D Giles Limited

This volume is a survey of the remarkable quality and range of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection of French drawings, one of the best such collections in the United States

Nineteenth-Century French Drawings explores the history of this medium, and chronicles the remarkable part it has played throughout the past decades at the Cleveland Museum of Art. There are works by such iconic artists as Honoré Daumier, Berthe Morisot and Auguste Renoir, a luminous coloured pencil study by symbolist artist Alexandre Séon and a group of “noir” drawings—named for their use of varied black drawing media—by Henri Fantin-Latour, Albert-Charles Lebourg and Adolphe Appian, among others. Entries illuminate the role of drawing within 41 artists’ works and five essays by leading scholars shed new light on the making and collecting of drawings in France during this extraordinary period.

In nineteenth-century France, drawing expanded from a means of artistic training to an independent medium with rich potential for experimentation. A variety of new materials became available to artists, encouraging figures ranging from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Paul Cezanne to reconsider drawing’s place within their practice. Public and private exhibition venues increasingly began to display their works, building an audience attracted by the intimacy of drawings and their unique techniques and subjects.

A lavishly illustrated publication which explores an exceptionally diverse array of work by self-taught artists with wide-ranging backgrounds and motivations.

Creating Connections features over 70 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and watercolors from the Rosenthal Collection of work by self-taught artists. This richly illustrated publication explores the mysterious connections we have with works of art and examines the journey into the meaning of art for its creators. It looks at the historic approaches to the creations of self-taught artists and the problems inherent in their interpretation. It also considers where we should go to achieve a more equitable and inclusive art history.

The Rosenthal Collection comprises a significant and notably varied grouping. Not only does it cover a broad mix of American names including Earl Cunningham, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Bill Traylor, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Ralph Fasanella, Martín Ramírez, and Janet Sobel, it also includes non-US artists Carlo Zinelli, Hiroyuki Doi, Adolf Wölfli, Donald Pass, and Nek Chand among others. Jean Dubuffet, the French painter who famously promoted their study, is also featured.

An illustrated interview by Julie Aronson with Richard Rosenthal provides special insight into the collector who has brought together this exceptionally diverse array of work. Essays by Olivia Sagan and Charles Russell look at the need for a more nuanced approach to these artists and their work, at the history of its appreciation (including terminology such as “Outsider Art”), and examine the work in the context of autobiography, trauma, connection, and remembering.

A fascinating, profusely illustrated, study of the impact of Austrian-born architect and designer Joseph Urban (1872–1933), on the development and acceptance of American Modernism through the story of one of his last commissions.

Designed in 1929 and completed in 1930, this rare, bespoke bedroom, created for the seventeen-year-old Elaine Wormser, embodies the skillful blend of Viennese artistic influences, sleek modern finishes, daring color and pattern that marked all of the artist’s greatest achievements. The interior, whose elements are held by the Cincinnati Art Museum, has never been fully researched, published or displayed before now. Five essays, accompanied by nearly 90 full-color illustrations, unlock the narratives and significance of this important historic interior.

Joseph Urban arrived in Boston in 1911; he lived and worked in the United States for the rest of his life. Over the next twenty-two years, he would become one of the nation’s most important and celebrated designers, at the forefront of American modernism, doing as much as anyone to shape its distinctive face. His iconic designs include the Tulip Room, Central Park Casino, New York, 1929; Park Avenue Restaurant, 128 East 58th Street, New York, 1931; and the bedroom for Nedenia Hutton, daughter of E. F. Hutton and Marjorie Merriweather Post , Mar-a-Lago Palm Beach, Florida, 1926. When Urban arrived in the United States, the new architecture and design were just beginning to make their appearance; by the time he died in 1933, they were already starting to assert their dominance

Top 10 Title, Art/Architecture/Photography, Publishers Weekly Spring 2021 Announcement Issue

The Phillips Collection—America’s first museum of modern art—was founded in Washington, DC, in 1921 by Duncan Phillips as a memorial to his father, Duncan Clinch Phillips, and his brother, James, who died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. Recognizing the healing power of art, Phillips sought to inspire others to “see beautifully as true artists see.” This ground-breaking volume, planned in conjunction with the museum’s centennial, offers an unprecedented breadth of insights and inclusive narratives on the Phillips’s growing art collection from a range of voices, including artists, curators, and critics, who shed light on the museum’s acquisitions since 2000.

