American art megastar Julian Schnabel (born 1951) has made a metier of both painting and film, and while he is equally acclaimed for his achievements in each of these disciplines, the works have often been kept separate in the public eye. Yet Schnabel's painting has drawn on cinematic imagery for years, often connecting otherwise disparate work via this theme, and his award-winning films have drawn on art both formally and as subject matter-most famously in the 1996 hit "Basquiat." Schnabel himself resists categorization: "I make art," he says,"whether it is painting, writing, photography or making a movie." This survey of Schnabel's career to date presents the artist's painterly production, from the 1970s through to the present, juxtaposing his large-scale paintings with his numerous critically acclaimed movies-"Basquiat" (1996), "Before Night Falls" (2000), "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (2007) and his newest film "Miral," which addresses the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The complete scripts of each of these movies are featured, punctuated with stills chosen by Schnabel. Published for the Art Gallery of Ontario's 2010 survey, "Julian Schnabel: Art and Film" is the first appraisal of how Schnabel works across media, bridging painting, writing and cinema.
Julian Schnabel was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His first solo show was at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1976, but it was with his 1979 exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York that Schnabel first asserted his presence as a figurehead for new possibilities in painting. Retrospectives of his work have been mounted by Tate Gallery, London (1983), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1987) and Museo Nacionale Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid (2004), among many others. He made his cinematic debut in 1996 with his account of the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which starred Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" earned him Best Director both at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes, and an Academy Award nomination in this same category.

Kasimir Malevich's (1878-1935) sudden and startling realization of a nonrepresentational way of painting, which he called Suprematism, stands as a seminal moment in twentieth-century art. Rainer Crone and David Moos trace the artist's development from his beginnings in the Ukraine to his involvement with Futurist circles in Moscow through to the late 1920s and beyond. They convincingly demonstrate that Malevich's late representational painting, still widely misunderstood, solidifies his extraordinarily inventive stance. Against the historical background of distinctly Russian progressive cultural and scientific movements, the authors define affinities between Malevich's work and other nonpolitical revolutions: relativity and quantum theory in physics; the work of Roman Jakobson and the Prague School in linguistics; and the exploration of language in the writings of the poet Velimir Khlebnikov. They situate the artist within the fundamental epistemological shift from nineteenth-century objectivity to an all-pervasive modernist subjectivity, relying upon Malevich's contribution to illustrate the ways cultural production is mediated through various modes of transmission. Rainer Crone holds the Chair for Twentieth Century Art at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita t, Munich, and is adjunct professor of art history at Columbia University. David Moos is a doctoral candidate in art history at Columbia University."

Winner, Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in Publication and Melva J. Dwyer AwardIain Baxter legally changed his name to IAIN BAXTER& in 2005. He appended an ampersand to his name to underscore that art is about connectivity -- about contingency and collaboration with a viewer. He also effected the name change to perpetuate a strategy of self re-definition that is central to his creative project. BAXTER& began making art in the late-1950s under his birth name but quickly realized that the name itself was creative material, to be deployed, manipulated, and shared. In 1965, he formed a collaborative art-making entity which evolved into N.E. Thing Company, a corporate-styled entity whose co-presidents were BAXTER& and his wife Ingrid. Producing a diverse array of projects that encompassed conceptually based photography, pioneering works of appropriation art, and gallery transforming installations, the N.E. Thing Company offered a new model of art making, allowing the artists to remain anonymous and masquerade in the guise of business people. Following the dissolution of N.E. Thing Company in 1978, BAXTER& produced extensive bodies of work with Polaroid film, created numerous installations that blended painting and sculpture, and made pedagogy a focus of his creative enterprise. Consistent themes permeate his work and vector through his thinking. And by assessing these themes -- a relentless emphasis on reaching out to the viewer, a core concern with ecology and the environment, and a belief that art must assume plural means and media -- one discerns BAXTER&'s creative credo, understanding that "art is all over." This comprehensive book reviews BAXTER&'s remarkable career across all media. It accompanies a major international touring exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in November 2011 and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in April 2012. Featuring more than 160 reproductions of BAXTER&'s work, it also includes essays by the exhibition's curator, David Moos, along with contributions by Michael Darling (James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Alex Alberro (Associate Professor, University of Florida), and others. The book will also feature a comprehensive bibliography compiled by Adam Lauder (W.P. Scott Chair for Research in E-Librarianship, York University).

This is a fascinating look at the innovative and daring in situ work "He Called Her Amber" by Iris Haussler. In 2007 Iris Haussler created a work for the inauguration of the newly transformed Art Gallery of Ontario: an in situ piece entitled He Named Her Amber located in The Grange, a 19th century mansion now part of the Gallery. Haussler presented a complex narrative around a young Irish woman who had been hired as a maid at the Grange in 1828. Mysteriously bequeathed papers revealed that O'Shea had hidden documents and objects in and around the house. Subsequently, Archaeological Services Ontario (ASO) found a veritable Pandora's box of items. Only after the event did the artist and the Gallery reveal to the world that He Named Her Amber was a commissioned work of art and not an historical find. Thematically structured around Narrative, Disclosure and Analysis, volume documents a daring public artwork with essays and comments from artist, curator, critics, and from visitors with sharply divided views.