The invention in the late eighteenth century of lithography, or "writing on stone," reshaped the course of graphic arts. Some years later, the father of this world-changing technology, Alois Senefelder, published a description of the process. This...

As early as the 1850s, gaslight tempted New Yorkers out into a burgeoning nightlife filled with shopping, dining, and dancing. Electricity later turned the city at night into an even more stunning spectacle of brilliantly lit streets and glittering...

An illuminating one-volume compendium of primary documents on the art of medieval and Renaissance EuropeThis unique collection brings together notebooks, letters, treatises, and contracts dealing with the art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, providing...

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...

Art Deco is one of the most exciting chapters in the history of the decorative arts. Conceived in France before the First World War, it spread throughout Europe and had its greatest and most spectacular success in the United States. Myriad influences...

A groundbreaking account of the role of writing in Michelangelo's artMichelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Pietà, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career,...

A love story told in the form of an auction catalog.Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person -- their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman...

"This third volume of the catalogue dedicated to publishing the complete paintings, sculptures and drawings of Andy Warhol (1928-87) focuses on the years 1970 to 1974. With the authoritative writing and fascinating attention to detail of the first two...

Kohn Pedersen Fox's jewel-like glass pavilion for the Rodin Museum evolved from the search to create a home for two seminal bronzes, The Gates of Hell and The Burghers of Calais, by Auguste Rodin. The tension created between the two pieces suggests...

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the...

Composed of bright monochrome squares randomly arranged in a grid to create stunning sheets of kaleidoscopic color, Gerhard Richter's 4900 Colors (2007)--the latest result of the artist's long-term exploration of seriality--was created just following the...

Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today’s multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an...

On the occasion of what would have been Andy Warhol's eightieth birthday, in 2008, this exquisitely produced volume examines one essential but miraculously under-studied element of the artist's work: The shadow. Beginning with photographic still lifes of...

“Sublime . . . Kalman’s elegantly witty and at times melancholy narrative runs arm in arm with her unmistakable paintings on a serendipitous romp through the history of the world.” —Vanity Fair “Wildly original . . . there’s nothing else even remotely...

Prolific, mercurial, thought-provoking, charming, engaging, dynamic, confusing--just like the artist himself, Andy Warhol's films explore the gamut of human emotion. From the time he obtained his first film camera in 1963, up until his death in 1987,...

For generations, the women of the Ndebele of southern Afrcia have produced an art of remarkable richness and vitality. In their ceremonial beadwork and in large murals that cover the exterior walls of their mud dwellings, these women have created designs...

Chuck Close--a man who describes himself as "an artist looking for trouble"--has for three decades consistently but variously challenged the accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. Published to accompany a retrospective of his prints opening at...

Through a historical analysis of Vermeer's method of production and a close reading of his art, Daniel Arasse explores the originality of this artist in the context of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Arguing that Vermeer was not a painter in the...

New York Times Bestseller“Dolnick brilliantly re-creates the circumstances that made possible one of the most audacious frauds of the 20th century. And in doing so Dolnick plumbs the nature of fraud itself . . . an incomparable page turner.” —Boston...

Ornament, the art of decorative patterning, includes some of the most spectacular creations of human imagination and skill. Although the fashion for unadorned form pushed ornament to the margins of Western taste in the twentieth century, an ornamental...