Seeing Differently features diverse artistic expressions across wide-ranging media by renowned artists from the 19th to the 21st centuries, including John Akomfrah, Benny Andrews, Esther Bubley, Edgar Degas, Anselm Kiefer, Simone Leigh, and Aimé Mpane. This richly illustrated book includes an opening essay by Phillips director Dorothy Kosinski, artist conversations with John Edmonds, Whitfield Lovell, Alyson Shotz, and the late David C. Driskell, and 11 thematic essays by scholars and practitioners across disciplines. Its over 200 plates feature paintings, sculptures, videos, quilts, prints, and photographs, many with object responses by notable contributors, including artists Anthony Gormley, Sean Scully, Renée Stout, and Jennifer Wen Ma, among others.

A fascinating look at the unexpected juxtapositions between twenty-first-century fashion design and historical garments.

Fashion Reimagined features fifty outstanding examples of fashionable dress drawn entirely from the superb collection of the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Mint’s costume collection in 1972, the checklist includes men’s and women’s fashions from 1760 to 2022. The book is divided into three sections that reflect three aspects of historicism: Minimalism, Pattern and Decoration, and The Body Reimagined. Each catalogue entry addresses a theme and provides information and insights about the individual designers, fabric and construction details, and globalization that is embedded in both the textiles and fashions 1760 to the present.

The Mint’s fashion collection features a wide range of historical garments, together with significant pieces by major contemporary designers, including Oscar de la Renta, Gianni Versace, and Miuccia Prada. Ranging from court suits to street wear, highlights include an English eighteenth-century sack back dress, two English men’s court suits, early nineteenth-century printed cotton dresses, wedding dresses from the mid and last quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as a rare 1920s wedding ensemble by Roman fashion artist Maria Monaci Gallenga, a very rare early twentieth-century Ispahan mantle by Paul Poiret, an unusual mid twentieth century Black Narcissus dress by American designer James Galanos, several examples of 1960s and 70s mod and hippie chic style, and innovative contemporary fashions by Giorgio Armani, Romeo Gigli, Zandra Rhodes, Anna Sui, Yoji Yamamoto, Walé Oyéjidé for Ikiré Jones, Anamika Khanna, and Iris van Herpen, among others. 

A compelling account of the early period of expeditionary archaeology and photography told through the words and works of six pioneers

Exposing the Maya focuses on the works of Désiré Charnay, Alice and Augustus Le Plongeon, Teobert Maler, Alfred Maudslay and Adela Breton, all of whom were masters of their craft and travelled extensively to sites in Mexico and Central America. The over 100 selected images in this volume, together with nearly 40 additional contextual images featuring sketches from travel journals, hand-colored drawings, prints, and maps, are combined with the photographers’ own words found in their published writings, journals and letters to provide insight into their methods, context for their images, and to capture the realities of field work in Mesoamerica.

Accessible and highly illustrated, Exposing the Maya is a wonderful account of this period of expeditionary photography, an age that witnessed the evolution of photographic techniques and brought to life the long-faded murals and decoration of these ruins. This is a compelling story of incredible journeys, and the challenging conditions under which these pioneering photographers produced their images, and how they perceived the remnants of these ancient indigenous cultures in modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Our love affair with the baseball jersey continues in this major new book on the evolution of the iconic shirt as sportswear, streetwear, cultural icon, and fashion must-have.

New volume in the Frick Diptych series focuses on a remarkable Renaissance lamp, pairing an essay by Frick director Ian Wardropper with a new poem by James Fenton.

The form of this extraordinary bronze lamp, the most elaborate of several produced by Riccio (Andrea Briosco), is based on a Roman sandal, and its surface is covered with intricate reliefs modelled with a goldsmith's refinement and crisp detail. The subjects evoke the populace of classical art and poetry, including a Nereid and Triton, Pan, harpies and innumerable putti, along with goats, musical instruments, shells, masks and garlands. Inspired by the Roman half-boot, the lamp is designed as a bizarre shoe balanced on a pyramidal base, and, as Ian Wardropper discusses in his essay, it would have provided its owner with much pleasure and intellectual stimulation. Early in its history, the lamp is known to have belonged to a series of distinguished Paduan collectors. Paired with Wardropper's essay is a beautiful poem by James Fenton.

