"Between Sea and Sahara" gives us Algeria in the third decade of colonization. Written in the 1850s by the gifted painter and extraordinary writer Eugene Fromentin, the many-faceted work is travelogue, fiction, stylized memoir, and essay on art. Fromentin paints a compelling word picture of Algeria and its people, questioning France's--and his own--role there. He shows French dynamism tending to arrogance, tinged with malaise, as well as the complexity of the Algerians and their canny survival tactics. In his efforts to capture the non-Western world on paper as well as on canvas, Fromentin reveals much about the roots of a colonial relationship that continues to affect the Algeria of today. He also reveals his own development as painter, writer--and human being.
Now available for the first time in English, "Between Sea and Sahara" appeals to today's reader on many levels--as a story of color, romance, and dramatic tension; as an eyewitness account of the colonial experience in Algeria; as a study in trans-genre text, foreshadowing Fromentin's psychological masterpiece, the novel Dominique. And, as Valerie Orlando points out in her introduction, Fromentin opens a window on the ethos informing the fashion of Orientalism that flourished with colonialism.

This substantial monograph on the respected German Concrete artist features a selection of floor and skirting-board paintings from the late 60s and 70s, large-scale and multi-media architectural paintings, furniture, abstract geometric oils and acrylics and sculptural wall-works. A serious study of post-Constructivist color and space.

Winslow Homer was the antithesis of the unkempt bohemian artist of the nineteenth century. Yet he is ranked as one of America's greatest painters. The reason is not hard to discover, for Winslow Homer's powerful epic statements spoke for America with a breadth that few other artists have achieved. This is a lively, intimate, and immensely readable portrait of the artist that throws a new light on Homer's life and puts it in fresh perspective, concentrating on Homer's years at Prout's Neck on Maine's rugged coast, where he would create his finest paintings, from 1883 until his death in 1920.

The Japanese artist Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889) was celebrated for his exciting impromptu performances at calligraphy and painting parties. Dynamic, playful and provocative, Kyosai delighted his audience with spontaneous and speedy paintings of demons, skeletons, deities and Buddhist saints. These were often satirical, reflecting a time of political and cultural change in Japan. Among his most charming and inventive works are his brilliant depictions of animals, which humorously play the roles of protagonists of modern life. Kyosai's important place in Japanese art is here explored in depth by Sadamura Koto, a leading authority on the artist, in this catalogue of the exceptionally rich holdings of the Israel Goldman Collection.

Maurice Sendak is the widely acclaimed American children's book author and illustrator. This critical study focusses on his famous trilogy, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There, as well as the early works and Sendak's superb depictions of Grimms' fairy tales in The Juniper Tree. L.M. Poole begins with a chapter on children's book illustration, in particular the treatment of fairy tales. Sendak's work is situated within the history of children's book illustration, and he is compared with many contemporary authors. This new edition includes a new introduction, a new bibliography and many more illustrations. The text has been completely revised and updated.

In Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema, Joe McElhaney situates Visconti's films as privileged and deeply expressive instances of a trope that McElhaney identifies as the ""cinema of fabric"": a reoccurrence in film in which textiles-clothing, curtains, tablecloths, bedsheets-determine the filming process. An Italian neorealist, Visconti emerges out of a movement immediately following WWII wherein fabric assumes crucial functions, yet Visconti's use of fabric surpasses his colleagues in many ways, including its fluid, multifaceted articulations of space and time. Visconti's homosexuality is central to this theory in that it assumes metaphoric potential in addressing ""forbidden"" sexual desires that are made visible in the films. Visconti's cinema of fabric gives voice to desires not simply for human bodies draped in fabric but also for entire environments, a world of the senses in which fabric becomes a crucial method for giving form to such desires. McElhaney examines Visconti's neorealist origins in Ossessione, La terra trema, and Rocco and His Brothers, particularly through fabric's function within literary realism and naturalism. Neorealist revisionism through the extravagant drapings of the diva film is examined in Bellissima and Senso whereas White Nights and The Stranger are examined for the theatricalizing through fabric of their literary sources. Visconti's interest in German culture vis-?a-vis The Damned, Death in Venice, and Ludwig, is articulated through a complex intertwining of fabric, aesthetics, politics, and transgressive sexual desire. Finally, Visconti's final two films, Conversation Piece and The Innocent, assess through fabric both the origins of Italian fascism and the political tensions contemporaneous with the films' productions. Fabric in Visconti is often tied to the aesthetic impulse itself in a world of visionaries attempting to dominate their surrounding environments and where a single piece of fabric may come to represent the raw material for creation. This book will tantalize any reader with a keen eye and strong interest in film and queer studies.

About Red Social Red Social by Alejandro Garcia-Lemos and Cynthia Boiter is a visual and literary art book that evolved from a 2012 art exhibition of work by Garcia-Lemos at the Goodall Gallery at Columbia College in Columbia, SC. The title of the book and exhibition, Red Social, translates to Social Network in Garcia-Lemos's native Spanish. As he approached this body of work, which is made up of 24 unique portraits, Garcia-Lemos who is a native of Bogota, Colombia, focused on relationship-building and the community of fellow artists and arts lovers he had become enmeshed in in his new home of Columbia, SC. The sitters for each portrait, almost all of whom were close members of his newly formed community, were asked to bring symbolic icons for their sitting and many went so far as to collaborate on their specific portraits. (Several fellow-artists made actual artistic contributions to their portraits.) "The creative space that opened during these sessions provided an atmosphere of candor which mimicked that of the therapist," the artist says. "I came to realize the importance of a comfort level between the artist and subject and I chose people who have been supportive of me and are truly friends and family." Once the series was complete and had been exhibited, Garcia-Lemos hoped to continue in the collaborative spirit so he approached local writer and editor, Cynthia Boiter. It was his idea to have Boiter create short fictional stories about the characters in the portraits-whether she was personally familiar with the characters or not-based on nothing but the title of the portrait and the various icons represented. Boiter says that, "Many of the friends about whom I wrote had to become strangers before they could become subjects about whose inner lives-their worries, fantasies, and insecurities-I could write. But as unconnected as these stories are to the portrait models who inspired them, they are still real stories, I'm sure, that belong to someone else out there." The result is a fascinating reverse-process of illustration. Based upon Garcia-Lemos's paintings, Boiter uses fiction to illustrate the portrait subjects. Each piece of short fiction-few are over 250 words in length-tells the tale of a unique individual with subject matters ranging from love to loss to issues of gender roles, new roles, and throwing off the roles society attempts to impose upon all of us.

Joy Postle Blackstone was best known for her vivid murals, often depicting the jubilant wading birds of Florida. When she died in 1989, the world lost a wonderful artist but Joy was much more than a painter. Joy s father died when she was only three; her childhood was spent nurtured by her mother and brother, until she began her career at the Chicago Art Institute.

After graduation, her life changed, as she and her family moved to rural Idaho to live on the family homestead. There, she met her husband, Bob, and so began their three-year honeymoon, in the midst of the Great Depression. Joy painted and Bob promoted. They lived a vagabond life. They eventually settled in Florida, where Joy made friends with the birds who would make her murals legend.

"Joy Cometh in the Morning" traces an artist s life from 1896 through to her death in 1989. Joy Postle Blackstone harbored the psychological scars of abortion, infidelity, childlessness, death, and the eventual limitations of advanced age; yet, as the Bible says, Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. Through feast or famine, hope or despair, Joy persevered, and she did it with a smile.