Name: Philip Guston
Brand: Philip Guston
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Philip Guston

$29.95

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913–1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston’s wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art—from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston’s voice—as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

The Realisms of Berenice Abbott

$85.00

The Realisms of Berenice Abbott provides the first in-depth consideration of the work of photographer Berenice Abbott. Though best known for her 1930s documentary images of New York City, this book examines a broad range of Abbott’s work—including portraits from the 1920s, little known and uncompleted projects from the 1930s, and experimental science photography from the 1950s. It argues that Abbott consistently relied on realism as the theoretical armature for her work, even as her understanding of that term changed over time and in relation to specific historical circumstances. But as Weissman demonstrates, Abbott’s unflinching commitment to “realist” aesthetics led her to develop a critical theory of documentary that recognizes the complexity of representation without excluding or obscuring a connection between art and engagement in the political public sphere. In telling Abbott’s story, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott reveals insights into the politics and social context of documentary production and presents a thoughtful analysis of why documentary remains a compelling artistic strategy today.

Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art

$34.95

First published in 1996, this irreplaceable resource has now been updated, revised, and expanded by Kristine Stiles to represent thirty countries and more than one hundred new artists. Stiles has added forty images and a diverse roster of artists, including many who have emerged since the 1980s, such as Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems, Damien Hirst, Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo-Qian, Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Barney, and Takashi Murakami. The writings, which as before take the form of artists' statements, interviews, and essays, make vivid each artist's aesthetic approach and capture the flavor and intent of his or her work. The internationalism evident in this revised edition reflects the growing interest in the vitality of contemporary art throughout the world from the U.S. and Europe to the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia.

Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art

The Writings of Robert Motherwell

$38.95

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), one of the leading American Abstract Expressionist painters, was also a theorist and exponent of the movement. His writing articulated the intent of the New York school —Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, and others—during a period when their work was often reviled for its departure from traditional representation. As founder of the Documents of Modern Art series (later renamed the Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), Motherwell gave modern artists a voice at a time when very few people understood their theories or work. This authoritative new edition of the artist's writings about art includes public lectures, essays, and interviews. Impeccably edited, with an informative introductory essay and rigorous annotation, it is illustrated with black-and-white images that elucidate Motherwell's writings.

Modern Chinese Artists

$85.00

The first biographical dictionary of its kind in any Western language, this pioneering work provides short, information-packed entries for approximately 1,800 Chinese artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In recent years interest in modern Chinese art has spread across the globe. Public and private collections are being formed; courses in modern Chinese art are offered in many universities and museums. At the same time, the number of practicing artists in China and the amount of published material have greatly increased. Michael Sullivan’s pathbreaking book Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China, published in 1996, included a biographical index of some eight hundred artists. This volume includes more than twice that number, with entries that have been revised, expanded, and brought up to date. Illustrated with portraits and photographs of more than seventy leading artists, this comprehensive, convenient reference will be an essential tool for anyone interested in the study or collection of modern Chinese art.

The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin

$85.00

In this magisterial book, Henri Dorra synthesizes more than fifty years of study to present a comprehensive examination of Paul Gauguin's symbolism. Drawing on his profound grasp of the artistic and social contexts in which Gauguin worked, Dorra provides new, complex insights into and interpretations of Gauguin's multilayered symbolism. The Symbolism of Paul Gauguin is lavishly illustrated with a major visual compendium of the artist's prodigious output. The highly readable narrative, based on a sophisticated understanding of Gauguin's oeuvre, offers a masterly interpretation of recurrent images and their interrelationships in the contemporaneous artistic and social context.

Dorra discusses Gauguin's iconography and the artist's treatments of similar themes in various media, from prepatory drawings for paintings to related ceramics and wood carvings. He traces Gauguin's meanings in literary sources from classical mythology and the Bible to late ninetheenth-century literature. He also links the form and content of the artist's work to his unusual ancestry and upbringing. As the final scholarly work by an internationally recognized expert on nineteenth-century French symbolism, this book provides a profound new perspective on Gauguin and his work.

Recording Conceptual Art

$29.95

Recording Conceptual Art features a highly provocative series of previously unpublished interviews conducted in early 1969 with some of the most dynamic, daring, and innovative artists of the tumultuous 1960s. The nine individuals—eight artists and one art dealer—are now known as major contributors to Conceptual art. These fascinating dialogues, conducted by Patricia Norvell, provide tantalizing moments of spontaneous philosophizing and brilliant insights, as well as moments of unabashed self-importance, with highly imaginative and colorful individuals.

The Poethical Wager

$34.95

In these highly inventive essays, Joan Retallack, acclaimed poet and essayist, conveys her unique post-utopian vision as she explores the relationship between art and life in today's chaotic world. In the tradition of the essay as complex humanist exploration, she engages ideas from across history: Aristotle's definition of happiness, Epicurus's swerve into unpredictable possibility, Montaigne's essays as an instrument of self-invention, John Cage's redefinition of Silence. Within her unifying rubric of poethics, Retallack gives the reader plenty of surprises with a wonderful range of examples, situations, and texts through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from Gertrude Stein's favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental feminine, a John Cage performance—all serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a "complex realism."

Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans

$45.00

This splendidly illustrated book brings to life the ancient Romans whom modern scholarship has largely ignored: slaves, ex-slaves, foreigners, and the freeborn working poor. Though they had no access to the upper echelons of society, ordinary Romans enlivened their world with all manner of artworks. Discussing a wide range of art in the late republic and early empire—from familiar monuments to the obscure Caupona of Salvius and little-studied tomb reliefs—John R. Clarke provides a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of ordinary Roman people. Writing for a wide audience, he illuminates the dynamics of a discerning and sophisticated population, overturning much accepted wisdom about them, and opening our eyes to their astounding cultural diversity.

Clarke begins by asking: How did emperors use monumental displays to communicate their policies to ordinary people? His innovative readings demonstrate how the Ara Pacis, the columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius, and the Arch of Constantine announced each dynasty's program for handling the lower classes. Clarke then considers art commissioned by the non-elites themselves—the paintings, mosaics, and reliefs that decorated their homes, shops, taverns, and tombstones. In a series of paintings from taverns and houses, for instance, he uncovers wickedly funny combinations of text and image used by ordinary Romans to poke fun at elite pretensions in art, philosophy, and poetry.

In addition to providing perceptive readings of many works of Roman art, this original and entertaining book demonstrates why historians must recognize, rather than erase, complexity and contradiction and asks new questions about class, culture, and social regulation that are highly relevant in today's global culture.

Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties

$38.95

Performance artist Linda Montano, curious about the influence childhood experience has on adult work, invited other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work. The result is an original and compelling talking performance that documents the production of art in an important and often misunderstood community.

Among the more than 100 artists Montano interviewed from 1979 to 1989 were John Cage, Suzanne Lacy, Faith Ringgold, Dick Higgins, Annie Sprinkle, Allan Kaprow, Meredith Monk, Eric Bogosian, Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Kim Jones. Her discussions with them focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change. The interviews highlight complex issues in performance art, including the role of identity in performer-audience relationships and art as an exploration of everyday conventions rather than a demonstration of virtuosity.

Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties

Singular Women

$34.95

In this groundbreaking volume, contemporary art historians—all of them women—probe the dilemmas and complexities of writing about the woman artist, past and present. Singular Women proposes a new feminist investigation of the history of art by considering how a historian's theoretical approach affects the way in which research progresses and stories are told. These thirteen essays on specific artists, from the Renaissance to the present day, address their work and history to examine how each has been inserted into or left out of the history of art. The authors go beyond an analysis of the past to propose new strategies for considering the contributions of women to the visual arts, strategies that take into account the idiosyncratic, personal, and limited rhetoric that confines all writers.

Sadakichi Hartmann

$63.00

Brilliant and controversial, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote copiously about American and European art and the shaping of American culture during the decades from 1890 to 1910. Jane Weaver has recovered and assembled over fifty of Hartmann's critical writings from influential, though often obscure, turn-of-the-century journals. These reviews and theoretical essays not only provide some of the earliest known criticism of important artists and photographers of the period, but also make Hartmann's fundamental—and uniquely American—definition of modernism available to students of art and cultural history. A most useful adjunct to the text is a complete bibliography of Hartmann's writings on art, as well as an annotated checklist of all the artists treated by Hartmann in this book.

Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), half German, half Japanese, learned the American cast of mind and heart as a beloved young disciple of the aged Walt Whitman. Reflecting the poet's zealous vision, Hartmann's piercing commentaries on the art centers of Boston and New York offer unparalleled documentation of the years before and after 1900.

Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter

$85.00

Pieter Bruegel (ca. 1525–1569), generally considered the greatest Flemish painter of the sixteenth century, was described in 1604 by his earliest biographer as a supremely comic artist, few of whose works failed to elicit laughter. Today, however, we approach Bruegel’s art as anything but a laughing matter. His paintings and drawings are thought to conceal profound allegories best illuminated with scholarly erudition. In this delightfully engaging book, Walter S. Gibson takes a new look at Bruegel, arguing that the artist was no erudite philosopher, but a man very much in the world, and that a significant part of his art is best appreciated in the context of humor. In his illuminating examination of the witty and amusing elements in Bruegel’s paintings, prints, and drawings in relation to the sixteenth century European culture of laughter, Gibson reminds us exactly why Bruegel was one of the most original artists of his time.

In a series of engrossing chapters, Gibson explores the function and production of laughter in the sixteenth century, examines the ways in which Bruegel exploited the comic potential of Hieronymus Bosch, and traces how the artist developed his remarkable gift for physiognomy in his work, culminating in three paintings of festive peasants he produced during the 1560s: the Wedding Dance, the Kermis, and the Wedding Banquet. Gibson also takes a detailed look at the Dulle Griet, Bruegel’s most complex evocation of Bosch.

To the Rescue of Art

$29.95

Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements.

Rudolf Arnheim has spent a lifetime analyzing the basic psychological principles that make works of visual art meaningful, stirring, indispensable, and lasting. But recent fashionable attitudes and theories about art, he argues, are undermining the foundation of artistic achievement itself.

The essays collected in this volume are written in his familiar, careful, and solidly supported manner, but under present circumstances they amount to a call to arms. Included is a series of miniature monographs on a variety of great works of art. In other essays, Arnheim uncovers enlightening perspectives in the art of the blind, in architectural space, in caricature, and in the work of psychotics and autistic children. He also presents new scientific aspects on the psychology of art and widens our range of vision by connecting art with language, literature, and religion.

Fluxus Experience

$36.95

In this groundbreaking work of incisive scholarship and analysis, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious—Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world.

Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it's important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics' and curators' perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general.

Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.

Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s

$26.95

Although Lewis Mumford is widely acknowledged as the seminal American critic of architecture and urbanism in the twentieth century, he is less known for his art criticism. He began contributing to this field in the early 1920s, and his influence peaked between 1932 and 1937, when he was art critic for the New Yorker. This book, for the first time, assembles Mumford's important art criticism in a single volume. His columns bring wit and insight to bear on a range of artists, from establishment figures like Matisse and Brancusi to relatively new arrivals like Reginald Marsh and Georgia O'Keeffe. These articles provide an unusual window onto the New York art scene just as it was casting off provincialism in favor of a more international outlook. On a deeper level, the columns probe beneath the surface of modern art, revealing an alienation that Mumford believed symptomatic of a larger cultural disintegration.

Many of the themes Mumford addresses overlap with those of his more familiar architectural criticism: the guiding role of the past in stimulating creativity in the present, the increasing congestion of the modern metropolis, the alarming lack of human control over modern technology, and the pressing need to restore organic balance to everyday living. Though he was open to new movements emanating from Europe, Mumford became the chief advocate of a progressive American modernism that was both socially aware and formally inventive.

The Renaissance

$41.95

The Renaissance is a strikingly original and influential collection of essays in which Walker Pater gave memorable expression to an aesthetic view of life. It has never before been published in a scholarly edition. Donald L. Hill reproduces Pater's text of 1893, with a record of all verbal variations in other editions, from the early magazine versions to the Library Edition of 1910. Mr. Hill provides a full set of critical and explanatory notes on each of Pater's essays; headnotes outlining the story of its composition, publication, and reception; and an essay on the history of the book as a whole. Students of Pater and the Aesthetic Movement in England will find this new, annotated edition indispensable.

Art of Engagement

$45.00

Art of Engagement takes the first comprehensive look at the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945. Tracing the remarkably fertile confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art, Peter Selz leads readers on a journey that begins with the Nazi death camps and moves through the Bay Area's Free Speech Movement of 1964, the birth of Beat and hippie countercultures, the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the beginning of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and some of the most radical manifestations of the women's movement, gay liberation, Red Power, and environmental activism. It also deals with artists' responses to critical issues such as censorship and capital punishment. Selz follows California's outpouring of political art into the present with responses to September 11 and the war in Iraq. In the process, Selz considers the work of artists such as Robert Arneson, Hans Burkhardt, Jerome (Caja), Enrique Chagoya, Judy Chicago, Llyn Foulkes, Rupert García, Helen and Newton Harrison, Wally Hedrick, Suzanne Lacy, Hung Liu, Peter Saul, Miriam Schapiro, Allan Sekula, Mark di Suvero, Masami Teraoka, and Carrie Mae Weems. Abundantly illustrated and beautifully produced, Art of Engagement showcases many types of media, including photographs, found objects, drawings and prints, murals, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installations, performance art, and collage. Readers will come away from the book with a historical sense of the significant role California has played in generating political art and also how the state has stimulated politically engaged art throughout the world.

Copub: San Jose Museum of Art

Art Workers

$34.95

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in response to the political turbulence generated by the Vietnam War, an important group of American artists and critics sought to expand the definition of creative labor by identifying themselves as “art workers.” In the first book to examine this movement, Julia Bryan-Wilson shows how a polemical redefinition of artistic labor played a central role in minimalism, process art, feminist criticism, and conceptualism. In her close examination of four seminal figures of the period—American artists Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke, and art critic Lucy Lippard—Bryan-Wilson frames an engrossing new argument around the double entendre that “art works.” She traces the divergent ways in which these four artists and writers rallied around the “art worker” identity, including participating in the Art Workers' Coalition—a short-lived organization founded in 1969 to protest the war and agitate for artists' rights—and the New York Art Strike. By connecting social art history and theories of labor, this book illuminates the artworks and protest actions that were central to this pivotal era in both American art and politics.

A Best Book of 2009, Artforum Magazine

Reclaiming Female Agency

$54.95

This volume is the third in an influential series of anthologies by editors Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard that challenge art history from a feminist perspective. Following their Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982) and The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992), this new volume identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship. Framed by a lucid and stimulating critical introduction, twenty-three essays on artists and issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s and after, offer a nuanced critique of the poststructuralist premises of 1980s feminist art history.

Contributors: Allison Arieff, Janis Bergman-Carton, Babette Bohn, Norma Broude, Anna C. Chave, Julie Cole, Bridget Elliott, Mary D. Garrard, Sheila ffolliott, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Ruth E. Iskin, Geraldline A. Johnson, Amelia Jones, Maud Lavin, Julie Nicoletta, Carol Ockman, Erica Rand, John B. Ravenal, Lisa Saltzman, Mary D. Sheriff

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

$32.95

When this book first appeared in 1982, it introduced readers to Robert Irwin, the Los Angeles artist "who one day got hooked on his own curiosity and decided to live it." Now expanded to include six additional chapters and twenty-four pages of color plates, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees chronicles three decades of conversation between Lawrence Weschler and light and space master Irwin. It surveys many of Irwin's site-conditioned projects—in particular the Central Gardens at the Getty Museum (the subject of an epic battle with the site's principal architect, Richard Meier) and the design that transformed an abandoned Hudson Valley factory into Dia's new Beacon campus—enhancing what many had already considered the best book ever on an artist.

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

Telematic Embrace

$34.95

Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term "telematic art" to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott’s philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott’s ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art.

Telematics, a powerful marriage of computers and telecommunication, made technologies we now take for granted—such as e-mail and automated teller machines (ATMs)—part of our daily life, and made art a more interactive form of expression. Telematic art challenges traditional relationships between artist, artwork, and audience by allowing nonlocal audiences to influence the emergent qualities of the artwork, which consists of the ebb and flow of electronic information. These essays constitute a unique archaeology of ideas, tracing Ascott’s meditations on the formation of consciousness through the intertwined cultural histories of art and technology from the 1960s to the present.

Shanken’s introduction situates Ascott’s work within a history of ideas in art, technology, and philosophy. Given the increasing role of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the creation of commerce and community at the dawn of this new millennium, scholars, students, laypeople, policymakers, and artists will find this collection informative and thought-provoking.

Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

$45.95

The essays in this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume capture the theoretical range and scholarly rigor of recent criticism that has fundamentally transformed the study of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Readers are invited to consider the profound issues and penetrating questions that lie beneath this perennially popular body of work as the contributors examine the art world of late nineteenth-century France—including detailed looks at Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Morisot, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The authors offer fascinating new perspectives, placing the artworks from this period in wider social and historical contexts. They explore these painters' pictorial and market strategies, the critical reception and modern criteria the paintings engendered, and the movement's historic role in the formation of an avant-garde tradition. Their research reflects the wealth of new documents, critical approaches, and scholarly exhibitions that have fundamentally altered our understanding of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These essays, several of which have previously been familiar only to scholars, provide instructive models of in-depth critical analysis and of the competing art historical methods that have crucially reshaped the field.

Contributors: Carol Armstrong, T. J. Clark, Stephen F. Eisenman, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Green, Robert L. Herbert, John House, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Michel Melot, Linda Nochlin, Richard Shiff, Debora Silverman, Paul Tucker, Martha Ward

Cover image for Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, isbn: 9780520250222

Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art, 1890s to Mid-1930s

$34.95

From the first Modernist exhibitions in the late 1890s to the Soviet rupture with the West in the mid-1930s, Russian artists and writers came into wide contact with modern European art and ideas. Introducing a wealth of little-known material set in an illuminating interpretive context, this sourcebook presents Russian and Soviet views of Western art during this critical period of cultural transformation. The writings document complex responses to these works and ideas before the Russians lost contact with them almost entirely. Many of these writings have been unavailable to foreign readers and, until recently, were not widely known even to Russian scholars. Both an important reference and a valuable resource for classrooms, the book includes an introductory essay and shorter introductions to the individual sections.

Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art, 1890s to Mid-1930s

Pop L.A.

$34.95

Andy Warhol said about his road trip to Los Angeles in 1963: “The farther West we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways.” In this original and engaging book, Cécile Whiting examines what Pop looked like when it left the highbrow cloisters of Manhattan’s art galleries and ventured westward to the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles. She finds that the artists who made California their home in the 1960s did not abandon their paint brushes for tennis rackets and surfboards, but rather created in their works a new and different sense of space, the urban experience, and popular culture.

Whiting shows how artists such as Vija Celmins, Llyn Foulkes, David Hockney, Dennis Hopper, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and Judy Chicago helped to shape the identity of Los Angeles as an emerging art center, while avoiding in their representation of the city the clichés of both its boosters and its detractors. Delving deep into the southern California aesthetic sensibility, Pop L.A. recounts how the artists transformed the image of the city in works that focused on the ocean and landscape, suburban life, dilapidated houses in aging neighborhoods, streets and parking lots, and public buildings such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The common bond of place, for Whiting, gives coherence to the varied experiments in the visual and performance arts that altered the cultural terrain during this pivotal time. The Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s inspired a new generation of architectural writing about the metropolis and its debased sister city, Las Vegas. Over the course of the decade, the conception of the city pioneered by artists in Los Angeles spread beyond the city of angels to characterize cultural life in the United States.

Embattled Avant-Gardes

$34.95

This sweeping work, at once a panoramic overview and an ambitious critical reinterpretation of European modernism, provides a bold new perspective on a movement that defined the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Walter L. Adamson embarks on a lucid, wide-ranging exploration of the avant-garde practices through which the modernist generations after 1900 resisted the rise of commodity culture as a threat to authentic cultural expression. Taking biographical approaches to numerous avant-garde leaders, Adamson charts the rise and fall of modernist aspirations in movements and individuals as diverse as Ruskin, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Purism, and the art critic Herbert Read. In conclusion, Adamson rises to the defense of the modernists, suggesting that their ideas are relevant to current efforts to think through what it might mean to create a vibrant, aesthetically satisfying form of cultural democracy.

A Short Life of Trouble

$24.95

This engrossing memoir brings to vivid life the behind-the-scenes struggles of Marcia Tucker, the first woman to be hired as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Tucker came of age in the 1960s, and this spirited account of her life draws the reader directly into the burgeoning feminist movement and the excitement of the New York art world during that time. Her own new ways of thinking led her to take principled stands that have changed the way art museums consider contemporary art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney, she organized major exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. As founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized and curated groundbreaking exhibitions that often focused on the nexus of art and politics. The book highlights Tucker's commitment to forging a new system when the prevailing one proved too narrow for her expansive vision.

A Short Life of Trouble

$44.95

This engrossing memoir brings to vivid life the behind-the-scenes struggles of Marcia Tucker, the first woman to be hired as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Tucker came of age in the 1960s, and this spirited account of her life draws the reader directly into the burgeoning feminist movement and the excitement of the New York art world during that time. Her own new ways of thinking led her to take principled stands that have changed the way art museums consider contemporary art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Whitney, she organized major exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. As founder of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized and curated groundbreaking exhibitions that often focused on the nexus of art and politics. The book highlights Tucker's commitment to forging a new system when the prevailing one proved too narrow for her expansive vision.

Radical Art

$85.00

During the 1930s, the era of the Depression and the New Deal, American artists transformed printmaking into one of the decade's most exciting forms of art. As a cheap, vital, and egalitarian means of artistic expression, prints came close to realizing the ideal of creating "art for the millions." In this dynamic book, Helen Langa shows how innovative printmakers developed "social viewpoint" works that focused on contemporary issues of labor justice, antiracism, and antifascist activism. Discussing artists such as Aaron Douglas, Mabel Dwight, Boris Gorelick, Harry Gottlieb, Elizabeth Olds, Harry Sternberg, Joseph Vogel, and Hale Woodruff, Langa explains how they developed new types of meaningful content, worked in modern, yet accessible, styles, invented new technical processes, and sought fresh strategies for distributing their work to the public. Many, but not all, of the artists she considers worked for the Federal Art Project at the Graphic Arts Division workshop; each struggled to resolve the conflicting goals of reaching a mass audience while also critiquing social injustice and promoting radical idealism.

In Pursuit of Universalism

$85.00

In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art. In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorō, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

Copub: The Phillips Collection

True to Life

$31.95

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing dialogues, gathered here for the first time. Weschler chronicles Hockney's protean production and speculations, including his scenic designs for opera, his homemade xerographic prints, his exploration of physics in relation to Chinese landscape painting, his investigations into optical devices, his taking up of watercolor—and then his spectacular return to oil painting, around 2005, with a series of landscapes of the East Yorkshire countryside of his youth. These conversations provide an astonishing record of what has been Hockney's grand endeavor, nothing less than an exploration of "the structure of seeing" itself.

Entropy and Art

$24.95

This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics - between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.

Learning Mind

$63.00

How is art conceived, created, and experienced? How is it taught? How does the act of viewing a work make the viewer part of that work? Learning Mind: Experience Into Art addresses these questions as it documents the changing practices in the making, teaching, and exhibition of art. Timely, multifaceted, and instructive, this groundbreaking volume explores the contemporary art experience and its expanding presence in society through lively essays, revealing interviews, and provocative conversations with some of the most influential artists and educators of our time. Featured artists include Magdalena Abakanowicz, Ann Hamilton, Alfredo Jaar, Kerry James Marshall, and Ernesto Pujol, along with designers Walter Hood and Bruce Mau. Contributing authors include curators Marcia Tucker and Christopher Bedford, art critics Michael Brenson and Jerry Saltz, art historian David Getsy, educators Ronald Jones and Lawrence Rinder, philosopher Arthur Danto, psychiatrist Mark Epstein, theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, and chef-educator Alice Waters. In demonstrating the role that art schools and universities play in the creative process, Learning Mind offers students, teachers, and readers new and vital theoretical texts as well as practical strategies for integrating art into our daily lives.

Copub: School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Telling Stories

$34.95

In Telling Stories, David Kaufmann focuses on Philip Guston's controversial figurative paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s. He looks at the early critical reception of these works to see what the artist was actually doing and, at another level, to investigate the odd alchemy of artists and their audiences. Grounding his historical approach in careful readings of the paintings, Kaufmann pays close attention to Guston's intense and complicated relationship to Judaism. At the same time, by situating Guston in the context of the fashions of the New York art world, Kaufmann provides unique insight into the workings of that world at the moment when the strictures of artistic modernism began to fade.

