Generously illustrated essays consider Isa Genzken's remarkable body of work, from her early elegant floor pieces to her later explosive assemblages. Since the late 1970s, the Berlin-based contemporary artist Isa Genzken (b. 1948) has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its formal and material inventiveness. In her sculptural practice, Genzken has developed an expanded material repertoire that includes plaster, concrete, epoxy resin, and mass-produced objects that range from action figures to discarded pizza boxes. Her heterogeneous assemblages, a New York Times critic observes, are "brash, improvisational, full of searing color and attitude." Genzken, the recent subject of a major retrospective at MoMA, offers a highly original interpretation of modernist, avant-garde, and postminimalist practices even as she engages pressing sociopolitics and economic issues of the present. These illustrated essays address the full span of Genzken's work, from the elegant floor sculptures with which she began her career to the assemblages, bursting with color and bristling with bric-a-brac, that she has produced since the beginning of the millennium. The texts, by writers including Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and the artist herself, consider her formation in the West German milieu; her critique of conventions of architecture, reconstruction, and memorialization; her sympathy with mass culture; and her ongoing interrogation of public and private spheres. Two texts appear in English for the first time, including a quasi-autobiographical screenplay written by Genzken in 1993. Contributors Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Diedrich Diederichsen, Hal Foster, Isa Genzken, Isabelle Graw, Lisa Lee, Pamela M. Lee, Birgit Pelzer, Juliane Rebentisch, Josef Strau, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lawrence Weiner Contents Isa Genzken: Two Exercises (1974) * Birgit Pelzer: Axiomatics Subject to Withdrawal (1979) * Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: Isa Genzken: The Fragment as Model (1992) * Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: Isa Genzken: Fuck the Bauhaus. Architecture, Design, and Photography in Reverse (2014) * Isa Genzken: Sketches for a Feature Film (1993) * Isabelle Graw: Free to Be Dependent: Concessions in the Work of Isa Genzken (1996) * Diedrich Diederichsen: Subjects at the End of the Flagpole (2000) * Pamela M. Lee: The Skyscraper at Ear Level (2003) * Benjamin H. D. Buchloh: All Things Being Equal (2005) * Wolfgang Tillmans: Isa Genzken: A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans (2003) * Diedrich Diederichsen: Diedrich Diederichsen in Conversation with Isa Genzken (2006) * Lisa Lee: "Make Life Beautiful!" The Diabolic in the Work of Isa Genzken (A Tour Through Berlin, Paris, and New York) (2007) * Lawrence Weiner: Isa Genzken Again (2010) * Juliane Rebentisch: The Dialectic of Beauty: On the Work of Isa Genzken (2007) * Yve-Alain Bois: The Bum and the Architect (2007) * Josef Strau: Isa Genzken: Sculpture as Narrative Urbanism (2009) * Hal Foster: Fantastic Destruction (2014)

The most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Faith Ringgold, whose groundbreaking art and political activism span more than sixty years - featuring a stellar line-up of contributors and an unprecedented collection of images Faith Ringgold is a critically acclaimed American artist whose unique methods of visual storytelling have documented and advanced art historical, feminist, and civil-rights movements for more than half a century. Accompanying a major retrospective at the New Museum, New York, this expansive survey covers work from all periods of her career, including her early civil rights-era figurative paintings, her graphic political protest posters, and her signature experimental story quilts.

First published in 1996. The art of the extraordinary French artist, Henri Matisse (1869- 1954), has provided visual pleasures and intellectual challenges to its viewers for the last hundred years. This is collection of gathered, summarized, and evaluated major literature on the artist primarily from France, the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, where major Matisse collections bear witness to early and intense interest in the artist's work.

Women artists have made a huge contribution to contemporary mainstream art, and their rise to international prominence has accompanied the development of feminism, feminist theory and history of art. Jo Anna Isaak's important new study of the work of women artists discusses the work of individual women artists in the context of contemporary art practices and in relation to key feminist issues in art history.
Isaak looks at the work of a diverse range of artists including women from the United States, the former Soviet Union and the United Kingdom - discussing, among others, the work of Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman and the Guerilla Girls. Isaak discusses work by 20th century Soviet women artists, providing a fascinating case study of the production of art in non-Western economic, political and ideological circumstances.