A fascinating survey of exceptional American chair design from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

Designed for function, each chair has a story to tell about the history and evolution of American design, art and craftmanship. At the heart of the catalogue is the presentation of 57 chairs from the Jacobsen Collection of American Art covered in 49 essays, all showing beauty and historical context, as well as important social, economic, political and cultural influences. Highlights include designs by John Henry Belter, George Hunzinger, Herter Brothers, Stickley Brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, and Frank Gehry, among others. There are good examples of historically significant chairs, such as the House of Representatives Chamber Arm Chair (1857), and a photograph of this chair being sat in by Abraham Lincoln, plus an Appalachian Bent Willow Armchair, which is shown in a 1901 photo being sat in by President McKinley on the porch of his summer home. Key icons from post-war American history include Charles Eames’ 1946 moulded plywood Low/Lounge Wood Chair, and the Contour Bar Stool designed by Frank Gehry in 1972.

The chairs are arranged across four main, broadly chronological sections, from the early 1800s to the Civil War; from Reconstruction through the Gilded Age to the dawn of the 20th century; from Art Nouveau to post-war Modernism; and finally, from the post-war Space Age to the Digital Age and the contemporary focus on space saving and sustainability. Each section opens with a brief introduction to its key themes.

A major new illustrated survey on two internationally significant Imperial Roman portrait busts.

Imperial Colors focuses on the paired busts of Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193-211) and his wife, Empress Julia Domna in the Eskenazi Museum of Art, two of the finest known examples of later Roman portrait sculpture. This book presents innovative multidisciplinary research that is accessible both to specialists and generalists. In addition to contextualizing these portraits in the visual art and culture of the wider Roman empire, this publication will provide the first detailed and secure evidence for their original appearances. Highlights of this include the recently discovered vestiges of colorful paint, fresh insights into masterful marble polishes, and fascinating possibilities regarding their production and display in antiquity. These sculptures are also carefully constructed images, designed to promote political ideas. They represent continuity with older Imperial models but were updated to create a distinctive visual language for the new Imperial house.

Looking Up explores Noguchi’s work on the themes of space, charting our place in the universe, and ‘skyviewing’; examines the changing artistic climate during his long career; and places him in context with a younger generation of artists, including Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, James Turrell, and Charles Ross. The book includes essays by leading specialists, as well as a plate section and contemporary photos of the creation, transportation and installation of Skyviewing Sculpture .

The eighth volume in the Double Exposure series, Movements, Motions, Moments draws upon the visual images in NMAAHC’s collection to explore the dynamic ways religion is engaged and practiced by African Americans.

Movements, Motions, Moments shows how African Americans have negotiated their participation and engagement in religious spaces. The book is divided into three sections—Movements, Motions, and Moments. Images of figures including Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, Noble Drew Ali, Father Divine, Prophet Elijah Muhammad, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Pauli Murray, Bishop Myokei Cain-Barrett, and others are depicted next to photographs of religious celebrations, ritual practices, and individual moments of faith and spirituality. Photographers include Lola Flash, Chester Higgins, Jason Miccolo Johnson, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Kenneth Royster, James Van Der Zee, Milton Williams, Lloyd W. Yearwood, and others.

Photographs in this volume range from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and include religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, African indigenous, non-secular, and other religious traditions (Humanism, Atheism, Spiritualism, and others). It also includes photography capturing contemporary events and movements including Black Lives Matter and the global pandemic.

Over 50 works, arranged by theme, are drawn from major British collections, including the Royal Collection, the V & A, Tate Britain, the British Museum, and a wealth of regional museums and private collections. In addition memorabilia and souvenirs-bronzes, photos, brooches, and Faberge works, many relating to the British royals, especially Queen Victoria and her children- all evoke the sense of a cabinet of curiosities. This is a must-have for dog lovers.

This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World showcases American craft like never before. Accompanying a 2022 exhibition of the same name, it features artists’ stories of resilience, methods of activism, and highlights craft’s ability to spark essential conversations about race, gender, and representation.

This book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, the nation’s preeminent center for the enjoyment of American craft. It honors the history of the American studio craft movement while also introducing progressive contemporary narratives.

This Present Moment highlights the often-overlooked histories and contributions of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities. The volume features many of the more than two hundred recently acquired artworks to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection.

Named after Alicia Eggert’s 2019–20 neon artwork, This Present Moment looks at American craft “in the whirlwind of now,” revealing possibilities for contemporary makers to show us a more empathetic future.

Featured artists include Tanya Aguiñiga, Nick Cave, David Chatt, Sonya Clark, Cristina Córdova, Cindy Drozda, Alicia Eggert, J. Paul Fennell, Aram Han Sifuentes, Carla Hemlock (Kanienkeháka), Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Ron Ho, Katie Hudnall, Pat Kramer, Stephen Young Lee, Linda Lopez, Roberto Lugo, Wendy Maruyama, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Tom Loeser, John Mascoll, Connie Mississippi, George Nakashima, L. J. Roberts, Judith Schaechter, Preston Singletary, Polly Adams Sutton, Toshiko Takaezu, Gail Tremblay (Mi’kmaq and Onondaga), Nancy Worden, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, and many more.