American Art to 1900

$42.95

From the simple assertion that "words matter" in the study of visual art, this comprehensive but eminently readable volume gathers an extraordinary selection of words—painters and sculptors writing in their diaries, critics responding to a sensational exhibition, groups of artists issuing stylistic manifestos, and poets reflecting on particular works of art. Along with a broad array of canonical texts, Sarah Burns and John Davis have assembled an astonishing variety of unknown, little known, or undervalued documents to convey the story of American art through the many voices of its contemporary practitioners, consumers, and commentators. American Art to 1900 highlights such critically important themes as women artists, African American representation and expression, regional and itinerant artists, Native Americans and the frontier, popular culture and vernacular imagery, institutional history, and more. With its hundreds of explanatory headnotes providing essential context and guidance to readers, this book reveals the documentary riches of American art and its many intersecting histories in unprecedented breadth, depth, and detail.

Jay DeFeo and The Rose

$85.00

Rarely is an artist so closely associated with a single work as is Jay DeFeo with her monumental painting The Rose. Begun in the late 1950s, when DeFeo, a central figure of the Beat generation of San Francisco, was just starting to garner widespread national recognition, the visionary work occupied the artist for eight years. Massive in scale, layered with nearly two thousand pounds of paint, the overpowering painting was already famous before its first exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum. It was next exhibited in San Francisco, then stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it languished for twenty-five years before a historic conservation restored it to public view. The Rose now resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This volume is the first major study of The Rose in particular and of Jay DeFeo in general. In the collection, eleven distinguished art and cultural historians—Bill Berkson, Niccolo Caldararo, Richard Cándida Smith, Walter Hopps, Lucy R. Lippard, Greil Marcus, Sandra S. Phillips, Marla Prather, Carter Ratcliff, David A. Ross, and Martha Sherrill—unfold the story of the creation, as well as the tricky and painstaking rescue, of DeFeo’s radiant masterpiece. While providing new material on The Rose and exposing many myths surrounding both the artist and her great work, these essays also place Jay DeFeo in relation to artists of her time, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, and Eva Hesse. The book, which adds significantly to the scholarship of postwar American art, includes nearly eighty halftones, thirteen color plates, and Judith Dunham’s detailed Rose-related chronology.

Symbolist Art in Context

$34.95

The Symbolist art movement of the late nineteenth century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism, more than the two movements it links, emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from vague and conflicting definitions. In Symbolist Art in Context, Michelle Facos offers a clearly written, comprehensive, and accessible description of this challenging subject. Reaching back into Romanticism for Symbolism's origins, Facos argues that Symbolism enabled artists (including Munch and Gauguin) to confront an increasingly uncertain and complex world—one to which pessimists responded with themes of decadence and degeneration and optimists with idealism and reform.

Toward a Psychology of Art

$34.95

From the Introduction:

The papers collected in this book are based on the assumption that art, as any other activity of the mind, is subject to psychology, accessible to understanding, and needed for any comprehensive survey of mental functioning. The author believes, furthermore, that the science of psychology is not limited to measurements under controlled laboratory conditions, but must comprise all attempts to obtain generalizations by means of facts as thoroughly established and concepts as well defined as the investigated situation permits. Therefore the psychological findings offered or referred to in these papers range all the way from experiments in the perception of shape or observations on the art work of children to broad deliberations on the nature of images or of inspiration and contemplation. It is also assumed that every area of general psychology calls for applications to art. The study of perception applies to the effects of shape, color, movement, and expression in the visual arts. Motivation raises the question of what needs are fulfilled by the production and reception of art. The psychology of the normal and the disturbed personality searches the work of art for manifestations of individual attitudes. And social psychology relates the artist and his contribution to his fellow men.

A systematic book on the psychology of art would have to survey relevant work in all of these areas. My papers undertake nothing of the kind. They are due to one man's outlook and interest, and they report on whatever happened to occur to him. They are presented together because they turn out to be concerned with a limited number of common themes. Often, but unintentionally, a hint in one paper is expanded to full exposition in another, and different applications of one and the same concept are found in different papers. I can only hope that the many overlappings will act as unifying reinforcements rather than as repetitions.

These papers represent much of the output of the quarter of a century during which I have been privileged to live, study, and teach in the United States. To me, they are not so much the steps of a development as the gradual spelling-out of a position. For this reason, I have grouped them systematically, not chronologically. For the same reason, I did not hesitate to change the words I wrote years ago wherever I thought I could clarify their meaning. Removed from my original intimacy with the content, I approached the text as an unprepared reader, and when I stumbled, I tried to repair the road. In some instances, I recast whole sections, not in order to bring them up to date, but in the hope of saying better what I meant at the time.

Some of the earlier papers led to my book, Art and Visual Perception, which was written in 1951 and first published in 1954- Sections of the articles on perceptual abstraction, on the Gestalt theory of expression, and on Henry Moore are incorporated in that book. Others continued where the book left off, for instance, the attempts to describe more explicitly the symbolism conveyed by visual form. The short piece on inspiration provided the substance for the introductory chapter on creativity in my more recent book, Picasso's Guernica. Finally, in rereading the material, I was surprised to find how many passages point to what is shaping up as my next task, namely, a presentation of visual thinking as the common and necessary way of productive problem solving in any human activity.

Ten of the papers in this book were first published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. To mention this is to express my indebtedness to the only scholarly periodical in the United States devoted to the theory of art. In particular, Thomas Munro, its first editor, showed a great trust in the contribution of psychology. He made me feel at home among the philosophers, art historians, and literary critics whose lively propositions inhabit the hostel he founded and sustained. To him, as well as to my friends of the University of California Press, who are now publishing my fourth book, I wish to say that much of what I thought about in these years might not have been cast into final writing, had it not been for their sympathy, which encouraged the novice and keeps a critical eye on the more self-assured pro.

There are a few scientific papers here, originally written for psychological journals but free, I hope, of the terminological incrustation that would hide their meaning from sight. There are essays for the educated friend of the arts. And there are speeches, intended to suggest practical consequences for art education, for the concerns of the artist, and for the function of art in our time. These public lectures are hardly the products of a missionary temperament. In fact, I marveled why anybody would go to a theorist for counsel, illumination, and reassurance in practical matters. However, when I responded to such requests I noticed, bewildered and delighted, that some of my findings pointed to tangible applications, which were taken to be useful.

Monument Wars

$29.95

The National Mall in Washington, D.C., is “a great public space, as essential a part of the American landscape as the Grand Canyon,” according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger, but few realize how recent, fragile, and contested this achievement is. In Monument Wars, Kirk Savage tells the Mall's engrossing story—its historic plan, the structures that populate its corridors, and the sea change it reveals regarding national representation. Central to this narrative is a dramatic shift from the nineteenth-century concept of a decentralized landscape, or “ground”-heroic statues spread out in traffic circles and picturesque parks-to the twentieth-century ideal of “space,” in which authority is concentrated in an intensified center, and the monument is transformed from an object of reverence to a space of experience. Savage's lively and intelligent analysis traces the refocusing of the monuments themselves, from that of a single man, often on horseback, to commemorations of common soldiers or citizens; and from monuments that celebrate victory and heroism to memorials honoring victims. An indispensable guide to the National Mall, Monument Wars provides a fresh and fascinating perspective on over two hundred years of American history.

Beyond the Lines

$28.95

In this wonderfully illustrated book, Joshua Brown shows that the wood engravings in the illustrated newspapers of Gilded Age America were more than a quaint predecessor to our own sophisticated media. As he tells the history and traces the influence of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, with relevant asides to Harper's Weekly, the New York Daily Graphic, and others, Brown recaptures the complexity and richness of pictorial reporting. He finds these images to be significant barometers for gauging how the general public perceived pivotal events and crises—the Civil War, Reconstruction, important labor battles, and more. This book is the best available source on the pictorial riches of Frank Leslie's newspaper and the only study to situate these images fully within the social context of Gilded Age America. Beyond the Lines illuminates the role of illustration in nineteenth-century America and gives us a new look at how the social milieu shaped the practice of illustrated journalism and was in turn shaped by it.

