Devoted wife and mother. Acclaimed novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. At a time when society expected women to concentrate on family and hearth, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) published twelve novels, four short story collections, almost two dozen stories and essays, and innumerable illustrations. In "Mary Hallock Foote, " Darlis A. Willer examines the life of this gifted and spirited woman from the East as she adapted herself and her artistic vision to the West.

Foote's images of the American West differed sharply from those offered by male artists and writers of the time. She depicted a more gentle West, a domestic West of families and settlements rather than a Wild West of soldiers, American Indians, and cowboys. Miller examines how Foote's career was molded by the East-West tensions she experienced throughout her adult life and by society's expectations of womanhood and motherhood.

This biography recounts Foote's Quaker upbringing; her education at the School of Design for Women at Cooper Union, New York; her marriage to Arthur De Wint Foote, including his alcohol problems; her life in Boise, Idaho, and later Grass Valley, California; her grief over the early death of daughter Agnes Foote; and the previously unexplored last two decades of her life.

Miller has made extensive use of every major archive of letters and documents by and about Foote. She sheds light on Foote's numerous stories, essays, and novels. And examines all pertinent sources on Foote's life and works.

Anyone interested in the American West, women's history, or life histories in general will find Miller's biography of Mary Hallock Foote fascinating,

Frank Lloyd Wright is one of the 20th century's best-known architects. Over 40 years after his death, historical and critical comment and debate are increasing and controversy continues to surround him. This volume is a chronologically arranged, annotated bibliography of English- and foreign-language sources including over 3,500 primary entries, with thousands more connected references, presented alphabetically by decades and genres. The book documents not only the literature on Wright from 1886 to the present, but also his own extensive writings. It covers source books, monographs, anthologies, exhibition catalogues, book and exhibition reviews, periodical articles, and obituaries. All references are indexed by personal names, buildings, and projects. There is also a photo-essay comprised entirely of images published here for the first time, and a comprehensive chronology of the architect's life and career, which spanned 70 years and produced about 450 buildings and almost 550 unrealized architectural projects. The book will be of great value to scholars, students, and practitioners.

KURT JACKSON

A new book about the British landscape painter Kurt Jackson (b. 1961).

This new hardback edition includes many new illustrations. including photographs taken for this new edition. The text has been completely updated.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 4:

One of Kurt Jackson s appealing concepts is that the ocean is one of the last true wildernesses left on the planet. It s an idea that I found very interesting when he explained it to me when we first met in St Just. I took it that he meant a spiritual as well as an ecological or natural wilderness. Jackson s art can thus be seen as an art that is the border region between humanity and nature, between culture and nature, as well as literally tackling that area the coast which is neither land nor sea.

Note that Kurt Jackson is always facing outwards from the land, and looking towards the ocean, not painting with his back to the sea, and looking towards the land (and notice that the many boats and ships and helicopters and such in this area are left out of the paintings, too).

So Jackson s Porth series, about Priest Cove, and all of his sea paintings, are very important in his art in articulating this idea of the ocean as the last wilderness. Have you ever wondered what s out there? is a question that Kurt Jackson asks (it s the title of one of his major paintings, too the centrepiece of the Porth series).

Jackson has repeated the question over a number of related works: the title of two 2004 pieces is The Last Wilderness In Western Europe? This was painted on Jura (in Scotland), and both pictures are consciously emptied of human marks just empty moorland and a delicate blue sky. An earlier picture, part of the Cape series, was entitled Do You Ever Wonder What s Out There? (1999) an unusual composition in the Jackson oeuvre which puts the horizon very high, and focusses on the dark blue ocean flecked with white spray.

Kurt Jackson isn t that interested in many of the connotations of the ocean the moon, time, goddesses, rebirth (though moons do appear in his art from time to time). He s not really interested in religious or pagan or magical symbols in that way. And he s not that interested in shipping, fishing, and all things maritime, like J.M.W. Turner was.

But when Jackson asks a question like have you ever wondered what s out there?, and considers the sea as one of the last wildernesses, that alters the interpretation of his sea paintings. It doesn t apply to all of them, though: in plenty of paintings (and not only the smaller or more modest ones), Jackson is not thinking in terms of big themes. But when he titles a painting Have You Ever Wondered What s Out There? (and writes the title in big letters across the painting), it s clearly intended to resonate in the viewer at a deeper level.