The cover of this volume is printed in 50 color variations; a purchased copy may be different from the image pictured.

An essay by Xavier F. Salomon paired with a contribution by award-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst bring to life Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s (1732–1806) Progress of Love, a series of fourteen paintings considered by many to be the artist’s masterpiece. The paintings were commissioned in 1771 for the comtesse du Barry, to be installed in 1772 in Louveciennes, the pavilion outside Paris built for her by her lover, Louis XV. By 1773 the canvases, The Pursuit, The Meeting, The Lover Crowned, and Love Letters, had been rejected by Du Barry and returned to the artist. In 1790 Fragonard moved the canvases to his cousin’s house, the Villa Maubert, in Grasse, and over the course of the year painted ten additional panels: two large-scale works,

Love Triumphant and Reverie; four narrow “strips” depicting hollyhocks, and four overdoors of putti. Sold by the Maubert estate to the dealer Agnew’s in 1898, the works were later purchased in February 1915 by the industrialist Henry Clay Frick. By May 1916 the panels were installed at Frick’s new mansion in New York in the present-day Fragonard Room in The Frick Collection.

The featured artists work in a wide variety of media, from Lauren Fensterstock, who creates detailed, large-scale installations using intensive modes of making drawn from the decorative arts, including paper quilling and mosaic, and from whom SAAM has commissioned a site-specific work—inspired in part by the illustrated renaissance German manuscript The Book of Miracles -—that will transform an entire gallery at the Renwick, to Timothy Horn, who creates exaggerated adornments that combine natural and constructed worlds, taking inspiration from objects as varied as baroque jewellery patterns and Victorian era detailed studies of lichen, coral, and seaweed, from bronze and glass, as well as unusual materials like crystalized rock sugar, to evoke the extravagant Amber Room in the Catherine the Great’s palace of Tsarskoye Selo; and from Debora Moore, known for her exquisitely detailed glass renderings of orchids, and who is represented in this volume in her new series, Arboria (2018), in which Moore focuses less on realism and more on capturing an intensely personal experience of beauty and wonder, to Rowland Ricketts who creates immersive installations using handwoven and hand-dyed cloth, starting on his farm, where he cultivates the indigo plants he uses to colour his artwork, fully linking his material and process with the finished product. Participatory engagement from non-artists, forms a major part of Rickett’s work, emphasizing the relationship between nature, culture, the passage of time, and everyday life.

The volume illustrates the ways in which the Aristotelian corpus has been transmitted over time. In particular, it focuses on one crucial, extended moment: the moment when, thanks to the invention of printing, Aristotle’s works became widely available in Latin, Greek, and even in vernacular languages in the late 15th and 16th centuries. At that moment, Aristotle’s authority comes under increasing scrutiny as the new science and philosophy of early modern Europe chart different courses for the future. However, Aristotle is not only an obstacle to be overcome, he also serves as a bridge to the new age especially in the work of Jesuit philosophers and scientists. One way or the other, Aristotle had to be dealt with. He could not be avoided.

The extraordinary books and manuscripts in this volume, selected from the collection of the Martin J. Gross Foundation, demonstrate just how intellectuals of the time received and wrestled with Aristotle. Through commentaries, treatises, lecture courses in schools, and above all in the written marginalia of books, the volume reveals the extent of the age’s engagement with Aristotle. Many of these books and manuscripts have never before been studied, so this is an important invitation to reassess the impact and influence of Aristotle at a point in time when much contemporary scholarship chooses to ignore him.

Tiffany’s masterpieces tell stories of American entrepreneurship, of places of worship, and of evolving relationships to religion. This volume not only focuses on the beautiful and exceptionally crafted objects in the collection, but it also delves into the ideas and stories, including the progressive technologies, designers, and patrons behind the windows. As well as comparative details there are two special gate-fold inserts which highlight two of the windows—Christ and the Apostles, 1890 and Ecclesiastical Angels, 1905.

An international team of specialists in the history of art, archaeology, and anthropology place the Cleveland Krishna amid the material traces of a sophisticated population based in the Mekong River delta at the ancient metropolis known as Angkor Borei. They reveal the long-lasting influence and prestige of the site, well into the Angkorian period, more than six hundred years after the creation of the Cleveland Krishna and the gods of Phnom Da. This is the fifth in the Cleveland Masterworks Series.