Pictures for Use and Pleasure

$85.00

In this groundbreaking book, James Cahill expands the field of Chinese pictorial art history, opening both scholarly studies and popular appreciation to vernacular paintings, "pictures for use and pleasure." These were works commissioned and appreciated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the non-elites of Chinese society, including women. Traditional Chinese collectors, like present-day scholars of Chinese painting, have favored the "literati" paintings of the Chinese male elite, disparaging vernacular works, often intended as decorations or produced to mark a special occasion. Cahill challenges the dominant dogma and doctrine of the literati, showing how the vernacular images, both beautiful and appealing, strengthen our understanding of High Qing culture. They bring to light the Qing or Manchu emperors' fascination with erotic culture in the thriving cities of the Yangtze Delta and demonstrate the growth of figure painting in and around Beijing's imperial court. They also revise our understanding of gender roles and show how Chinese artists made use of European styles. By introducing a large, rich body of works, Pictures for Use and Pleasure opens new windows on later Chinese life and society.

Cezanne's Other

$85.00

In the voluminous scholarship that's been written on Paul Cézanne, little has been said about the twenty-four portraits in oil that Cézanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, over an extended twenty-year period. In Cézanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Susan Sidlauskas breaks new ground, focusing on these paintings as a group and looking particularly at the differences that render many of them unrecognizable as the same person. She argues that Cézanne sidestepped the conventional goals of portraiture-he avoids representing a consistent, identifiable physiognomy or conventional feminine postures and does not portray the subject's inner life-making lack of fixedness itself his subject, which leads him ultimately to a radical reformulation of modern portraiture. Sidlauskas also upends the notion of Mme Cézanne as the irrelevant and absent spouse. Instead she reveals Hortense Fiquet Cézanne as a presence so crucial to the artist that she became the essential “other” to his ever-evolving “self.” Coupling historical texts from philosophy, psychology, and physiology with more recent writings from women's and gender studies, cognitive psychology, and visual culture, Sidlauskas demonstrates that Mme Cézanne offered intimacy at arm's length for the painter who has been dubbed “the lone wolf of Aix.”

American Carnival

$36.95

In this vividly written, compelling narrative, award-winning journalist Neil Henry confronts the crisis facing professional journalism in this era of rapid technological transformation. American Carnival combines elements of memoir with extensive media research to explore critical contemporary issues ranging from reporting on the Iraq War, to American race relations, to the exploitation of the image of journalism by advertisers and politicians. Drawing on significant currents in U.S. media and social history, Henry argues that, given the amount of fraud in many institutions in American life today, the decline of journalistic professionalism sparked by the economic challenge of New Media poses especially serious implications for democracy. As increasingly alarming stories surface about unethical practices, American Carnival makes a stirring case for journalism as a calling that is vital to a free society, a profession that is more necessary than ever in a digital age marked by startling assaults on the cultural primacy of truth.

Monster/Beauty

$34.95

This daring, intensely personal book challenges both conventional and feminist ideas about beauty by asking us to take pleasure in beauty without shame, and to see and feel the erotic in everyday life. Bringing together her varied experiences as a poet, art historian, bodybuilder, and noted performance artist, Joanna Frueh shows us how to move beyond society's equation of youth with beauty toward an aesthetic for the fully erotic human being.

A lush combination of autobiography, theory, photography, and poetry, this book continues to develop the ideas about the erotic, beauty, older women, sex, and pleasure that Frueh first addressed in Erotic Faculties. Monster/Beauty examines these issues using a provocative, often explicit, set of examples. Frueh admiringly looks at the bodies and mindsets of midlife female bodybuilders, rethinks the vampire, and revises our ideas about traditional models of beauty, such as Aphrodite. Above all, she boldly brings her personal experience into the text, weaving her reflections on female sensuality with contemporary theory.

These linked essays are as much a performance as they are a discussion, breaking down the barriers between the personal and the academic, and the erotic and the intellectual. Frueh writes passionately and beautifully, and the result is a much-needed exploration of beauty myths and taboos.

Painting Harlem Modern

$39.95

Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. She brings insightful analysis to his work, beginning with the 1930s street scenes that provided Harlem with its pictorial image, and follows each decade of Lawrence's work, with accounts that include his impressions of Southern Jim Crow segregation and a groundbreaking discussion of Lawrence's symbolic use of masks and masking during the 1950s Cold War era. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.

Art of Renaissance Florence, 1400–1600

$43.95

In this absorbing illustrated history, Loren Partridge takes the reader on an insightful tour of Renaissance Florence and sheds new light on its celebrated art and culture by examining the city's great architectural and artistic achievements in their political, intellectual, and religious contexts. This essential and accessible text, the only up-to-date volume on Renaissance Florence currently available, incorporates insights from recent scholarship, including gender studies, while emphasizing the artists' social status, rivalries, and innovations. The result is a multilevel exploration of how the celebrated Florentine culture formally registers in specific works of art or architecture and how these works interactively informed and often shaped the culture.

A Chinese Bestiary

$34.95

A Chinese Bestiary presents a fascinating pageant of mythical creatures from a unique and enduring cosmography written in ancient China. The Guideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries b.c.e., contains descriptions of hundreds of fantastic denizens of mountains, rivers, islands, and seas, along with minerals, flora, and medicine. The text also represents a wide range of beliefs held by the ancient Chinese. Richard Strassberg brings the Guideways to life for modern readers by weaving together translations from the work itself with information from other texts and recent archaeological finds to create a lavishly illustrated guide to the imaginative world of early China.

Unlike the bestiaries of the late medieval period in Europe, the Guideways was not interpreted allegorically; the strange creatures described in it were regarded as actual entities found throughout the landscape. The work was originally used as a sacred geography, as a guidebook for travelers, and as a book of omens. Today, it is regarded as the richest repository of ancient Chinese mythology and shamanistic wisdom. The Guideways may have been illustrated from the start, but the earliest surviving illustrations are woodblock engravings from a rare 1597 edition. Seventy-six of those plates are reproduced here for the first time, and they provide a fine example of the Chinese engraver's art during the late Ming dynasty.

This beautiful volume, compiled by a well-known specialist in the field, provides a fascinating window on the thoughts and beliefs of an ancient people, and will delight specialists and general readers alike.

Charles Willson Peale

$85.00

Son of a convicted felon whose early death left the family impoverished, Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) went on to lead a staggeringly full and successful life. A portrait painter who produced an unparalleled body of work, including the iconic The Artist in His Museum, Peale was also a revolutionary soldier, a radical activist, an impresario of moving pictures, a natural historian, an inventor, and the proprietor of one of the first modern museums. His many other interests included a lifelong preoccupation with writing; in fact, his autobiography is one of the first examples of the genre in the United States. David C. Ward's engaging book, richly textured with references to the history and culture of the time, is the first full critical biography of Peale. It links the artist's autobiography to his painting, illuminating the man, his art, and his times. Peale emerges for the first time as that particularly American phenomenon: the self-made man.

Before Peale's time, autobiographies had been written mainly as religious and confessional documents. Peale, however, produced his secular work to describe, not how God made him, but how he worked to make himself. This compelling study, drawing extensively from Peale's extraordinary autobiography, shows how Peale's life itself documents the development of American independence and individualism. Ultimately Ward addresses Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's great question, "What then is the American, this new man?" as he sheds light on one of these new men and on the formative years in which he lived.

Arts & Numbers

$18.00

The creative classartists, actors, writers, musicians, freelancers, dancers, performers, and the likeare known for applying their passion for creative expression to everything they do. Perhaps the one thing that most fills this group with apprehension is the rigid world of numbers. This leads to problems arising from the unconventional financial and business situations of creative professionals, as well as the nonprofit organizations with which they're often affiliated. Finances, budgeting, and business matters can be dreaded, if not outright ignored, by creatives--to the detriment of their artistic pursuits.

Author, artist, and CPA Elaine Grogan Luttrull has written Arts & Numbers to help creative professionals find the same confidence in their financial dealings as in their chosen mode of expression. It is an engaging, accessible guide that covers a variety of must-know topics, such as budgeting, cash management, visual charting, taxes, employment, and business etiquette. In a simple, straightforward style, Luttrull draws examples from smooth-flowing narratives depicting common issues within the arts worlds, as well as from her own personal anecdotes. Unlike stuffy textbooks and patronizing business books, Arts & Numbers is a lively and artfully done ally in helping creative professionals plan their present financial situations and secure their futures.

John Howe's Ultimate Fantasy Art Academy

$26.99

Discover the creative processes and intriguing inspirations behind the work of leading fantasy artist John Howe – conceptual designer on The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy – in this comprehensive practical art book.

