Intimate portraits from one of the most innovative figurative artists of the twentieth century and the master of painted flesh. Curated by the artist's longtime studio assistant and friend, David Dawson, this important volume features twenty major and rarely seen paintings by Lucian Freud (1922-2011). The book begins with works from 1990, when Freud began painting the performance artist Leigh Bowery: these large-scale portraits of Bowery ushered in a new sense of monumentality in the artist's oeuvre. Inspired by Bowery's impressive physique, Freud began working on a larger scale, which emphasized the physical presence of his subjects. Despite their grand scale, Freud's subjects are still depicted with a sense of intimacy, penetrating honesty, and psychological depth. The naked body is a subject that has special significance in Freud's oeuvre. Nakedness was a way for Freud to get a more truthful portrait. Freud's probing oils get fresh consideration in this monograph and Dawson provides insights and stories about Freud working on these portraits, giving an intriguing behind-the-scenes look at the life of a contemporary master of representational art.

A startlingly powerful collaboration reimagines female beauty What is beauty without pain? Compromise is what our culture offers women: cinching, pinching, cutting, shaving, scraping, starving, and, of course, lifting and separating, all in service of one sharply circumscribed model purported to be pleasing-but not to most, if any, women. This extraordinary book reimagines beauty at its most provocative and fetishized locus: the female breast. Artist, writer, and scholar Joanna Frueh scrutinizes ideals of beauty and sensuality, often motivated by her experiences with breast cancer. Frances Murray, her friend and collaborator for more than thirty years, documents Frueh's journey of unapologetic beauty in a series of intimate, dazzlingly original photographs before and after her bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy. Reflecting with insight, directness, and humor-and with contributions from a breast surgeon, an oncologist, and artists and scholars who have had breast cancer-Frueh arrives at a new, liberating view of beauty and of the sensual pleasure found in transformative self-acceptance. Central to this reckoning is her documentation and critique of the notion of hyperbeauty (the flash of flesh appeal, hyperthin, hyperfeminine, hyperbosomy, hypersexy, and hyperyoung sold at the global 24/7 beauty bazaar) and her playful, inventive presentation of tools for remaking minds and hearts disfigured by self-denying ideals. In its bracing critique, passionate argument, and compelling narrative-all illustrative of its own unapologetic beauty-this collaboration is a performance of startling power, stirring to consider and a pleasure to behold.

In 1970 in Munich Gerhard Richter met Brigid Berlin alias Brigid Polk, Andy Warhol's legendary muse and enfant terrible of New York's high society. This meeting gave rise to Richter's important "Brigid Polk" series, based on Polaroid self-portraits by the eccentric artist: a dialogue between America and Europe, photography and painting, artist and muse. The series about Brigid Polk is an important record of Gerhard Richter's photo paintings. It is exemplary of his struggle for a new self-concept of painting in dialogue with photography. This volume is the first to pay extensive tribute to this multifaceted series and traces the history of its creation, which revolved Heiner Friedrich, an important gallery owner in Munich. The personal reminiscences of those who were present at the time are particularly evocative of the avant-garde art scene of the 1970s.

Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibition Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are. Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

Based on new research this fascinating book draws together a group of works from public and private collections to examine, for the first time, the relationship that Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) had with the theatrical world and the most celebrated stage artists of his day, such as James Quin, David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. Gainsborough painted notable portraits of these and twenty others, including dramatists, dancers and composers. This publication firmly establishes the artist's place within the theatrical worlds of Bath and London and shows why the art of ballet, and in particular Gainsborough's sitters, rose to prominence in 1780 and examines parallels between Gainsborough's much admired painterly naturalism and the theatrical naturalism of Garrick and Siddons with whom he had personal friendships.

The North Sea oil industry plays a vital role in the UK economy. Oil was first pumped ashore thirty years ago and based on current estimates there are still thirty further years of oil reserves to be claimed from the sea. This exhibition aims to capture the vibrant community of people working throughout the sector. Scottish portrait painter Fionna Carlisle will create 24 new portraits representing a cross section of the people working in the oil industry, from employees of major international corporations to the self-employed. There are portraits of geologists, rig-builders, economists, helicopter pilots, the technical and service staff on the rigs themselves, and many others - all of whom have been chosen to represent the many aspects of this vital industry.

Challenging prevailing theories regarding the birth of the subject, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather in the theory and practice of portraiture in early-twentieth-century Vienna. Soussloff traces the development in Vienna of an ethics of representation that emphasized subjects as socially and historically constructed selves who could only be understood-and understand themselves-in relation to others, including the portrait painters and the viewers. In this beautifully illustrated book, she demonstrates both how portrait painters began to focus on the interior lives of their subjects and how the discipline of art history developed around the genre of portraiture.Soussloff combines a historically grounded examination of art and art historical thinking in Vienna with subsequent theories of portraiture and a careful historiography of philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to human consciousness from Hegel to Sartre and from Freud to Lacan. She chronicles the emergence of a social theory of art among the art historians of the Vienna School, demonstrates how the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka depicted the Jewish subject, and explores the development of pictorialist photography. Reflecting on the implications of the visualized, modern subject for textual and linguistic analyses of subjectivity, Soussloff concludes that the Viennese art historians, photographers, and painters will henceforth have to be recognized as precursors to such better-known theorists of the subject as Sartre, Foucault, and Lacan.

Faces of Power and Piety is the second in the Medieval Imagination series of small, affordable books that draw on manuscript illuminations in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Library. Each volume focuses on a particular theme to provide an accessible and delightful introduction to the imagination of the medieval world. The vivid and charming faces featured in this volume include portraits of both illustrious historical figures and celebrated contemporaries. They reveal that medieval artists often disregarded physical appearance in favor of emphasizing qualities such as power and piety, capturing how their subjects wished to be remembered for the ages. Faces of Power and Piety also looks at the development of portraiture in the modern sense during the Renaissance, when likeness became an important component of portrait painting. An exhibition of the same name will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from August 12 through October 26, 2008.

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

There was a time in America when two men pictured with their arms wrapped around each other, or perhaps holding hands, weren't necessarily seen as sexually involved - a time when such gestures could be seen simply as those of intimate friendship rather than homoeroticism. Such is the time John Ibson evokes in "Picturing Men", a striking visual record of changes in attitudes about relationships between gentlemen, soldiers, cowboys, students, lumberjacks, sailors, and practical jokers. Spanning from 1850 to 1950, the 142 everyday photographs that richly illustrate "Picturing Men" radiate playfulness, humor, and warmth. They portray a lost world for American men: a time when their relationships with each other were more intimate than they commonly are today, regardless of sexual orientation. "Picturing Men" starkly contrasts the calm affection displayed in earlier photographs with the absence of intimacy in photos from the mid-1950s on. In doing so, this lively, accessible book makes a significant contribution to American history and cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of photography.