Neuville’s status as a woman, and an outsider, made her a particularly keen and sympathetic observer of individuals from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. She drew the earliest ethnographically correct images of indigenous Americans, together with vistas predating the works of other traveler-artists, and long-vanished buildings. Although she arrived in America as an outcast, by the end of her second residency, as the celebrated wife of the French Minister Plenipotentiary, she was interacting with political leaders and making her mark on society in Washington, DC and New York City. Artist in Exile tells her compelling story.

The Artful City is a richly illustrated portrait of the city from colonial times to the present, documented and celebrated in the maps, paintings, photographs, poetry, and prose of renowned artists and writers. This work is a highly readable illustrated history of one of America’s most important physical and cultural entities.

Craft in the Laboratory builds off STEAM-related programming created by the Mint Museum of Art’s department of Learning & Engagement to explore this intersection in depth. Drawn from the Museum's renowned permanent collection of craft and design in all media—ceramic, pottery, wood, metal, glass, fibre, textiles and design— this volume highlights how artists have thought like scientists and engineers. For example, Kate Malone’s knowledge of the chemistry of clay bodies and glazes allows her to produce sculptures such as Heart Walnut. Douglas Harling made Vishnu Dreams using the ancient technique of granulation, aided by his understanding of the roles of surface tension, oxygen reduction, and eutectic bonds in fusing gold granules to a surface. Zoltán Bohus carefully planned the layers of glass in Stratofera on paper before creating it, using his knowledge of geometry and the prismatic qualities of glass. Technical aspects of materials and processes are discussed.

Luigi Valadier (1726–1785) was an extraordinarily inventive Roman metalsmith, talented draughtsman, and maker of both table decorations and objects in gilt bronze, marble, and hard stone. His exquisite table centrepieces—produced for popes, royalty, and aristocrats, in Rome, as well as in France, England, Spain and Portugal—were considered the height of luxury in the eighteenth-century, and his fame spread far and wide. This new volume highlights fifty works produced by the Valadier workshop with comparative objects, designs and transcripts.

Lavishly illustrated, this volume is the first complete monograph on Luigi Valadier and the only comprehensive publication on Valadier in English. Shedding new light on the provenance and dating of some work, the volume further identifies the exact roles performed inside the workshop by the celebrated dynasty of craftsmen that included Luigi’s French-born father Andrea and his son Giuseppe, as well as detailing the Valadier family’s collaborations with other workshops and artists. Luigi Valadier provides an indispensable resource for future scholarship and is a must-have for collectors, dealers, and scholars.

2021 New England Society Book Award winner

The Adventures of a Narrative Gardener is an entirely new kind of garden book, rather than a homage to contemporary gardens, a survey of historic gardens or a "how-to" manual. Through a careful mix of rich visual imagery and memoir, author Ronald Lee Fleming brings to life the garden he has created at Bellevue House, Newport, and explains his many sources, many of which hold deeply personal memories.

The book explores the 1961 Goldsmiths Hall exhibition in London and its influence on contemporary jewelry designers such as John Donald, Arthur King, Andrew Grima and Gilbert Albert. The 1961 exhibition brought a new direction in jewelry design to the fore, influencing others—including the major jewelry houses such as Cartier, Bulgari, Chopard and Van Cleef and Arpels—paving the way for an international movement in fashion and design. These jewelry designers created unique pieces, often for individual clients, using non-traditional materials and unusual forms.

This vibrantly illustrated volume showcases over 140 examples of Reiss’s work, ranging from his early graphic creations for adverts, menus, packaging, calendars, and books, to his architecture and interior designs for clients including the Busy Lady Baking Company, Café Rumpelmayer, Crillon Restaurant, Longchamps restaurants, and the Music Pavilion façade at the 1939 World’s Fair. Reiss's portraits of African Americans include leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance as well as members of the professional and working classes. Essays by leading specialists Marilyn Satin Kushner, Debra Schmidt Bach, C. Ford Peatross, and Jeffrey C. Stewart provide an overview of Reiss’s life and artistic achievements, examining his interior designs of iconic New York restaurants and bars, his portraits of African Americans and his decorative arts including his work in new twentieth-century materials.

