Do you desire to show your art in a gallery, yet do not know where to begin? Gallery Ready shares best practices for visual artists, from emerging to midcareer, so they can experience optimum results in making, showing and selling their art. As an artist, you will learn what you can do to attract the attention of a gallery director. Gallery Owner, Franceska Alexander shows artists: How to make their art stand out from the crowd How to be fully prepared to meet with a important gallery decision makers How to keep their artwork fresh and collectors excited about the art Gallery Ready, A Creative Blueprint for Visual Artists, clearly illustrates what artists can do to make their art, gallery ready!

In her own charming, spirited, and readable style, Beatrice Wood tells us the story of her unorthodox life and her influence on 20th-century art. Rebellious, radical, and romantic, Wood (1893-1998) defied propriety to become a true national, and international, treasure. Her absorbing autobiography includes vintage documents and her own personal photos and sketches of her many famous friends and acquaintances in the art world. She became romantically involved with the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, and offers rare glimpses into the lives of her circle, including key cultural figures like Constantin Brancusi, Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anais Nin, and Krishnamurti. At age forty Wood studied ceramics and went on to become one of the major ceramists of the 20th century, working until her death at age 105. This captivating chance to enjoy Wood's rare charisma and spirit provides a better understanding of American art and the people who have shaped it.

Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi's stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists. Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you "can feel what the other feels" (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi's own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramovic, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971 examines the beginnings of Ono's extensive career, demonstrating her pioneering role in visual art, performance and music during the 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition begins in New York in December 1960, where Ono initiated a performance series with La Monte Young in her Chambers Street loft. Over the course of the decade, Ono earned international recognition, staging Cut Piece in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1964, exhibiting at the Indica Gallery in London in 1966, and launching her global War is Over! campaign in 1969. Ono returned to New York in the early 1970s and organized an unsanctioned `one woman show' at The Museum of Modern Art. Over forty years after Ono's unofficial MoMA debut, the Museum will present its first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the artist's work. The publication evaluates the broader cultural context of Ono's early work and features five sections reflecting her geographic locations during this period and the corresponding evolution of her artistic practice. Each chapter includes an introduction written by a guest scholar, artwork descriptions, new interviews with key figures from the time, and a selection of primary documents culled from newspapers, magazines and journals.

Digital artist Zheng Wei Gu (AKA Guweiz) shares his anime-inspired world in this beautifully produced and insightful book, leading you through his fantasy world with a portfolio packed with gritty detail and a surreal vibe. Guweiz began drawing when he was 17, inspired by an anime art tutorial on YouTube. Discovering a natural talent, he carried on drawing and quickly amassed a fan-base for his edgy illustration style. Throughout this book, readers will discover his artistic journey from the very beginning, with behind-the-scenes details about how some of his most popular pieces were created. He reveals his secrets for turning influences into truly original digital art, including that all-important narrative that takes drawing and painting beyond the purely visual. Step-by-step tutorials share techniques and tips to help you create these sorts of effects in your art, resulting in images with the depth of detail and intrigue that Guweiz has made his trademark. The artist's unique urban take on the popular manga/anime style is gripping right from the first page, from the surreal take on Japanese lifestyle to the urban fantasy he creates.

A comprehensive reference book on the life and works of Diego Valazquez, the most important painter in the Spanish Habsburg court of King Phillip IV. Featuring a wonderful gallery of his paintings, accompanied by an expert analysis of each work, and a description of his style and technique. This beautifully illustrated book is essential reading for anyone who would like to learn more about this master of painting, who influenced so many later artists.

The conflict between National Socialism and Ernst Barlach, one of the important sculptors of the twentieth century, is an unusual episode in the history of Hitler's efforts to rid Germany of 'international modernism.' Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures, but protested the injustice, and continued his work. Peter Paret's discussion of Barlach's art and struggle over creative freedom, is joined to an analysis of Barlach's opponents. Hitler's rejection of modernism, often dismissed as absurd ranting, is instead interpreted as a internally consistent and politically effective critique of liberal Western culture. That some radical national socialists nevertheless advocated a 'nordic modernism' and tried to win Barlach over, indicates the cultural cross-currents running through the early years of the Third Reich. Paret's closely focused study of an artist in a time of crisis seamlessly combines the history of modern Germany and the history of modern art. Peter Paret is Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Spruance Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, which awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Medal and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The German government has awarded him the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit. His other works include, German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (Cambridge, 2001), Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Univ, of NC, 1997), The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Harvard, 1989), and Clausewitz and the State (Oxford, 1985).

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was one of the outstanding draughtsmen of the 19th century: drawing was not only a central tenet of his art, but essential to his existence. Through an examination of the artist's drawings and pastels, Christopher Lloyd reveals the development of Degas's style as well the story of his life, including his complicated relationship with the Impressionists. Following a broadly chronological approach, the author discusses the various subject areas, not only the images of dancers (which form over half of Degas's total oeuvre) but also of nudes and milliners, and the less well-known racehorse and landscape drawings. He covers his whole career, from when Degas was copying the Old Masters to learn his craft to when he ceased work in 1912 because of failing eyesight, setting him within the artistic context of the period. Lloyd's extensive research, which includes consulting the artist's detailed notebooks, has resulted in a comprehensive exposition with, at its heart, some 250 pencil, black-chalk, pen-and-ink, and charcoal drawings and pastels of timeless appeal.

