This book, the first full history of twentieth-century American comics, focuses on the contributions of fifteen comic masters, including Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Charles Schulz, and Art Spiegelman. Insightful and entertaining chapters on the artists, accompanied by a wide selection of their drawings, reveal the genre’s important contributions to art and culture.

How did artists of the twentieth century use their work to respond to their unique personal experiences and moment in history? This provocative question is explored in this engaging new book on American art. By focusing on broad, defining themes, embodied in the work of such pivotal artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, the authors look at how art provided a means for re-imagining America, visualizing what it had become, and where it might go i...

This book explores the fascinating relationship between contemporary portrayals of children in nineteenth-century paintings, popular prints, illustrated primers, and advertisements, and their expected roles in society.

More than fifty years ago, a treasury of studio material—including oil sketches, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and manuscripts—was rescued from the empty house of Thomas Eakins by a devoted student, Charles Bregler. This book is both a catalogue of the Bregler collection and a reassessment of Eakins's career as read through the newly discovered materials.

The history of America is largely a history of the sea. This marvelous book features a selection of more than two hundred of the finest objects from Mystic Seaport that tell the history of America and its maritime heritage. Presented with accessible texts and beautiful reproductions are masterpieces of maritime painting, exquisite photographs of classic yachts and powerboat races, and diverse prints and watercolors. Unique examples of American folk art—yarn paintings, reverse paintings on ...

This beautiful and authoritative book surveys the sculpture of many civilizations—from ancient Egypt, Greece, and China to fifteenth-century Italy, nineteenth-century France, and twentieth-century North America—to explain how sculpture is made. Nicholas Penny provides a basic introduction to the nature of the materials used by sculptors, examining how these were regarded as well as how they were worked in different periods and in different cultures. An essential guide for students, t...

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. A wide range of figures are reassessed, including t...

One of the best known and most influential artists in the history of art, Michelangelo was a prolific sculptor, painter, architect, and draftsman. This lovely book focuses on more than 250 of his drawings executed in chalk, charcoal, and pen and ink. Distinguished art historian Hugo Chapman examines this array of works and discusses how the act of drawing figured prominently in Michelangelo’s work.

In this handsome book, a leading authority on Impressionism offers fresh interpretations of beloved paintings, exploring how pictorial style generated social and political meanings.

This beautiful book is the first full-length study of Leonardo's beginnings as an artist. It discusses his years in Verrocchio's workshop and his subsequent work on his own, the development of his technique, and the relationship of his early paintings to each other and to their sources.

This pioneering book, with more than 200 stunning illustrations, is the first comprehensive account of Henri Matisse as a maker of portraits and self-portraits. John Klein examines Matisse’s portraits of many different sitters—the artist himself, his family, fellow artists and other professionals, and patrons. Klein shows that Matisse had different goals for his portraits, and the portraits he created differed according to the various social contexts of his subjects.

This book will put the artist back in midst of Surrealism so that his achievement is more profoundly understood within that context. Works by artists such as Miró, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and René Magritte will delineate the Surrealist milieu and some of its chief aspects.  The following theses are also explored: Calder's wit, caricature, and linear flights of fancy; his marvelous personages and fantastic creatures; biomorphic forms from an imag...

In this innovative volume, literary critics and art historians explore the relationship between literature and the visual arts in nineteenth-century France. Eighteen leading scholars analyze contemporary forms of representation to reveal the rich variety of factors that linked image and text.

This summary catalogue provides comprehensive and detailed information about the contents of the collection—descriptive material, provenances, selected references, current locations, other data, and illustrations—culled from sales catalogues, Degas’s own inventory, catalogues raisonnés, and other sources.

A unique group of paintings, drawings, and prints, principally by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Monet, and Guillaumin, which were collected by Dr. Paul Gachet and now have their home in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, are published—many for the first time—in this catalogue that accompanied an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hailed as the greatest Venetian painter after Titian, Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1556) is known for a delightfully idiosyncratic artistic vision that has had special appeal for twentieth-century sensibilities. This book—which discusses Lotto's life and work—explores the way his formal and iconographic experiments set him apart from the mainstream culture of his time.