The Berlin Masterpieces in America: Paintings, Politics, and the Monuments Men tells the story of how, and why, some of the world’s most iconic artworks toured the USA in what became the first blockbuster show. This fully illustrated volume is the first to examine the entire journey of the “202” and its historical-political implications – from the salt mines to the Wiesbaden CCP to their sensational tour and return to a very different Germany at the onset of the Cold War. It offers insights into Farmer and his fellow Monuments Men’s protest of the transfer, the “Wiesbaden Manifesto;” the logistics of the US tour and popular reactions to the unprecedented exhibition in post-war America. This history is framed by essays on the fate of artworks in Nazi Germany and during the war, and on the significance of modern efforts to research the history of ownership of works of art. Augmenting the essays are an exhibition catalogue, interviews with the people closest to Walter Farmer in his later life, and a complete illustrated checklist of the “202.”

The Berlin Masterpieces in America is a significant contribution to the growing interest in re-evaluating the policy of using art as political propaganda, and with the enduring problems of provenance and restitution.

The story of Virginia is at the centre of the American experience. World-changing, pivotal events of the nation have most often taken place in Virginia or been meaningfully shaped by Virginians. The ideas most cherished by Americans were oft inspired and contested in the state, with lasting consequence.

The history of the “mother of states” and the “mother of presidents” is long, rich, and complex. While Virginians have offered ideas with lasting positive global impact, they also have engaged in tragic fights and have allowed unmistakable injustices.

This book presents 400 evocative objects from Museum’s permanent exhibition, and from its impressive collection, chronologically and with brief background. In a 200-page sampling of letters, documents, artefacts, paintings, furniture, silver, and other decorative objects, along with books, maps, prints, broadsides, guns, uniforms, period photographs, and utilitarian objects, a unique and lavishly illustrated history of Virginia is provided.

Each piece is accompanied by an entry detailing its history and that of its artist or maker written by Taft curatorial staff. Lynne D. Ambrosini’s essay explores the collecting practice of Charles and Anna Taft. Deborah Emont Scott’s foreword provides a history of the Taft bequest and its lasting significance to the city of Cincinnati and its present day inhabitants.

The Knafel Collection of French faience, the finest in private hands, includes outstanding examples of Nevers, Rouen, Moustiers, Moulins, and Marseilles production from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The quality of these masterpieces almost obscures the fact that French faience was essentially a provincial art, largely patronized and commissioned by a local aristocracy and made far from the centres of political power in Versailles and Paris.

In this stunning new volume, Charlotte Vignon traces the history of French faience, offering detailed discussions of key centers of production. Illustrated with more than seventy examples, this valuable resource testifies to the creativity and beauty of an engagingly innovative tradition.

Doris Lee exploded onto the national scene in 1935 when her painting Thanksgiving was awarded the Art Institute of Chicago’s Logan Prize and instigated the Sanity in Art movement in protest. Two years later, her painting Catastrophe was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Simple Pleasures explores this initial national recognition in the 1930s within the context of American Scene painting, and traces the artist’s thematic interest in the simple objects and scenes of the everyday through her career. It also examines the influence of the rise in abstraction during the late 1940s and 1950s, and the particular way in which this abstraction found resonance with Lee’s long-held interest in, and collections of, folk and non-western art. During this post-war period, Lee, like many of her American Scene colleagues, found lucrative work in the heyday of commercial advertising. Lee’s commercial commissions for patrons such as American Tobacco Company, Life magazine, Abbott Laboratories, and Associated American Artists are especially compelling in both their populist accessibility and in their deceptively sophisticated abstraction. Sixty-five works by the artist span the 1930s through the 1960s and are comprised of paintings, drawings, prints, and commissioned commercial designs in fabric and pottery. Included are advertisements by companies that commissioned images from Lee, and photographs that contextualize the artist’s work within the Woodstock artist’s community.

The Merriweather Post collection offers an enthralling glimpse into one of the most remarkable, and intact, collections of jewelry ever amassed.

Spectacular immerses the reader in jewelry history and design, weaving in seminal moments in Post’s life as one of the most passionate and confident collectors of jewelry of the twentieth century. There are exquisite pieces by Van Cleef and Arpels; numerous examples by Cartier; contemporary commissions from Harry Winston, George Headley, David Webb, and Fulco di Verdura, and historical pieces such as the Marie Louise Diadem, and the legendary earrings worn by Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution.

Spectacular provides a critical perspective on developments in changing jewelry styles in America and Europe through one woman’s unique collection. Fascinating essays highlight special details of the gems and jewels, as well as their sometimes scandalous history. Full of fabulous images and interesting facts this new volume will appeal to anybody who wants to know the story behind some of the most amazing jewels ever created.

