeuvre and brings the long nineteenth century into aesthetic focus.

Sophie Taeuber ranks among the pioneers of classical avant-garde in the first half of the 20th century. Born 1889 in Switzerland and educated in St. Gallen, Switzerland, at Wilhelm von Debschitz's teaching and experimental workshop in Munich and the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg. She returned to Switzerland in 1915 to study at Rudolf von Laban's dance school in Zurich, where she became involved in the Dada-movement and also taught textile design 1916-29. From 1928, Taeuber lived and worked in her studio home in Meudon near Paris until she had to flee from German occupation to the south of France and again in 1942 to Zurich, where she died in January 1943. Richly illustrated, this comprehensive new monograph on Sophie Taeuber can for the first time draw on many private collections, presenting an abundance of works previously unpublished or kept from public display for decades. It documents Taeuber's entire range of creativity and her mastery of material, shape, and colour, her inventiveness and her interdisciplinary thinking and approach. It shows her remarkable versatility in an oeuvre covering all disciplines of the modernist movement: applied and fine art, dance, architecture, interior design and teaching.

The collections of twentieth-century paintings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, have developed largely through the generosity of individuals. Notable among these in the early decades of the century were Frank Hindley Smith and Mrs W F R Weldon, while since the Second World War the Museum's collections have been enriched through gifts and requests from Thomas Balston, R A P Bevan, Molly Freeman, Christopher Hewett and others. This book gives the reader a taste of the wide range of the collection, with its representative group of Camden Town and Euston Road School pictures, and important early works by Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementos, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one's hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in "Treasuring the Gaze", Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures - and their abrupt disappearance - reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject's gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures - including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures - Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, "Treasuring the Gaze" provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.

Citrons, lemons, and bitter oranges float like heavenly bodies above Italian villas, Nuremberg gardens, and picturesque countryside in J. C. Volkamer's ode to the citrus fruit. Reproducing a rare hand-colored set of the copper plates, this publication shows 170 varieties of citrus fruits in life size. Full of fragrance and color, they revive a time when fruits really were exotic.

This book presents a detailed account of Guillermo Kuitca's major bodies of work, analysing his diverse range of imagery and reflecting on his engagement with the spaces in which we live. Following Kuitca's development from the 1980s to his latest body of work, the narrative reveals an artist who has continually challenged himself and his audience with new kinds of painterly language. In Kuitca's hands, everyday visual material such as road maps, street plans, architectural blueprints and theatre seating charts are transformed into remarkable paintings. Their impact comes from their apparent engagement with dark subjects such as the Holocaust and Argentina's 'Dirty War,' as well as the artist's innovative imagery and techniques. Drawing on conversations and studio visits the author has had with the artist, Guillermo Kuitca reveals the multifarious elements of a challenging and exciting body of work. It is essential reading for anyone fascinated by this truly original artist.

This book offers the first detailed account of the paintings of American artist Thomas Nozkowski (born 1944), creator of modestly-sized abstract works that swiftly convey what one writer described as 'a remarkable sense of freedom within constraint.' As an emerging artist in the 1970s, Thomas Nozkowski's mature style developed in the wake of Minimalism, Pop Art and Colour Field painting and during a decade which became defined by movements - such as Conceptual and Performance art - that eschewed painting. While many artists identified with the notion of 'painting's terminal condition', Nozkowski chose to express personal experience through small-scale canvases that refused to adhere to 'a signature style' or align themselves with a particular movement. Through John Yau's perceptive text, the trajectory of Nozkowski's very individual artistic pathway is clearly presented. Offering insightful context and discussion of specific works, this book provides the definitive narrative of an artist gifted with an original vision.

Originally published as Volume 2 of "The Tao of Painting," this is the first English translation of the famous Chinese handbook, the "Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan" (original, 1679-1701). Mai-mai Sze has translated and annotated the texts of instructions, discussions of the fundamentals of painting, notes on the preparation of colors, and chief editorial prefaces."

David Hockney is possibly the world's most popular living painter, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. Here are the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. How does drawing make one `see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still', as Hockney suggests? What significance do different media - from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad - have for the way we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? How have changes in technology affected the way artists depict the world? The conversations are punctuated by wise and witty observations from both parties on numerous other artists - Van Gogh or Vermeer, Caravaggio, Monet, Picasso - and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney lives, and Yorkshire, his birthplace. Some of the people he has encountered along the way - from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Billy Wilder - make entertaining appearances in the dialogue.

Accompanying a travelling exhibition on the work of the London-based Dutch artist, "The World of Madelon Vriesendorp" is a testament to a brilliant figure who has made a unique contribution to the visual culture of architecture. Images of Vriesendorp's idiosyncratic collection of drawings, paintings, postcards and paraphernalia are combined in this volume, alongside texts that illuminate her work. Charles Jencks ruminates on Vriesendorp's cosmology of symbols; the novelist and artist Douglas Coupland writes on the pathology of collecting; Beatriz Colomina re-treads the 'delirious' 1970s in New York; and Rem and Charlotte Koolhaas reframe the domestic environment that has been both family home and Vriesendorp's studio archive for 30 years. The artist's own view on the world is as witty as it is imaginative; vividly espousing her own 'theory of misunderstanding', a theory that privileges culture's heart-rending failures over its supposed successes.