In this engrossing and instructive book, prize-winning author Jennifer Montagu draws on contemporary biographies and on archival documents—many published here for the first time—look at the physical, social, economic, and industrial world of the great sculptors of the Roman baroque. Montagu both clarifies the position and practice of the baroque sculptor and throws new light on debates about attribution. In addition, her exploration raises issues that address fundamental matters of sculptural pr...

One of the most sensuous and intellectual painters of his time, Chassériau left his mark on both the second generation of Romantic artists and their Symbolist successors. The entries in this beautiful book examine over 250 of Chassériau’s paintings, drawings, and prints, and the accompanying essays and Biographical Chronology explore the artist’s personality and professional milieu, offering an illuminating view of the arts in mid-nineteenth-century France. 

This fascinating book investigates what is specifically German about German art. It focuses on the attitudes Germans have had toward their art from the Romantic period to the present and discusses the ways they have tried to find their identity as a nation through this art.

This beautiful and eagerly awaited volume, companion to the earlier, highly regarded Giotto to Dürer, is a guide to the sixteenth-century paintings of London’s National Gallery. The sumptuously illustrated book examines the finest works of such artists as Holbein, Raphael, Cranach, Titian, Gossaert, and Bronzino and provides fascinating insights into the individual masterpieces and their makers.

This beautiful and authoritative book is the first to examine the development of Gothic sculpture throughout Europe. It discusses not only the most famous monuments—such as the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims, Westminster Abbey, and the Siena Duomo—but also less familiar buildings in France, England, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia. Numerous illustrations—including photographs taken especially for the book—accompany the text.

This beautifully illustrated book provides a complete overview of the art of the Southern Netherlands from 1585 to 1700. The author examines the development of Flemish and specifically Antwerp painting, the work of Rubens and such other leading masters as Van Dyck and Jordaens, and the Antwerp tradition of specialization among painters as well as the sculpture and architecture of this period.

When the story of modern art is told, British artists are mentioned infrequently or not at all. In this book, distinguished art historians attempt to explain the marginal position of British modern art by examining the development of the London art world—its institutions and individual artists—over the past two centuries.

From ceramics and silversmithing to calligraphy and textiles, crafts have played a rich and complex role in Britain’s artistic, social, and cultural history during the twentieth century. This all-encompassing book, with more than 500 illustrations, is the first to discuss the full range of craft disciplines and their efforts to define and redefine themselves in Britain.

In this original history of English satirical prints in the first half of the eighteenth century, Mark Hallett examines graphic satire as an artistic genre and as a vehicle of social and political critique. He investigates a wide range of satirical prints, from the celebrated engravings of William Hogarth to the inventive work of the two George Bickhams, and places graphic satire in the context of London’s thriving print market.

This stimulating book discusses the way in which countries acquire their distinctive features and appearance. Focusing on Britain, with its characteristic terraced houses, Georgian squares, postwar slab blocks, and Victorian floral ornamentation, Lubbock traces the fierce debates over consumerism, good design, and town planning that have raged in Britain since the Elizabethan period.

This important book tells the story of the public buildings erected in London during the period when that city served as the capital of a worldwide empire. Examining a wide range of structures, including the British Museum, the Law Courts, the Whitehall government buildings, and the South Kensington museums complex, M. H. Port discusses their political, financial, and social history and the debates over the architectural styles in which they would be built.

More than two hundred years ago, Russian Empress Catherine the Great and some of her courtiers developed a taste for British art and collected some spectacular items including paintings, drawings, sculpture, silver, and Wedgwood ceramics. This sumptuously illustrated book tells the story of the acquisition of these treasures and of the cultural relations between Britain and Russia in the eighteenth century.

Distinguished critic John Russell provides the introduction, and eminent British ...

In this lavishly illustrated book, one of Paris's leading historians links the beauty of the city to its harmonious architecture, the product of a powerful tradition of classical design running from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Anthony Sutcliffe traces the main features of the development of Parisian building and architecture since Roman times, explaining the interaction of continuity and innovation and relating it to issues of power, the social structure, the property market, fashi...

The Albert Memorial, one of Britain’s most famous monuments, was the masterpiece of the great architect, George Gilbert Scott. This lavishly illustrated book explores the history and symbolism of the nineteenth-century monument and provides a full account of its recent restoration. The authors show how the Memorial brought together architecture, fine art, applied art, and craft in a brilliant expression of Gothic Revival. 