Liana Paredes is director of Collections & chief curator at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens.

Martin D. Fuller is the founder and president of Martin Fuller Appraisals, LLC.

Michael Hall is the curator of ceramics of the Capelain Collection in Jersey, Channel Islands.

Jennifer Levy is a curatorial assistant at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens.

Jeffrey Post is the curator of the U.S. National Gem and Mineral Collection, and chairman of the Department of Mineral Sciences, Smithsonian Institution.

Dr. Wilfried Zeisler is the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens’ curator of Russian and 19th-century Art.

The history of the early Americas is a story of before and after, defined and divided by a pivotal moment of contact between two distinct cultures. On the European side it is a tale of exploration, high-stakes treasure-seeking, and conquest. For indigenous Americans—including the Maya, the Nahua, the Taíno, and the Wari—it is the beginning of the end, a violent saga of disease, enslavement, and the loss of languages and rituals.

This collision of cultures comes to life in the manuscripts, maps, archaeological objects, and rare books that make up the collection of early American treasures in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Collecting for a New World: Treasures of the Early Americas relates these encounters through vivid illustrations and interpretive descriptions of more than sixty rare and priceless items.

In describing for the first time the journeys of the objects themselves—via African shipwrecks, secret meetings on airstrips, discoveries in castle libraries, and journeys into unknown archaeological sites hidden deep in the jungles of Guatemala—curator John Hessler reveals the role played by private collectors, whose knowledge, vision, and—in many cases, philanthropy—contribute so significantly to the collective understanding and interpretation of history and culture.

The shifting styles and emphases of the 20th century are traced via the remarkable photographs of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams as straight photography superseded Pictorialist poetry in the 1930s, via the work of aesthetic photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind who were influenced by abstract painting, and through the work of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus who were observing and recording the rapid social and economic changes in American society.

Acton provides historical context, brief biographies, and a glossary of photographic terms. A second volume on 19th-century photographs is planned for 2022. The Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame is considered to be one of the finest university art museums in America. Its permanent collection of 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century photography comprises 10,000-plus pieces

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN CERAMIC CIRCLE AWARD 2021

A fascinating exploration of the inspiration behind, and development of, classically inspired sculpture and other ornamental wares in black basalt, the famous stoneware perfected by Josiah Wedgwood in 1768. 

Wedgwood, with prescience, said of his new creation: ‘Black is Sterling and will last forever.’ This volume presents approximately 120 examples of ornamental black basalt, including portrait busts, statues, and vases, ewers, and other fully three-dimensional, ornamental forms. Works in low relief include tablets, plaques, medallions, and cameos. The volume also features essays by renowned subject specialists and individual, fully illustrated catalogue entries which will be grouped into three chapters and organized according to the era—Classical Antiquity, 16th- and 17th-Centuries, 18th Century—of the design sources used by Wedgwood and his contemporaries to create their basalt wares.

The subject of writing and receiving letters, which recurs frequently in the work of Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), is given dramatic tension in this masterful painting of two women in a mysterious moment of crisis. The artist seldom, if ever, surpassed the subtly varied effects of light seen here as it gleams from the pearl jewellery, sparkles from the glass and silver objects on the table, and falls softly over the figures in their shadowy setting.

Each book in the Frick Diptych series illuminates a single work in the Frick’s rich collection with an essay by a Frick curator paired with a contribution from a contemporary artist or writer.

This is a beautifully illustrated, interdisciplinary volume which explores how European and American artists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revealed a compelling interest in dramatic geologic phenomena—caves and natural arches, boulders and rock formations, mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, and cliffs. From a topographical, often strata-focused means to a later mode that evoked nature’s great transformational powers over time, European and American artists pursued their cross-cultural travels in seeking geological wonders. The authors address the importance and history of geology, the most popular science of the 1800s.

Past Time features a combination of outstanding drawings, watercolours, and brilliant oil sketches and studies, with works by Asher B Durand, Frederic Church, John Singer Sargent, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, J. M. W. Turner, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Thomas Rowlandson, amongst many others. This volume is a great addition to the currently available publications on the relationship between the growth of natural science and the interest amongst artists in capturing and presenting scientific phenomena and an ever-changing earth.

This is a timely, visual, exploration of the fascinating life and lasting legacy of sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), who overcame poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination to become one of America's most influential twentieth-century artists. Her story is one of community-building, activism, and art education.

