“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...

Italian baroque sculpture has enjoyed a controversial reputation, much like that of its chief protagonist, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It has been damned for creating a sham world, distracting the spectator from its spiritual poverty by dazzling technical...

This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century’s most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his “non-art” work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular...

Diane Arbus was the archetypal artist living on the edge.Diane Arbus's unsettling photographs of dwarves and twins, transvestites and giants, both polarized and inspired, and her work had already become legendary when she committed suicide in 1971. This...

The story of the color black in art, fashion, and culture―from the beginning of history to the twenty-first centuryBlack―favorite color of priests and penitents, artists and ascetics, fashion designers and fascists―has always stood for powerfully opposed...

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...

A literary classic, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh Captures the voice of one of the most beloved and important artists of all time.Though Vincent van Gogh is often thought of as a mad genius, in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh the thoughtful,...

A deeply researched and surprising new assessment of one the most brilliant artists of Spain's Golden Age This masterful examination of the life and work of Juan van der Hamen y León (1596-1631) serves as a powerful and novel lens for viewing the...

In this study, originally published in Norway as Fra Principat Til Dominat, Professor L'Orange sets down the essence of his thought on the crucial period of transition from decentralization to standardization in civic and cultural life-a period not...

When in their lives do great artists produce their greatest art? Do they strive for creative perfection throughout decades of painstaking and frustrating experimentation, or do they achieve it confidently and decisively, through meticulous planning that...

Serving as both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this new edition to Baxandall's pre-eminent scholarly volume examines early...

This book provides a standard introduction to Byzantine art and architecture for the university student and for anyone seriously interested in the subject. It covers the whole Byzantine period from the fourth to the fourteenth century in a systematic...

Essential texts on a legendary twentieth-century artist, including key essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Peter Bürger, Thierry de Duve, and others.Twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)—legendary and self-mythologizing,...

The Futurist movement was founded and promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, beginning in 1909 with the First Futurist Manifesto, in which he inveighed against the complacency of "cultural necrophiliacs" and sought to annihilate the values of the past,...