When we look at a painting hanging on an art gallery wall, we see only what the artist has chosen to disclose--the finished work of art. What remains mysterious is the process of creation itself--the making of the work of art. Everyone who has looked at paintings has wondered about this, and numerous efforts have been made to discover and depict the creative method of important artists. A Giacometti Portrait is a picture of one of the century's greatest artists at work.

James Lord sat for eighteen days while his friend Alberto Giamcometti did his portrait in oil. The artist painted, and the model recorded the sittings and took photographs of the work in its various stages. What emerged was an illumination of what it is to be an artist and what it was to be Giacometti--a portrait in prose of the man and his art. A work of great literarydistinction, A Giacometti Portrait is, above all, a subtle and important evocation of a great artist.

Frederick Law Olmsted's career as a landscape architect was long and varied. The best-known fruits of that career were surely the great urban parks: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston. But most of this took place after the Civil War. Prior to 1865, Olmsted had built a public reputation as an author and journalist (producing three historically important books on slavery and the antebellum South) and as General Secretary of the Sanitary Commission of the Union Forces, the committee in charge of organizing medical treatment for the military during the war. He had also previously been an apprentice merchant, a seaman, a farmer, and manager of a mining plantation in California. His life had been marked by innumerable illnesses and accidents. His personality was notable for its contentiousness and obsessiveness.

Working from Olmsted's own personal and professional writings, Melvin Kalfus seeks to establish in this, the first biography of Olmstead to appear in a decade and a half, the connections between the many facets of Olmstead's life and work. Kalfus shows how Olmsted's childhood afflictions provided him with the inner sources of his creative imagination, provided the symbolism that was the linguistic and visual vocabulary employed in his work, fired his ambition, and led him so obsessively to seek the world's esteem through his works. Finally, Kalfus argues that Olmsted's individual psychodynamics fitted him uniquely to the role of the creative professional in public life-- the agent (or "delegate") for his society's needs-- needs that were unspoken as well as spoken.

The fourteen paintings reviewed in this study chronicle industrial artist Howard L. Worner's interpretation of the steel industry. By employing ethnographic techniques to his art, Worner contributed much to the understanding of the 'culture of work.' Worner identified closely with the occupational community he was painting by becoming an observer as well as a participant. Over time, he developed a rapport with the community and an acute understanding of its environmental processes. Worner used vibrant color, on-location painting, and a deep understanding of his subject to powerfully depict the rich culture of the steel mills. This book will provide students of art education a better understanding of the genre through artistic ethnography and interpretation, as well as an excellent overview of industrial art.

Glorious Catastrophe presents a detailed critical analysis of the work of Jack Smith from the early 1960s until his AIDS-related death in 1989. Dominic Johnson argues that Smith's work offers critical strategies for rethinking art's histories after 1960. Heralded by peers as well as later generations of artists, Smith is an icon of the New York avant-garde. Nevertheless, he is conspicuously absent from dominant histories of American culture in the 1960s, as well as from narratives of the impact that decade would have on coming years. Smith poses uncomfortable challenges to cultural criticism and historical analysis, which Glorious Catastrophe seeks to uncover. The first critical analysis of Smith's practices across visual art, film, performance, and writing, the study employs extensive, original archival research carried out in Smith's personal papers, and unpublished interviews with friends and collaborators. It will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the life and art of Jack Smith, and the greater histories that he interrupts, including those of experimental arts practices, and the development of sexual cultures.

Craving pleasure as well as knowledge, Raphael Sanzio was quick to realize that his talent would only be truly appreciated in the liberal, carefree and extravagantly sensual atmosphere of Rome during its golden age under Julius II and Leo X. Arriving in the city in 1508 at the age of twenty-five, he was entranced and seduced by life at the papal court and within a few months had emerged as the most brilliant star in its intellectual firmament. His art achieved a natural grace that was totally uninhibited and free from subjection. His death, at just thirty-seven, plunged the city into the kind of despair that follows the passing of an esteemed and much loved prince.In this major new biography Antonio Forcellino retraces the meteoric arc of Raphael's career by re-examining contemporary documents and accounts and interpreting the artist's works with the eye of an expert art restorer. Raphael's paintings are vividly described and placed in their historical context. Forcellino analyses Raphael's techniques for producing the large frescos for which he is so famous, examines his working practices and his organization of what was a new kind of artistic workshop, and shows how his female portraits expressed and conveyed a new attitude to women. This rich and nuanced account casts aside the misconceptions passed on by those critics who persistently tried to undermine Raphael's mythical status, enabling one of the greatest artists of all time to re-emerge fully as both man and artist.