Born just outside Jacksonville, Florida, Savage left the South to pursue new opportunities and opened a studio in Harlem, New York City, offering free art classes. She co-founded the Harlem Artists’ Guild in 1935 and became the first director of the federally-supported Harlem Community Art Center. Through her leadership there, Savage played an instrumental role in the development of many artists: William Artis, Gwendolyn Knight, Gwendolyn Bennett, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Blackburn, Romare Bearden, among many others.

This ground-breaking volume features fifty works by Savage, and those she mentored or influenced, as well as correspondence and period photographs.

This book celebrates the reunion— for the first time in twenty-four years and only the second time in their history—of two masterpieces of early Netherlandish painting commissioned by the Carthusian monk Jan Vos during his tenure as prior of the Charterhouse of Bruges in the 1440s: The Frick Collection’s Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos, commissioned from Jan van Eyck and completed by his workshop; and the Gemäldegalerie’s Virgin and Child with St. Barbara and Jan Vos, painted by Petrus Christus. These panels are examined with a selection of objects that place them for the first time in the rich Carthusian context for which they were created. Drawing on recent technical examination and new archival research, this volume explores the panels’ creation, patronage, and function in their rich Carthusian context.

The Carthusian order was one of the most austere strands of late medieval monasticism. In apparent contradiction to this asceticism, Carthusian monasteries became remarkable repositories of art, a material accumulation often attributed to lay patronage. However this explanation overlooks the ways in which the Carthusians themselves commissioned and used images for their daily devotions and liturgy, as well as their commemoration. The story of Jan Vos and his patronage of Jan van Eyck and Petrus Christus fundamentally informs our understanding of the role played by images in shaping monastic life and funerary strategies in late medieval Europe.

Pictures with Purpose, the seventh volume in the Double Exposure series, explores images from the NMAAHC’s collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photography that includes daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, cyanotypes, stereographs, and other early photographic forms. The volume looks at how early photographs of and by African Americans were circulated and used, and considers their meaning, for the sitter, for the photographer, and for the owner of the photograph. Particularly significant is how African Americans used photography to shape their image within and beyond their communities.

Pictures with Purpose features images of unknown African Americans before and after Emancipation—including children, couples, images of young African American soldiers in Civil War-era military uniform, and African American nursemaids with their white charges. Also included are photographs of renowned African Americans such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Mary Church Terrell. Photographers include J.P. Ball, Cornelius M. Battey, Matthew Brady, Frances B. Johnston, and Augustus Washington.

This magnificent new volume presents works of art from the fabled collection of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1674-1723)—including masterpieces by Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Correggio, Poussin, Rubens, and Rembrandt—bringing them together for the first time since the collection’s sale and dispersal more than two hundred years ago. In this book a representative group of nearly forty works—paintings, books, engravings, and portraits—tell the story of the collection's formation and exceptional character, focusing on such themes as the importance of the collection in the duke’s lifetime; the art market in early eighteenth-century Paris; the display of the collection in public and private spaces; and its widespread fame and resulting impact on visitors and contemporary artists and collectors in Paris.

This volume is both a celebration of the tricentennial of the city of New Orleans, as well as being a major contribution to art historical scholarship and is of great interest to art historians and collectors, as well as to the general public. The volume is structured to maximize scholarly interest, publish new research and consolidate what is known about Phillippe II’s collection, one of the greatest private collections of Western art ever assembled.

It features contributions by an international array of leading scholars, including Françoise Mardrus, Louvre Museum; Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Musée Condé; Alexandre Dupilet, author and historian; Xavier Salomon, The Frick Collection; Rachel McGarry, Minneapolis Institute of Art; Julia Armstrong-Totten, formerly of the Getty Provenance Index; Jean-François Bédard of Syracuse University; and Kelsey Brosnan, curatorial fellow for European Art at New Orleans Museum of Art.

The Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Collection is considered the world’s greatest private collection of portrait medals, rivalling many collections in international museums. This fully illustrated catalogue documenting the Scher Collection is an essential resource for scholars, students, collectors, and curators.

Portrait medals were developed during the Italian Renaissance and are central to the history of European portraiture, flourishing as an art form through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. Though less familiar to us now than painting and sculpture, these exquisitely crafted objects, typically made from lead, bronze, silver or gold, were produced (sometimes in large numbers) to commemorate individuals, to acknowledge special events, and to disseminate the identity and power of their sitters.

The study of the portrait medal has become, through the work of Stephen Scher and others, a burgeoning area of new scholarship. Excellent reproductions of all medals to size, with details of obverse, reverse and full captions, are accompanied by scholarly essays, interesting facts and historical references in this important new volume.