Why do modern cities, suburbs, and industrial and farming landscapes all tend to look alike despite their regional settings? In this generously illustrated and provocative book, a landscape architect argues that the monotony of the modern landscape is a reflection of indifference on the part of society to the diversity inherent in ecological systems and in human communities. In case studies drawn from all parts of the world—Turkey and Hong Kong to northern England and Edinburgh, to Kentuck...

This abundantly illustrated book provides the first full account of houses built and inhabited by the English upper classes during the period of radical social change between 1480 and 1680. Architectural historian Nicholas Cooper explores hundreds of gentry houses, some well known and others less familiar, and considers their evolution in the light of economic, political, and social changes of the age.

In this book Charles M. Radding and William W. Clark offer fresh perspectives on changes in architecture and learning during the Romanesque and Gothic periods, arguing that builders and masters shared similar ways of reasoning and solving problems.

This attractive and informative book offers the first appraisal of the design achievements of Kyle Cooper, one of the most innovative and important designers of film titles since Saul Bass. The book details Cooper’s work from his extraordinary title sequence for the horror thriller Seven through a succession of highly regarded titles for films including Spiderman, Mission Impossible, and Arlington Road.

Samuel Colt (1814-1862) first patented his "Colt" revolver in 1835 and thereby redefined the architecture of handguns. This stunning book is the first to present in detail the evolution of his most famous invention and to document the unsurpassed Colt firearms collections held by the Wadsworth Atheneum. Richly illustrated and beautifully produced, this volume presents the artistry of the firearms that Colt worked so diligently to perfect—as well as his promotional abilities that made a tre...

This inspiring and extensively illustrated book offers practical advice for those seeking to understand the principles and process of good design. Award-winning graphic designer and teacher Kenneth J. Hiebert interweaves theory and concrete, creative activity to show how inventive graphic design arises from diverse stimulus sources, how to avoid the cliche forms of obvious computer-generated design, and how design can become an exciting personal process.

This beautiful book examines the design achievements of Finland over the last seven decades, focusing on the central and decisive role played by Modernism. It discusses the work of such renowned architects and designers as Alvar Aalto and Kaj Franck, as well as of manufacturers including Arabia and Marimekko.

This beautiful book showcases the remarkable works of twentieth-century art acquired by a succession of adventurous directors and curators at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Eric Zafran relates the fascinating details behind the acquisition of works by Dalí, Calder, Picasso, Henry Moore, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and many others.

In this illuminating book, a prominent art historian explores the links between avant-garde art and modern mass culture, showing that the connections between the two have always been strong, and even necessary to both. The author recounts vivid episodes involving Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Christopher Williams, and many others, arriving at fresh and original insights into modern art and its place in late twentieth-century culture.

The magnificent bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral, the ivory, gold, enameled, and bejeweled book covers made to contain superbly illuminated manuscripts, the startling reliquary caskets made in the shape of the part of the body supposed to be contained within them—these and other sacred objects were contained within church treasuries and cloisters in the early Middle Ages in Europe. This beautiful book traces the development of these so-called Minor Arts and the major role they played a...

Renowned for his alluring and provocative photographs of the monuments, interiors, streets, and people of Paris, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) was fascinated with the myriad materials, textures, surfaces, and details of his subjects. Although not well known in his own lifetime, his influential work now appears in almost all the world’s major museums. This book, replete with exquisite reproductions of more than one hundred of Atget’s photographs, features selections from the Phi...

This exquisite volume, which includes many unfamiliar works by well-known artists, celebrates one of America's premier collections of modern photography.

This fascinating book assembles more than 250 photographic images from the Victorian era to the 1960s, each purporting to document an occult phenomenon: levitations, apparitions, transfigurations, ectoplasms, spectres, ghosts, and auras. Drawn from the archives of European and American occult societies and private and public collections, the photographs in many cases have never before been published.

This fascinating book presents and examines an extremely varied set of some 75 photographs taken by Mel Bochner between 1966 and 1969. This virtually unknown body of work, most of which is published here for the first time, reveals much about the crucial role of photography in the artistic development of one of the most important American artists of the Post-Minimal and Conceptual art movements. 

A study of the innovations of European and American photography between World Wars I and II.