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.

The British Museum watch collection is unsurpassed anywhere in the world, and tells the story of the watch which spans an incredible 500 years. Within the collection are examples ranging from sixteenth-century early stack freed watches made in south Germany to exquisite decorative watches of the seventeenth century. Everyday watches from the eighteenth century and precision-made chronometers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are included, as are examples from the modern era. All the major makers of Europe and America will be represented, including Thomas Tompion, whose reputation stretched far and wide even in his own time, and the Swiss-born Abraham Louis Breguet, who lived and worked in Paris supplying the best that money could buy to the crown heads and aristocratic families of the western world. In contrast to the high precision of the horological giants, the Museum has a growing collection of wristwatches, including those with automatic winding systems. There are also extensive collections of pin-pallet lever watches made for the mass market during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by companies such as Waterbury and Ingersoll. The collections are brought up to the minute with the inclusion of early examples of electro-mechanical watches and the quartz revolution.

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.

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.

Continuing its distinguished tradition of focusing on central political, sociological, and cultural issues of Jewish life in the last century, Volume XXVI of the annual Studies in Contemporary Jewry examines the visual revolution that has overtaken Jewish cultural life in the twentieth century onwards, with special attention given to the evolution of Jewish museums. Bringing together leading curators and scholars, Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History treats various forms of Jewish representation in museums in Europe and the United States before the Second World War and inquires into the nature and proliferation of Jewish museums following the Holocaust and the fall of Communism in Western and Eastern Europe. In addition, a pair of essays dedicated to six exhibitions that took place in Israel in 2008 to mark six decades of Israeli art raises significant issues on the relationship between art and gender, and art and politics. An introductory essay highlights the dramatic transformation in the appreciation of the visual in Jewish culture. The scope of the symposium offers one of the first scholarly attempts to treat this theme in several countries.
Also featured in this volume are a provocative essay on the nature of antisemitism in twentieth-century English society; review essays on Jewish fundamentalism and recent works on the subject of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet territories; and reviews of new titles in Jewish Studies..

"It stood out for me for a number of reasons. The first, and by far the most important to me, being that the composition is absolutely gorgeous." - Tim Clinch, Amateur Photographer "Packed with compelling visuals and important discussions around some of the planet's biggest issues, it's an excellent compendium of some of the world's best photographers working today." - Amateur Photographer "As compelling in its visuals as it is in its messaging, Fire is an unforgettable document." - Jonathan McIntosh, Royal Photographic Society Journal Fire is the fourth element. It destroys and creates something new. In its heat, colours, and magnitude, it provides a terrifying spectacle as much as an existential threat. Today, it speaks as much to the fragility of human structures as to the damage wrought on nature: the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, forest fires from the Amazon to Australia, and infernos in California so colossal that the sky turned red. Reason enough for the Prix Pictet, the world's leading award for photography and sustainability, to dedicate this year's photo book to the many facets of fire. Selected by photography experts from around the world, this impressive publication features 100 images from the Prix Pictet shortlist and beyond. As compelling in its visuals as it is in its messaging, this is an unforgettable document of an elemental force, and of the increasing extremes of climate change.

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.