Focusing on his evocative and profound references to children and their stories, Children's Stories and 'Child-Time' in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde studies the relationship between the artist's work on childhood and his search for a transfigured concept of time. This study also situates Cornell and his art in the broader context of the transatlantic avant-garde of the 1930s and 40s. Analisa Leppanen-Guerra explores the children's stories that Cornell perceived as fundamental in order to unpack the dense network of associations in his under-studied multimedia works. Moving away from the usual focus on his box constructions, the author directs her attention to Cornell's film and theater scenarios, 'explorations', 'dossiers', and book-objects. One highlight of this study is a work that may well be the first artist's book of its kind, and has only been exhibited twice: Untitled (Journal d'Agriculture Pratique), presented as Cornell's enigmatic tribute to Lewis Carroll's Alice books.

A significant publication of original writing on Lucian Freud, including interviews with leading contemporary artists, marking the 100th anniversary of his birth Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was one of the greatest figurative painters of the twentieth century. With an unflinching eye and an uncompromising commitment to his work, he created masterpieces that continue to inspire contemporary artists to the present day. Spanning nearly 70 years, Freud's career has often been overshadowed by his biography and celebrity. This book re-examines his paintings through a broad series of original approaches. Texts by a variety of rising and established international writers explore topics ranging from the compositional echoes of old master paintings in Freud's works, to the contextualization of his practice within the class struggles of 1980s Britain. Throughout the book, leading contemporary painters such as Tracey Emin and Chantal Joffe give insightful testimony to the relevance of Freud today. Marking the 100th anniversary of Freud's birth, this publication accompanies the first major exhibition of his work in 10 years. Presenting fresh perspectives on his paintings, it introduces Freud to a new generation of scholars and enthusiasts - demonstrating his lasting international importance. Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London October 1, 2022-January 22, 2023 Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid February 14-June 18, 2023

The first book-length feminist analysis of Eileen Gray's work, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In argues that Gray's unusual architecture and design - as well as its history of abuse and neglect - emerged from her involvement with cultures of sapphic modernism. Bringing together a range of theoretical and historical sources, from architecture and design, communication and media, to gender and sexuality studies, Jasmine Rault shows that Gray shared with many of her female contemporaries a commitment to designing spaces for sexually dissident modernity. This volume examines Gray's early lacquer work and Romaine Brooks' earliest nude paintings; Gray's first built house, E.1027, in relation to Radclyffe Hall and her novel The Well of Loneliness; and Gray's private house, Tempe A Pailla, with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. While both female sexual dissidence and modernist architecture were reduced to rigid identities through mass media, women such as Gray, Brooks, Hall and Barnes resisted the clarity of such identities with opaque, non-communicative aesthetics. Rault demonstrates that by defying the modern imperative to publicity, clarity and identity, Gray helped design a sapphic modernity that cultivated the dynamism of uncertain bodies and unfixed pleasures, which depended on staying in rather than coming out.

Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore (1692-1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore's small oil painting known as The Angel of Mercy (1746, Yale), one of the most shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art. The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted fi gure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story - certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the `modern moral subject' of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this signifi cant British artist. Highmore expert, Jacqueline Riding, will set this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist's life and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This will include exploration of superb examples of Highmore's portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale `conversations' The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family, juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the Foundling Museum's Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore's `Pamela' series, inspired by Samuel Richardson's bestselling novel. Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues around the status and care of women and children, master/servant relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder.

A beautiful new gift art book all about Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist behind the first truly Expressionist picture The Scream. Absorbed by such motifs as love, life, death and anguish, Munch's paintings captured the psychological feelings evoked by man. Beginning with a fresh and captivating introduction to Munch's life and art, the book showcases several of his works in all their glory.

A classic monograph in the World of Art series, offering a a detailed insight into Rembrandt's life and work. Rembrandt is among the few Old Master artists to retain universal appeal among art lovers today, his striking self-portraits lauded the world over - yet he remains an elusive, enigmatic figure. Here, the distinguished art historian Christopher White carefully considers the known facts to build a sensitive and thorough account of the artist's life and work. He describes the radiant happiness of Rembrandt's marriage, tragically cut short by the death of his wife, and discusses the catastrophe of his bankruptcy. The psychological factors that may have awakened Rembrandt's sudden interest in landscape are also explored, as is the artist's final decade, when he retreated into the private world of his imagination. This comprehensive introduction has now been revised and updated to reflect recent scholarship, and the bibliography has been expanded; Rembrandt's artworks are now faithfully reproduced in colour throughout.

The paintings of Wei Xiong's 'Unaltered Landscapes' are exuberant, mythic and boundless in their expansiveness and energy. Working with an alternately muted and sometimes bold and colorful palette, Xiong poses a series of questions within these mostly large-scale oil paintings - questions about mortality, our connectivity to the earth, and our often-complex relationship to the divine.