Leiji Matsumoto is one of Japan's most influential myth creators. Yet the huge scope of his work, spanning past, present and future in a constantly connecting multiverse, is largely unknown outside Japan. Matsumoto was the major creative force on Star Blazers, America's gateway drug for TV anime, and created Captain Harlock, a TV phenomenon in Europe. As well as space operas, he made manga on musicians from Bowie to Tchaikovsky, wrote the manga version of American cowboy show Laramie, and created dozens of girls' comics. He is a respected manga scholar, an expert on Japanese swords, a frustrated engineer and pilot who still wants to be a spaceman in his eighties. This collection of new essays-the first book on Matsumoto in English-covers his seven decades of comic creation, drawing on contemporary scholarship, artistic practice and fan studies to map Matsumoto's vast universe. The contributors-artists, creators, translators and scholars-mirror the range of his work and experience. From the bildungsroman to the importance of textual analysis for costume and performance, from early days in poverty to honors around the world, this volume offers previously unexplored biographical and bibliographic detail from a life story as thrilling as anything he created.

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.

The first half of this book is a detailed exploration of Turner's life and background. It begins with his early years in London, where he exhibited paintings in the window of his father's barber shop. Through his travels in Europe, copying and studying the old masters, Turner was largely self-taught until he enrolled at the Royal Academy. In 1796 one of his first oil paintings was hung there, and his success culminated in the opening of his own gallery. The second half of the book is a collection of his original works. These superb reproductions are accompanied by analysis of each painting and its significance regarding Turner's life, the period in which it was executed, his technique and his body of work as a whole. This reference book is essential for anyone who wants to learn more about one of the finest landscape painters in English history.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.

What is a moving image, and how does it move us? In Thinking In Film, celebrated theorist Mieke Bal engages in an exploration - part dialogue, part voyage - with the video installations of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila to understand movement as artistic practice and as affect. Through fifteen years of Ahtila's practice, including such seminal works as The Annunciation, Where Is Where? and The House, Bal searches for the places where theoretical and artistic practices intersect, to create radical spaces in which genuinely democratic acts are performed. Bringing together different understandings of 'figure' from form to character, Bal examines the syntax of the exhibition and its ability to bring together installations, the work itself, the physical and ontological thresholds of the installation space and the use of narrative and genre. The double meaning of 'movement', in Bal's unique thought, catalyses anunderstanding of video installation work as inherently plural, heterogenous and possessed of revolutionary political potential. The video image as an art form illuminates the question of what an image is, and the installation binds viewers to their own interactions with the space. In this context Bal argues that the intersection between movement and space creates an openness to difference and doubt. By 'thinking in' art, we find ideas not illustrated by but actualized in artworks. Bal practices this theory in action to demonstrate how the video installation can move us to think beyond ordinary boundaries and venture into new spaces. There is no act more radical than figuring a vision of the 'other' as film allows artto do. Thinking In Film is Mieke Bal ather incisive, innovative best as she opens up the miraculous political potential of the condensed art of the moving image.

Before reaching the tender age of 30, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) had already sculpted Pieta and David, two of the most famous sculptures in the entire history of art. As a sculptor, painter, draftsman, and architect, the achievements of this Italian master are unique-no artist before or after him has ever produced such a vast, multifaceted, and wide-ranging oeuvre. This fresh TASCHEN edition traces Michelangelo's ascent to the cultural elite of the Renaissance. Ten richly illustrated chapters cover the artist's paintings, sculptures, and architecture, including a close analysis of the artist's tour de force frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Full-page reproductions and enlarged details allow readers to appreciate the finest details in the artist's repertoire, while the book's biographical essay considers Michelangelo's more personal traits and circumstances, such as his solitary nature, his thirst for money and commissions, his immense wealth, and his skill as a property investor.

A wide-ranging collection of essays written for the William Morris Society exploring the various intersections between the life, work and achievements of William Morris (1834-1896) and that of John Ruskin (1819-1900). Subjects covered include Ruskin's connection with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the promotion of craft skills and meaningful work, Morris and the division of labour, Ruskin's engagement with education and the environment, Ruskin and the art and architecture of Red House, the parallels between Ruskin's support for Laxey Mill and Morris's Merton Abbey Works, the illustrated manuscript and the contrasts between Ruskin's Tory paternalism and Morris's revolutionary socialism. The book includes articles first published in The Journal of William Morris Studies between 1977 and 2012 and new pieces written especially for this volume. Ruskin's beliefs had a profound and lasting impact on Morris who wrote, upon first reading Ruskin whilst at Oxford University, that his views offered a "new road on which the world should travel" - a road that led Morris to social and political change.