Brings together Fantasy Art Workshop and Fantasy Drawing Workshop into a combined volume, fully updated and with new art.
Examines in fascinating detail over 150 of the artist's outstanding sketches, drawings and paintings, plus the techniques and stories behind each.
Leads you step-by-step through a range of specially commissioned drawing and painting demonstrations that reveal John's renowned artistic approach in action.
Discusses the rewarding journey into fantasy art, from the first steps of building a compelling portfolio to book illustration, graphic novels and the big screen.

This book will appeal to artists and fans of John Howe's work by leading you step-by-step through a range of specially commissioned demonstrations, sketches and finished paintings, some designed specifically for this book, that reveal John’s renowned artistic approach in action, plus the techniques and stories behind each.

It covers a wide range of subjects, beginning with the creative process, exploring where inspiration comes from, looking at narratives and themes, gathering reference materials, organizing your working environment, and protecting and storing artwork.

Howe covers drawing materials and explores drawing and painting fantasy beings from initial inspiration and approaches to characters, symbolism and accoutrements. He begins by showing how to create different types of male and female archetypes, humans in action, armour and weapons, faces, expressions and hands, hair and costumes, and goes on to explain how to create different types of fantasy beasts: talons, wings, fangs and fire, and noble animals, interspersed throughout with exciting case studies.

The book also explores fantasy landscapes and architecture and balancing light and dark atmospheres. The final section of the book provides further inspiration and guidance on presenting work in various forms, including film work, book covers and advertising, all areas John Howe has vast experience in.

The foreword is written by groundbreaking film director Terry Gilliam, with an afterword by Alan Lee, John's partner on the conceptual design for The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and Oscar-winning illustrator.

Cover image for John Howe's Ultimate Fantasy Art Academy, isbn: 9781446308929

101 Top Techniques for Artists

$17.99

101 Top Techniques for Artists is a colourful compendium packed full of practical tips and techniques by 101 of today’s most popular leading artists. Each technique is presented in clear, simple step-by-step instructions that describe how to complete the project yourself, including a full list of materials and detailed images to guide you along the way.

Divided into seven chapters that cover watercolours, acrylics, oils, pastels, drawing and mixed media, this handy book is bursting with some of the most popular styles and subjects, designed to showcase the very best of artistic abilities available to help develop your own creative streak.

All contributors featured in this book are professional artists belonging to the SAA, who together with a global community of over 46,000 other members, make up the world’s largest and friendliest art society. Whether you’re a beginner, an improver or a professional, there’s something new to learn for everyone in this comprehensive collection.

Cover image for 101 Top Techniques for Artists, isbn: 9781446362198

Artist of the Year Desk Diary 2014

$14.99

A practical week-to-view diary illustrated with over 50 inspirational paintings from the winners of the Society of All Artists (SAA) Artist of the Year Competition. This colourful organizer will provide the artist with creative inspiration throughout the year. Each weekly spread features a month quick glance overview and ample room for notes, as well as a beautiful full-page image of each category's winning entry. Appealing to artists of any ability, with paintings produced by competition winners who are amateurs and professionals, young and old. The paintings featured are created in a variety of mediums, from watercolour and acrylic to charcoal and oil and cover a wide range of subjects and themes.

Watercolor Fashion Illustration

$22.99

Learn to paint outstanding fashion watercolors with expert guidance from a leading fashion illustrator.

Watercolor is a wonderful medium for figure and fashion as it creates loose, impressionistic results that capture the essence of a look without getting too bogged down in the details. In this complete course, professional fashion illustrator Francesco Lo Iacono shows you how to master creating delicate, beautiful fashion illustrations.

The book begins with the best tools and materials, from paints and brushes to pencils, paper and more. You'll then explore simple watercolor techniques such as washes, wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, and using the white of the paper. Francesco then goes on to teach you about lighting and shading, which can have a dramatic effect on your work. And finally in the front section, you'll learn about colour, how to create palettes, how to mix colours and achieving a range of skin tones.

Once you've covered these fundamentals, Francesco explores the key elements of illustrating fashion, with guidance on how to approach both male and female faces, a wide variety of hair types and styles, different male and female poses, and how to draw and paint garments, reflecting tailoring, drapery, volume, texture and patterns.

Twenty step-by-step projects then take these building blocks and show you how to use them to create beautiful fashion watercolors, starting with easier subjects and building in complexity as your confidence grows. You'll begin by painting handbags and shoes without models before starting to introduce figures. The range of subjects included covers all angles, from full figures front on and in profile to close-up make-up and beauty illustrations. You'll also learn how to create dynamic compositions for editorial fashion illustration. Finally, Francesco covers the best ways to digitize and retouch your work, how to incorporate other media alongside your watercolors, how to work live at fashion events and how to take everything you've learned to develop your own personal style of fashion illustration.

Francesco's clients include fashion brands Dior, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton – and with this book you'll have all the tools you need to become an A-list fashion illustrator too.

Cover image for Watercolor Fashion Illustration, isbn: 9781446308738

The Joy of Sketch

$22.99

Rediscover the pleasure you got from childhood drawing, before you became too self-conscious and self-critical to enjoy it.

Most children draw. Before we can write, even, we scribble and sketch and create. But somehow that gets lost as we get older. We learn that Being An Artist is hard and complicated, and that there are technical rules to choosing colour and perfecting your perspective. This book is here to remind you of the joy you once found in creating, scribbling, getting something down on paper – and that it’s really about the process and nothing to do with how technically brilliant the finished ‘artwork’ is.

In this accessible guide, largely self-taught artist Jen Russell-Smith takes beginners by the hand and breaks down the barriers we face around sketching, and shows you how to begin with quick, loose sketches building your confidence and skills to draw spontaneously, with nothing more than the things around you for inspiration.

With simple exercises that anyone can follow, Jen shows you how to sketch the things and the places around you from life, using simple watercolour techniques to add vibrancy to your work.

With simple exercises and step-by-step tutorials, Jen shows you how to sketch the places around you from life, and those further afield from photos, using simple watercolour techniques to add vibrancy to your work.

Bold Visions

$19.99 $15.99 Save $4.00

Bold Visions is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to working with computers to create powerful art. It provides detailed and easy-to-follow advice on how to get the most from digital materials and tools, on their own or combined with traditional media.

Basic techniques section caters for newcomers plus those who want to brush up on their skills. From easy to follow techniques for effectively using Adobe Photoshop to painting with colour, and advice on using a mouse or tablet.

Concept and Design chapter highlights the importance of a solid conceptual phase and runs through the different stages: working from a brief, exploring a theme, composition, focal points and framing, scale and perspective, and painting a concept piece.

Concludes with an incredibly useful chapter on What to Do with Your Art, from posting your work online and creating internet portfolios to organizing exhibitions, and using your art in games and movies.

‘Essential to fantasy and Sci-fi artists alike. The book itself presents a high-gloss, professional approach that allows the attractive working examples.’ --Advanced Photoshop

‘A remarkable, well produced guide to creating science fiction and fantasy art on our computer. Calling something ' The Bible' of its own particular field is a mite presumptuous, but for once it's well justified.’ --Death Ray
‘Your personal digital painting bible […] written by Gary Tonge, one of the UK's top game concept designers […] jam-packed with luscious and inspiring images.’ --Photoshop Creative

Extreme Worlds

$22.99 $18.39 Save $4.60

This is a highly practical guide for budding artists who want to create their own extreme sci-fi worlds. Core elements of sci-fi art are taught through ingenious exercises and eleven detailed step by step projects. Subjects covered include aliens, robots, space ships, weapons, space stations and strange planets. It contains instruction suitable for beginners and more advanced artists, and is accompanied by an awesome gallery of the author's work.

101 Ways To Draw

$15.99

From soft pencils to graphite powder, ballpoint to fibre-tip pens, conté sticks to watercolour pencils, this unique guide covers everything you need to know to begin mastering and combining different media in your drawing.

This visual directory of drawing techniques beyond the pencil provides you with the skills to explore and experiment with all the different techniques and mediums. Use it as a handy reference for when you want to know how to use a particular tool, or as a catalogue of inspiration when seeking new ideas to try.

A wealth of media and equipment is demonstrated, and each page features invaluable information for beginners and accomplished artists alike. As the techniques progress, you’ll explore the creative possibilities beyond one medium, and be encouraged to look at your work and style in a new light. Use the examples shown to aid expression and skill development and to look at the myriad possibilities of mixed media, which have all been selected because of their compatibility.