Handsome and collectible, the books are produced to the highest standards. Each volume contains full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography. Now back in print, the series was awarded the first annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the International Center of Photography. Elliott Erwitt (b. 1928), an American by adoption, has a humorous outlook that is reflected in his always elegant work. His photographs take advantage of the sudden coincidence, the fortuitous conjunction of objects and events, to reveal the ridiculous or comical sides of everyday life. Dogs are a favorite subject for Erwitt, often serving as a witty metaphor for human foibles.

Jo Spence was one of Britain's pioneering photographers. Born into a working-class London family, she worked for many years as a studio photographer. Her political concerns led to documentary photography. Soon after completing her degree in the theory and practice of photography, she discovered she had breast cancer. Through her struggle to come to terms with the illness, to find non-invasive treatments and to share her experience with others, she developed unique ways of using photography.
"Cultural Sniping" brings together a wide range of Jo Spence's photographs and writings for the first time. Through images and texts she explores complex issues of gender, class, health and the body, and their impact on her understanding of personal history and the construction of identity.
"Cultural Sniping" includes images from Spence's early work in documentary photography and from her pioneering photo-therapy projects, undertaken in collaboration with other photographers. In her later work Spence faces up to the experience of illness and dying, and "Cultural Sniping" reproduces work from her "Return to Nature" and "Death Mask" series, in which she tries to come to terms with the reality of death. Jo Spence's commitment to engaging with personal experience, political understanding and critical theory make her writing and photography a vital contribution to our understanding of the politics of representation.

From court portraits for the Spanish royals to horrific scenes of conflict and suffering, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) made a mark as one of Spain's most revered and controversial artists. A master of form and light, his influence reverberates down the centuries, inspiring and fascinating artists from the Romantic Eugene Delacroix to Britart enfants terribles, the Chapman brothers. Born in Fuendetodos, Spain, in 1746, Goya was apprenticed to the Spanish royal family in 1774, where he produced etchings and tapestry cartoons for grand palaces and royal residences across the country. He was also patronized by the aristocracy, painting commissioned portraits of the rich and powerful with his increasingly fluid and expressive style. Later, after a bout of illness, the artist moved towards darker etchings and drawings, introducing a nightmarish realm of witches, ghosts, and fantastical creatures. It was, however, with his horrific depictions of conflict that Goya achieved enduring impact. Executed between 1810 and 1820, The Disasters of War was inspired by atrocities committed during the Spanish struggle for independence from the French and penetrated the very heart of human cruelty and sadism. The bleak tones, agitated brushstrokes, and aggressive use of Baroque-like light and dark contrasts recalled Velazquez and Rembrandt, but Goya's subject matter was unprecedented in its brutality and honesty. In this introductory book from TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 we set out to explore the full arc of Goya's remarkable career, from elegant court painter to deathly seer of suffering and grotesquerie. Along the way, we encounter such famed portraits as Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga, the dazzling Naked Maja, and The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, one of the most heart-stopping images of war in the history of art. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Based on a rich range of primary sources and manuscripts, "A Rossetti Family Chronology" breaks exciting new ground. Focusing on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the "Chronolgy" deomstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, reviews, finances, relationships, health and detailing literary and artistic influences. Drawing on many unpublished sources, including family letters and diaries, this new volume in the" Author Chronologies" series will be of value to all students and scholars of the Rossettis.

In a first, this anthology presents essays by art historians and cultural scientists from both sides of the Atlantic to rediscover, analyze and contextualize the rich and largely unknown art of Winold Reiss, opening up a new, previously untapped archive of multicultural Modernism. The German-American artist, who was born in Karlsruhe in 1886 and arrived in New York in 1913, defies instant categorization. With his dual background in fine arts and applied arts he set out to bridge the gulf between "high" and "low" art introducing a bold use of color to the American art scene and to interior design. In his portraits Reiss captured the multi-ethnic diversity of the US. His specific blend of cultural otherness, primitivism, and depictions of ethnicity challenged the conventions of the time.