Seattle art collectors Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis were frequent visitors to New York City in the 1970s and early 1980s when they collaboratively built their collection, filling their home with singular works of art. Their shared legacy and passion for engaging thoughtfully, deeply, and personally with art-and the frisson of excitement that arises with such a connection-are celebrated and echoed in this special exhibition catalogue. Spanning 1945 through 1976, the paintings, drawings, and sculptures in Frisson serve as significant examples of mature works and pivotal moments of artistic development from some of the most influential American and European artists of the postwar period, including Francis Bacon, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, David Smith, and others. Together they represent an inimitable archive of innovation and a cross-pollination of leading artistic positions in the postwar years. With twenty new scholarly essays written by leading experts, Frisson provides the first opportunity for in-depth research into and new insights about nineteen noteworthy artworks recently acquired by the Seattle Art Museum.

Art lovers are passionate seekers, but locating the works of the great masters can often present a challenge. In "The Art Lover's Pocket Guide," author Dr. Henry P. Traverso offers a guide to locating the works of the most popular and well-known Western visual artists worldwide.

Featuring diverse artists such as Joseph Albers, Picasso, Monet, Francisco de Zurbaran, and a host of others, this comprehensive handbook provides essential biographical information and historical context for more than 250 visual artists. It follows with an orderly list of each artist's works and where those works are located throughout the world, including museums, galleries, churches, monasteries, athenaeums, universities, parks, and libraries in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Both an easy-to-search database and a crash course in art history, "The Art Lover's Pocket Guide" provides an enhanced understanding of the arts along with the tools needed to plan an art history trip and to better navigate museums.

By 1862, just a decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and art-market experts. Enriching the V&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum's 19th-century history, describes how the young museum's rapid growth in the following decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans, gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and buying power of its directors and curators. The V&A soon became a collection of collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public museums. Enriching the V&A explores the formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship, of the V&A's leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the transformation of private property into public museum collections.

French historian, Serge Guilbaut, explores the aesthetic quarrels between Paris and New York of the 40s and 50s, analysing the art that became cultural and commercial icons, with works by Picasso, de Kooning, Dubuffet, Gorky, Kandinsky, Matisse, Newman, Pollock, Rothko, as well as forgotten artists like Barbeau, Bearden and Capogrossi. He also studies the reasons why the popular icons of one culture were not recognised by the other at that time. Faced with the imposing presence of the victorious movement of abstract expressionism, the French art scene, seemed incapable of projecting a single voice or direction for the future, as Paris had done in the past.To study the history of French and American art after the Second World War is a considerable challenge because the consensus among investigators has been shaped by the success of American art. The French art of that period has been regarded as irrelevant although it displayed the same debates about realism, geometrical abstraction and forms of abstract expressionism. The specific aspect of the French scene was the extreme politicisation of artistic expression at a time of strong tensions arising from the divisions of the Cold War.

In Edo Japan, woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e ("pictures of the Floating World") captured the entertainment culture of the urban elite and eventually many other subjects as well. These beautiful prints were the result of a meticulous craft process, in which an artist's initial drawing was translated by expert carvers into multiple printing blocks for different colours. In this attractive volume, Sarah E. Thompson, curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides a highly readable overview of the cultural and artistic history of ukiyo-e, showcasing 120 exceptional prints from the museum's world-class collection, by masters including Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. She explores each of the principal genres in turn: beauty and fashion, the kabuki theatre, landscape, nature, history and literature, and fantasy. Pictures of the Floating World features a traditional Japanese stab binding and is housed in a durable slipcase together with three remarkable prints, suitable for framing. It will be a must-have for all art lovers.

This book is based on the artwork of Sue Jane Taylor. She is no stranger to extreme working environments, having worked for over thirty years recording the lives of workers in the North Sea oil industry on sites such as Piper Alpha, Piper B, Forties platforms and recently Murchison in the Northern Seas. Her work now extends to the offshore renewable energy industry. The book brings a unique perspective to the relationship between art, environment and industry while revealing a relatively alien way of life on board a North Sea oil platform. Among other themes it will consider the future of energy in Scotland. The book has an introductory essay by Elsa Cox, Senior Curator of Technology at National Museums Scotland, illustrated by relevant objects from the collections in the National Museum. This is followed by Sue Jane Taylor's artwork, with extended captions.