Start with basic graphite pencils, sticks and powder to explore line and tone, shading, creating textures and erasing. Then move on to coloured pencils to cover techniques such as burnishing, lifting and sgraffito. There are various interesting methods to try with water-soluble coloured pencils too, including different ways of applying water, blending and overlaying colours.

Explore the effects that you can create with charcoal or conté sticks on different coloured and textured papers, and discover how to use pastel pencils and chalks for expressive drawing. Then master blending, shading and scumbling with hard and soft pastels, and perfect your techniques with crayons, oil pastels and oil paint sticks.

There are some really interesting ways to use ink pens for painting effects and instructions are included for cutting your own quill pen. Ballpoint pens, fibre-tips, marker pens and brush pens are also great tools for creating modern, graphic drawings - pick up some handy tips for mark making and blending.

Finally, experiment with mixed media and combining various pencils, pastels, crayons, powder, sticks and pens for some stunning results. Be inspired by the huge range of drawings in this book to expand and develop your own skills.

Cover image for 101 Ways To Draw, isbn: 9781446308677

Watercolor Portraits

$22.99

Painting expressive portraits of iconic faces has never been easier with this unique approach to watercolor painting.

In this fresh and super-accessible approach to modern portraiture, artist Nelli Andrejew removes any barriers to painting instantly recognizable faces. In just a few simple brushstrokes you can capture the essence and likeness of 15 international icons and create modern watercolor portraits you will be proud to hang on the wall.

The 15 famous personalities included have all made a valuable contribution to the world in some way - be it science, art or human rights. The subtle style of the portraits you'll learn how to paint in this book bring these heroes to life in watercolor, with step-by-step instructions and practical templates for tracing, removing the need for any real skill – just trace, paint, have fun, and paint portraits that will surprise and delight all who see them.

With this book you will learn how to paint:

Leonardo DiCaprio • Virginia Woolf • James Dean • Lana Del Rey • Bob Dylan • Michelle Obama • Albert Einstein • Marilyn Monroe • Girl with a Pearl Earring • Martin Luther King Jr. • Audrey Hepburn • Mona Lisa • Coco Chanel • Emma Watson • Vincent Van Gogh

In addition to the step-by-step tutorials, Nelli shares her tips and experience in the basic techniques you will need, from how to transfer the templates to your watercolour paper, to different ways to work with watercolors to successful portraits.

This beautiful guide will inspire you to try all the faces included and then go on to paint your own original portraits with the same techniques. The perfect way to spend a creative afternoon!

Fantasy Art Expedition

$26.99 $21.59 Save $5.40

Embark upon a fantasy art expedition around the world and discover how to draw and paint must-know supernatural creatures and fantastic characters. For each of the 12 locations there is a map, an explanation of the site's lore, and a detailed step by step demonstration showing the development of the key character. Projects demonstrate a wide selection of both traditional and digital drawing and painting techniques that can be widely applied in fantasy art. This is a complete, unique and attractive package that seamlessly binds the world of mythology and practical art instruction together for beginners and improvers.

Manga Watercolor

$19.99

Simply magical manga in watercolor! Learn how to create beautiful manga art from pencil sketch to finished painting, with this comprehensive guide.

As the popularity of Manga art continues to soar, manga and comic book artist Lisa Santrau shows beginners how to create subtle and beautiful manga pictures using pencil and watercolors - the simplest of art materials. Lisa explains the materials and tools needed and then explores the fundamentals of how to draw manga – from color theory and breaking down drawings into basic shapes, to body proportions and faces for both classic manga and chibi manga figures.

You will learn how to sketch, how to create depth in your work with shading, and a range of watercolor techniques including washes, wet-on-wet and layering, as well as special techniques involving masking fluid and an innovative 'film' technique for creating texture and patterns.

The exercises that follow the basics explore a wide range of techniques including manga poses, hair and eyes, then learn about backgrounds, textures, gradients and more.

Finally, there are 12 step-by-step painting projects to perfect your manga art skills, with downloadable templates if you want to skip the drawing and get straight to the painting. The projects are varied and fun, and comprise:

Sweet chibi girl on a slice of cake, using the dry technique
Fresh steampunk chibis against a bright background, using the wet-on-wet technique
Chibi sorcerer's apprentice in a flying teacup, with a galaxy background
Chibi Harry, aka a world-famous wizard, teaching you character design
Young girl framed by a romantic floral design, using a monochrome palette
Sailor boy in a symbolic sun circle, created with masking fluid
Girl in a kimono backlit by a window with flowers, using the white of the paper
Historical heroine in a voluminous ballgown, using the film technique
Melancholic schoolgirl against a fluorescent background, again with the film technique
Silhouette in the evening sunset, using the wet-on-wet technique
Food overload boy in the land of plenty, featuring surface textures
Girl's face with expressive eyes, exploring cool versus warm colors

This easy-to-follow book by the creator of the popular Mechanical Princess comics, contains all you need to successfully paint your own watercolor manga art.

Cover image for Manga Watercolor, isbn: 9781446308479

Watercolours in a Weekend

$21.99

A unique guide that will teach complete beginners how to paint a beautiful floral watercolour in just one weekend. Beginners recognise that they need to acquire basic painting skills - but at the same time they are eager to produce their first finished painting. This popular 'weekend' formula allows them to do both in a limited amount of time - to build skills gradually and to produce an attractive, frameable painting that they can hang on their walls by the end of the weekend. The author starts by introducing the materials required, and then leads readers through a series of watercolour technique exercises designed to provide a basic grounding in the skills needed for this subject area. This instruction is followed by six weekend projects for painting a range of popular floral subjects: a single flower; a group of white flowers; an indoors still life; an outdoors close-up; autumn flowers; and wild flowers in the landscape. Each course starts with practice exercises to be completed on the Saturday; readers are then ready to complete the full watercolour painting on the Sunday. Clear instructions accompany step-by-step photographs throughout, and technical information is given in special feature boxes.

Watercolor For The Soul

$22.99

Learn how to use watercolor to soothe your soul with this beginner’s guide to painting for relaxation.

This fresh approach looks first at the process of painting as a means to de-stress and unwind. Many people love the idea of painting but hold themselves back from starting because they are worried about not being good enough or not feeling as though as are creative. In this guide for the absolute beginner, artist and teacher Sharone Stevens shows you that watercolor can be accessible to everyone and that just painting very simple lines, patterns and shapes in calming colors, concentrating on each brush stroke, can have a powerful meditative effect, while at the same time allowing you to create beautiful art you can be proud of. She also encourages you to connect more with the world around you, finding inspiration in your every-day life and discovering the beautiful textures found in nature, from tree trunks to fruit and butterflies!

The aim of the techniques and projects in this book is to create art that relaxes both the artist and the viewer of the finished piece. Projects range from simple gift tags, bookmarks, cards and small wall pieces to larger art pieces that you never thought possible – all done with a focus on relaxation – which is so important in today’s fast-paced, increasingly digital world.

Learn how to mix a calming color palette, try simple painting exercises to get into a relaxed flow, and create beautiful artworks that will lift the spirits both during the painting process and beyond, as finished pieces of art.

Author Sharone Stevens is an established art teacher and talented artist who is passionate about using art for relaxation and encouraging others to build a regular creative practice. Her gentle lessons and nurturing reassurance will guide even total beginners through the process of making soothing, soulful modern watercolor art.

Watercolour Problems and Solutions

$21.99

This invaluable handbook for all watercolourists takes a practical problem-and-solution approach to painting a range of popular subjects, showing common mistakes and how to rectify them. Mastering fundamental drawing and watercolour techniques forms the basis of successful watercolour painting - the author starts by leading readers through a series of examples and exercises that will introduce them to tonal drawing, colour mixing, applying washes, and much more. Readers will then be ready to move on to the eight themed sections designed to help them in their specific areas of interest. Each theme starts by demonstrating the basic brushstrokes required for that subject. Trudy then sets out a series of problem-and-solution pages that are packed with useful tips on how to paint those subjects and avoid common pitfalls. The information throughout is presented clearly with plenty of useful annotations in a handy portable size so readers can take it wherever their painting takes them

Draw & Paint Fantasy Art Warriors & Heroes

$22.99

Learn how to bring to life the most exciting warriors and heroes. Armed with your pen and paper, let battle commence!

Discover how to draw and paint male and female warrior archetypes, from the ancient legend of Thor to the valour of King Arthur. Explore anatomy, color and lighting techniques, and discover how to render combat, armor, weapons and clothing. Become a master fantasy artist with ten easy-to-follow step-by-step projects.