"Fascinating and lucid . . . a stunningly illustrated and illuminating life of a singular painter." - Sue Roe, Wall Street Journal "Not just another art history book, no title in recent memory recalls with such exactitude the style of an era that, in retrospect, has become increasingly golden. . . . The book and its prose shimmer." - New York Times "Never before have Sargent's talents been so gloriously displayed as they are here. Quite simply, this Abbeville edition is a stunner, a book as satisfyingly extravagant as a Sargent portrait." - Christian Science Monitor "The spontaneity, elegance, and grace that characterize Sargent's work are everywhere evident on these large, luminous pages. . . . A visual delight, well written." - Art and Antiques The classic monograph on a much-loved artist-reissued in a spectacular oversize format In the early work of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Henry James saw "the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the threshold of its career has nothing more to learn." Sargent's talent, nay, genius was indeed uncanny, sustained with equal intensity through his famed society portraits, like the scandalous Madame X; his full-size showpieces, like The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit; his thousands of watercolours executed en plein air from Venice to Corfu to Maine to Montana; and his ambitious mural decorations for the public monuments of Boston. In Carter Ratcliff, Sargent has found a biographer and critic nearly his match in style and subtlety. Ratcliff expertly evokes the expatriate American milieu into which the artist was born, and offers penetrating insights into every phase of his career, every aspect of his work. Now, for the first time, this landmark monograph is offered in a special oversize format, with all of its 310 illustrations reproduced in stunning full colour, many at full-page size, allowing the reader to appreciate the master's every brushstroke. This new edition of John Singer Sargent will be a treasured reference for artists and an unalloyed delight for art lovers.

American artist, Joan Jonas' experimental projects in the late sixties and early seventies were essential to the development of contemporary performance, video, and conceptual art. Born in New York in 1936, she is regarded as a pioneer of video art and performance. Her work fuses video, dance, theatre, sculpture, drawing. Her projects have included collaborations with dancers like Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer and composers like Alvin Lucier. She investigates space, perception and time, ritual gestures, symbolic objects and stereotypes (especially female cliches), and the magical role of the narrator who conveys a drama in each action.

Van Eyck is now seen as the artist who bridged the gap between the medieval and the modern. His story is the story of modern art - the turbulent clash of ideologies, the shifting and making of taste, the perfect timing of historical event and technological change, the politics of the art world and the cult of celebrity. The Enlightenment had quietly placed van Eyck in the Gothic tradition. Then Napoleon looted panels of his masterwork, the Ghent Altar-piece, and took them back to the Louvre. With his work centre stage in the greatest art gallery of the time, interest in van Eyck exploded across Europe. The nineteenth century saw the arrival of van Eyck mania, with ever-more fanciful tales in the art press of his life as inventor of oil painting, monkish painter, even arsonist and murderer; with scenes from his life, cheap colour prints and van Eyck carpets and mirrors vying for popular consumption; and with the claiming of van Eyck as the first Pre-Raphaelite. Today, van Eyck is regarded as the first realist painter, with popular and scholarly attention shifted from the Ghent Altar-piece - also looted by Hitler and stored in an Austrian salt-mine during the Second World War - to the riddle of his celebrated Arnolfini Portrait. Inventing van Eyck tells the extraordinary story of the making of an artist for the modern age.

In 1951, Joan Eardley visited the coastal fishing village of Catterline in north-east Scotland for the first time. Her visit sparked a fascination that would last the rest of her life. She made the village her home and found inspiration in the dramatic light and rapidly changing weather. The gentle landscapes and wild rolling seascapes she painted of Catterline in wind, snow, rain and sun are among her best-loved works. Unpublished archival material and interviews with many of those who knew her shed new light on Eardley's life in Catterline. A vivid portrait is painted both of Eardley and of the village, showing the vital part Catterline played in her development as an artist. The story of her experiences on the wild Scottish coast is evocatively told and beautifully illustrated with some of her most remarkable drawings and paintings.

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.

THE ART OF ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

This is the most comprehensive and detailed study of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and is the only full-length exploration of Goldsworthy and his art available anywhere.

Fully illustrated, with a revised text. Bibliography and notes.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON GOLDSWORTHY S LEAFWORKS

It is the leafworks that are the most colourful of Andy Goldsworthy s sculptures. What the leaf sculptures show is how beautiful the colours of nature are: Goldsworthy shows the viewer these subtle colours by contrasting one leaf with another. Maple patch grouped the red/ orange/ yellow of Japanese maple leaves together; Poppy leaves contrasted the red poppy leaves against the mid-green of an elderberry bush; a Stone Wood sculpture of 1992 consisted of poppy leaves wrapped around a hazel branch, the red constrasting vividly with the wet green leaves; Dock Leaves interwove red leaves in green grass stalks. Two sycamore leafworks of 1980 and 1981 are very simple: a leaf black from cow shit is placed against pale Autumn leaves; another leaf, bleached white, is set down on a bed of dark leaves. He pins together two colours of sycamore leaves (sycamore is a favourite Goldsworthy medium) in Sycamore leaf sections (1988), and hangs the line of leaves from a tree. Shot with the sun behind them, the photograph of the leaves shows them glowing green and gold, the two classic colours of poetry and alchemy. The Autumnal colours of course connote nostalgia, decadence, sensuality, Romanticism, time passing, the decay of the year, and so on, all those things John Keats wrote about in his Ode: To Autumn, and in a billion other poets art. Goldsworthy s aim in the leaf pieces, though, draws attention to the fragility and delicacy of leaves, as well as their strength and function. A leaf, after all, is a complex biological factory, so the natural scientists say. There is a whole world in a single leaf, remarked Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy s leafworks do not have a scientific agenda. Rather, they celebrate the presence of leaves, the being-in-the-world of leaves, so to speak.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.