Susan Herbert's delightful feline reimaginings of famous scenes from art, theatre, opera, ballet and film have won her a devoted following. This unprecedented new compilation of her best paintings provides an irresistible introduction to her feline world. An array of cat characters take the starring roles in a variety of instantly recognizable settings. The masterpieces of Western art retain their distinctive styles while being cleverly filled with furry faces and pussycat tails. Cats then take to the stage in Shakespearean dramas and lavishly staged opera productions. The final stop is Hollywood, where cats are cast in everything from big-budget epics to cult classics, emulating the timeless glamour of the golden age of cinema. From Botticelli's Birth of Venus through Puccini's Tosca to James Dean and Lawrence of Arabia, Susan Herbert's brilliantly observed feline dramatis personae are a joy to discover.

The worldwide interest in automatic organs is larger now than ever before. From delicate and musically sublime little organs contained in musical clocks of the type Mozart and Haydn composed music for, through to enormous and loud dancehall and street organs, the genre exists to please everybody and to suit all tastes. This comprehensive, yet delightful and easy-to-read, reference unlocks the mysteries of mechanical versions of the King of Instruments and its smaller counterparts. 79 color and 538 black and white photos display examples from 18 chapters and six Appendices that specify how automatic pipe organs work, Italian water garden organs, barrel organs, orchestrions, and street and showground organs, as well as automatic organs of the 21st century and more. The list of makers, distributors, and inventors the world over has never been available before. Now musicians, instrument collectors, owners, museums, and grateful audiences can explore the how, where, and why of these charming entertainers. The valuation and price guide includes a thoughtful discussion of the market and its variables.

John Jennings (b. 1970) is perhaps best known for his collaboration with Damian Duffy on the New York Times bestseller and Eisner Award-winning graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred. However, Jennings is also a graphic designer and comic book scholar who, throughout his career, has conducted several interviews that shed light on the importance of Black Speculative narratives. The most enlightening of his interviews are brought together in John Jennings: Conversations. As a collective these interviews explore folklore, systemic racism, his Mississippi roots, and the phrase Jennings cocreated, the Ethnogothic. Jennings discusses the necessity for black heroes, not just for the sake of diversity, but for inclusiveness, touching on the conventions he has cofounded, such as the Schomburg Center's Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He addresses the struggle to be financially compensated for work, and he speaks at length about how being a professor informs his craft where he continues to examine black stereotypes in popular culture with courses of his own design. As a group the interviews in John Jennings: Conversations give a picture of a black man forging a way where comic books have afforded him a means to carve out an important space for people of color.

In 1874 Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise caused uproar among the critics and a revolution in painting. His inventiveness was inexhaustible: with paintings of haystacks, poplars and, finally, the enchanting water-lilies of Giverny, Monet captured light in all its fleeting qualities. At last, almost blind - 'I fear the dark more than death' - he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own times. Including hundreds of beautiful reproductions and contemporary illustrations, comprehensive text, documentary witness accounts and letters, this pocket-sized book is perfect both for the lover of Monet and of the history of Impressionism.

Over the past half century, Marina Abramović has earned worldwide acclaim as a pioneer of performance art. This handsome new book records the first UK exhibition to include works from her entire career. Re-performances of some of her best-known and most radical works appear alongside new works created especially for the exhibition. An augmented reality app for iOS and Android enables readers to watch films of Abramović’s original performances while reading the book. An essential purchase for all followers of Abramović’s extraordinary 50-year career, this important new publication brings expert voices into the debate that her ground-breaking work engenders. How far should an artist push herself in pursuit of her work? What role does the audience play in creating a performance? How can performance art outlive the moment in which it takes place?

A beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanying the first ever exhibition dedicated to Julie Manet This title offers an exhaustive description of the life, work, and art collection of Julie Manet (1878-1966)-the only daughter of Berthe Morisot and the niece of E douard Manet. The book will cover several aspects of the artist's life and work, from early beginnings to her role as a collector with her husband Ernest Rouart, offering a new and richly detailed account of her role in the the arts. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, this book constitutes a definitive account of the life of Julie Manet and her entourage that brings the whole world of the arts and culture in late 19th-century and early 20th-century Paris back to life. Distributed for Editions Hazan, Paris Exhibition Schedule: Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris (October 19, 2021-March 20, 2022)

The definitive introduction to the artist Mary Cassatt, placing her work in the wider context of 19th-century feminism and art theory. A close ally of Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt was the only American painter at the heart of the Impressionist group in Paris. Highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic, Cassatt was a forthright advocate for women's intellectual, creative and political emancipation. She brought her discerning gaze and compositional inventiveness across many media to the subtle social interactions of women in public and private spaces, such as at the theatre, and in moments of intimacy with children, where she was one of the most attentive and unsentimental analysts of the infant body and the child's emerging personality. Tracing key moments in Cassatt's long career, art historian Griselda Pollock highlights Cassatt's extensive artistic training across Europe, analysing her profound study of Old Masters while revealing her intelligent understanding of both Manet and Courbet. Pollock also provides close readings of Cassatt's paintings and her singular vision of women in modernity. Now revised with a new preface, updates to the bibliography and colour illustrations throughout, this book offers a rich perspective on the core concerns of a major Impressionist artist through the frames of class, gender, space and difference.