A revealing exploration of Edward Hopper's inspired relationship to New York City through his paintings, drawings, prints, and never-before-published archival materials This engaging book delves into the iconic relationship between Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and New York City. This comprehensive look at an essential aspect of the revered American artist's life reveals how Hopper's experience of New York's spaces, sensations, and architecture shaped his vision and served as a backdrop for his distillations of the urban experience. During sidewalk strolls and elevated train rides, Hopper sketched the city's many windowed facades. Exterior views gave way to interior lives, forging one of Hopper's defining preoccupations: the convergence of public and private. These permeable walls allowed Hopper to evoke the perplexing awareness of being alone in a crowd that is synonymous with modern urban life. Drawing on the vast resources of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the largest repository of Hopper's work, and the recently acquired gift of the Sanborn Hopper Archive, this book features more than 300 illustrations and fresh insight from authoritative and emerging scholars. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 19, 2022-March 5, 2023)

In recent years, music videos, celebrity dance contests and TikTok challenges have shaped the way we experience choreography and dance culture. During the Covid-19 pandemic when live performance events were cancelled, people confined to their homes turned to making and viewing short dance videos: created on mobile phones and designed to be easily replicable and shared on social media platforms. Dance has long had a relationship to film and the screen, from early films of Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance (c. 1890s) which highlighted the mediums ability to capture movement and light, to the multi-screen presentations of the choreography of Merce Cunningham transposed into video by Charles Atlas. Visual artists today are inventively reformatting dance and choreographed movement for not only film and the screen but also specifically for the gallery setting, with its repeatable presentation and spatialised viewing conditions. Between Poetics and Politics will feature 10-12 short films by contemporary artists and choreographers that explore the intersection of dance, movement and moving image. These moving image works focus on performing bodies, and unfold as both as individual works but also as collective storytelling, exploring timely topics, ranging from gender politics and desire to bodily memory, resistance and personal healing, to indigeneity and collective identities. The works will be contextualised by three new essays.

As world powers realign their cultural, economic and political outlooks, there is no better time to consider how Afro-Eurasia's complex network of ancient trade routes - which spanned the vastness of the steppe, vertiginous mountain ranges, fertile river plains and forbidding deserts across the continents and on to the seas beyond - fostered economic activity and cultural, political and technological communication. From silk to slaves, fashion to music, religion to science the movement of interaction of goods, people and ideas was crucial to the flourishing of peoples and their cultures across this vast region. Edited by Susan Whitfield, an established authority on the subject, with contributions from over 80 leading scholars from across the globe, Silk Roads situates the ancient routes against the landscapes that defined them, to reveal the raw materials that they produced, the means of travel that were employed to traverse them and the communities that were shaped by them. Organized by terrain, from steppe to desert to ocean, each section includes detailed maps, a historical overview, thematic essays and features showcasing art, buildings and archaeological discoveries. A wealth of photographs reveals the breathtaking and often forbidding landscapes encountered by travellers and traders through the millennia. With one section inscribed as a World Heritage Corridor by UNESCO in 2014 and others to follow, and China claiming the Silk Roads as the precursor of its Belt Road Initiative, this network of ancient trade routes and the interaction along them has never been of greater interest or importance than today. This beautiful publication honours the astonishing diversity in the way cultures advance and flourish not in spite of their differences, but because of them.

Plants and gardens play a central role in life on Earth. They have provided food, clothing, shelter, medicines, employment, leisure and enjoyment throughout history. Both also have many symbolic uses in art, mythology and literature, making plants and gardens the perfect theme for the Designer Bookbinders fourth International Competition held at the Bodleian Library in 2022. The chosen theme also celebrates 400 years since the founding of Oxford Botanic Garden. This beautiful catalogue features richly illustrated texts and finely printed volumes which are bound with skill and creativity using varied materials by binders from all over the world. The fourth in a series following on from 'Bound for Success' in 2009, 'Prize Volumes' in 2013 and 'Heroic Works' in 2017, 'A Gathering of Leaves' is a celebration of the stunningly inventive winning bindings featured alongside all the competition entries.