Draw & Paint Fantasy Art Warriors & Heroes

Anatomy for Fantasy Artists

$22.99

An indispensable guide for anyone interested in improving and developing their fantasy art figures.

Fantasy artists are unlikely to use models to draw from life but, to be successful, their creations must have a grounding in reality. This book by successful comic and fantasy artist Glenn Fabry, teaches you the principles of anatomy, from musculature and skeletal structure through to movement.

You can then develop your artistic style by breaking and bending the rules of anatomy through practical exercises and demonstrations, accompanied by incredible finished artworks. The step-by-step exercises help you to fully understand the subtle movements that combine to create expressions, and the flowing movements that constitute actions.

Anatomy for Fantasy Artists trains you in creating professional quality illustrations for comic book art, graphic novels, fantasy posters, sci-fi book covers and illustrations, and even computer games. In this book you will find valuable instruction from experts in the field, expanded from the original edition with additional pages that feature many more how-to, step-by-step illustrations.

Instruction starts with the basics of human anatomical drawing and musculature, facial expressions, hands and body language, and then follows with a review of the principles of perspective and composition. Subsequent sections instruct on ways to distort, develop, and transform the human figure, giving it features that range from monstrous or magical to super-agile or larger than life, including dynamic poses for superheroes and villans, as well as fantasy female poses.

Detailed artist's references and step-by-step instructions show how to build bodies that truly stretch the imagination. You also learn how to render characters in many different dynamic action poses, such as flying, spinning, punching, and jumping, as well as how to express each character's emotions through facial expressions. The cast of characters includes wizards, ogres, werewolves, winged avengers, goblins, aliens, enchantresses, barbarians, robots and more.

Author Glenn Fabry is a successful comic book and fantasy artist who has spent many years working in this field including work for both DC and Marvel Comics. Through his professional experience he has honed his skills, which he generously shares in this book, alongside professional artists Michael Cunningham and Ben Cormac.

Cover image for Anatomy for Fantasy Artists, isbn: 9781446308967

Alcohol Ink

$22.99

Make incredible art with ink!

• Discover the vibrant world of alcohol ink, the creative craze that's the hottest new art trend since paint pouring.

• Learn everything you need to know about working with this expressive medium and how to create striking ink art.

• Follow over 20 step-by-step tutorials and benefit from expert tips plus a wealth of colourful DIY inspiration.

Alcohol inks have exploded onto the art scene with the rise of fluid art techniques such as paint pouring. These accessible inks can be used to create stunning abstract art, even if you're a total beginner. Through step-by-step tutorials and exercises, you'll learn everything you need to know to get started with alcohol ink and how to combine techniques into incredible, bold and colourful, abstract art.

As well as paintings on paper, you'll discover inspiration and advice on using the techniques to decorate a wide range of surfaces, including ceramics, plastic, glass, wood and more to make fashion and home accessories and striking handmade gifts.

Fantasy Art for Beginners

$22.99 $18.39 Save $4.60

This is a comprehensive guide that will lead beginners through the approaches and techniques needed to create great fantasy art. Part One provides a thorough grounding in all the theoretical and practical skills. Part Two shows how to put these skills into practice in a series of step-by-step demonstrations. All popular fantasy subjects, including dragons, heroines and monsters, are tackled through the author's expert guidance. It includes accessible and practical information on how to choose the right medium, lighting, imagination, atmosphere and more.

DIY Watercolor Christmas

$22.99

Make this Christmas a watercolor wonderland with this creative guide to painting through the festive season.

Learn the materials and equipment you need for watercolor painting and how to create both traditional and contemporary color palettes for Christmas, and then learn a range of watercolor techniques including washes, blending and gradation, plus experimental ideas to try such as using salt, bleach and masking fluid in your work.

Twelve creative projects follow, with step-by-step tutorials so that even beginners to watercolor can jump right in. Learn how to paint your own Christmas cards, gift tags and gift boxes, create seasonal table settings, hand painted Christmas crackers and garlands.

Using innovative but accessible watercolor primers, you can now prepare a wide variety of surfaces for watercolor. This inspirational book will also show you how to use these new products to paint baubles, 3D cardboard letters and more.

Artist Ingrid Sanchez, aka @creativeingrid, shares her beautiful artwork and expert guidance in this unique book that will turn Christmas into the most artistic time of the year!

Draw Comic Book Action

$19.99

What does every aspiring comic artist REALLY want to draw? Action, of course! Learn how to render all aspects of adrenalin-filled movement, from jaw-dropping superhero antics to kick-ass fistfights.

Techniques for drawing every dynamic action are explained, from body contact and flying through to fistfights, group rumbles and full-on battles
Clever exercises show how to achieve convincing movement, from dynamic standing poses, to running, swinging, flying and fighting
An Action File of comic character drawings in dynamic poses forms an invaluable resource for practice and reference

Watercolor & Hand Lettering

$22.99

Learn how to combine watercolor illustrations with hand lettering to create beautiful art and gifts. Self-taught artist Tanje Pöltl shares the tips, tricks and know-how she's learned on her creative journey so that you can fast-track your skills.

Discover the materials you'll need in terms of paints, brushes, paper and pens, then get started with Tanja's exercises to learn the basic techniques of watercolour painting and hand lettering. 20 amazing step-by-step projects include ideas for gift boxes, journals, greetings cards, jar labels, posters, hoop art, table runners, height charts, box frames and more – all beautifully illustrated in a modern yet timeless style.

Kickstart your own creative journey with this accessible and indispensable guide to easy watercolour and hand lettering techniques and make art that makes you happy!

Cover image for Watercolor & Hand Lettering, isbn: 9781446308554

Big Brush Watercolor

$21.99

Using the Japanese hake brush, obtainable from most art and craft shops, Ron Ranson demonstrates how, because of its nature and size, it forces the watercolourist to simplify the subject matter and thus distil the essence of a scene. He also discusses the dissecting and dramatizing of the subject.

Watercolor Wild and Free

$19.99

Learn how to paint adorable animals, flavorful fruits, lively plants, and more in this free-and-easy approach to watercolor.

Artist Natalia Skatula has a beautiful, whimsical style that will charm you through 12 simple step-by-step projects and over 100 worked examples. Beginning with an overview on materials and equipment, Natalia then covers the general techniques needed to achieve the paintings, along with her top-10 personal tips for success.

Projects include:

A majestic whale
An adorable sloth
Elephants
Pandas
Dogs
Llamas
Bears
Foxes
Rabbits
And more!

This book also includes a range of presentation ideas to inspire you to put your finished work on display or gift it. The gallery of examples that follows includes plants, cats, beetles, birds, sealife, jungle creatures and fruits, giving you a treasure-trove of references for your painting.

This book also makes the perfect gift for artists of all ages, especially plant and animal lovers.

Find the inspiration and technique to start your watercoloring adventures with this beautiful guide!

DIY Watercolor Jungle

$22.99

Learn to paint tropical watercolor flowers and foliage in simple steps with this free and easy approach to watercolor painting for beginners. Marie Boudons beautifully presented creative course will get you started in this expressive and fun medium.

Find out about the essential materials you need, learn about color mixing for an on-trend jungle palette, get expert tips on transparency, overlays and negative space, discover ideas for compositions and then work step-by-step through over 20 tutorials for jungle plants and flowers.

From palm trees, monstera leaves and other jungle foliage to tropical flowers such as hibiscus, bird of paradise and anthurium, you'll find easy exercises and inspiring ideas for jungle-themed art, which is a huge trend in interiors and surface pattern design.

Along the way, be inspired by Marie's gorgeous ideas for presenting the finished work as art pieces, journal pages, handmade stationery and greetings cards, inspirational quote frames, personalized gifts and more.

Byron Birdsall's Alaska

$18.99

These illustrations of historic Alaska by Byron Birdsall, one of the state’s most renowned artists, portray the territory from the beginning of the twentieth century through the first decades after Alaska achieved statehood in 1959. Accompanied by informative captions, the black-and-white drawings are organized by region: Southcentral Alaska including Anchorage, the Arctic, the Interior, the western/Bering Sea coast, and Southeast. Birdsall’s masterful illustrations depict a myriad of scenes, from tents on Ship Creek in 1915 to a train unloading tourists at McKinley Park Station in 1935, from the Governor’s Mansion in 1939 in the capital city of Juneau to the Good Friday earthquake in 1964 and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline near the Koyukuk River in 1975.