Abbeville Press

Sun-dappled carp, radiant blossoms, and tumultuous waters are among the wonders and mysteries of nature captured in Joseph Raffaels brilliant close-up paintings. At a time when beauty is much out of favor in the art world, Joseph Raffael has taken what some would consider the highly radical step of daring to paint beautiful pictures. Long one of contemporary arts most highly regarded painters, Raffael transforms intense observations of nature into color-drenched, deeply felt works of art. He often works on a very large scale, using either watercolor, oil, or acrylic to achieve the painstaking detail of his dazzling images. Amei Wallachs warmly perceptive introduction, inspired by a visit to the artists home and studio in the south of France, explores Raffaels life history, his sources, and his ideas about art. Her individual chapter openers address the predominant subjects within the artists work, including water and shore scenes, flowers, animals, fish and lilies, sacred symbols, and Raffaels wife, Lannis. A thought-provoking essay by Donald Kuspit places Raffaels painting within the larger context of twentieth-century art, psychology, and philosophy. Complementing these texts are the paintings themselves-sun-dappled carp, luminous iris, tumultuous rivers, and other wonders of nature captured in radiant visual meditations. The artist has also contributed two engaging written pieces, both of which illuminate the pleasures and occasional terrors of the creative process. His «Diary of a Painting» traces the evolution of one major work over several months, from the original slide to the finished wall-size watercolor, providing insight into the emotional and technical demands of creating a work of art. His informative and revealing «Autobiographical Chronology» provides a personal look back, from his Brooklyn childhood to his art-making career in New York, California, and the south of France, where Joseph Raffael lives and works today.

Fashion's late king here offers a parade of couture featuring the luminaries of rock, royalty, and sport. A galaxy of stars, from Prince to Elton John, are shot by star photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts, Irving Penn, and Steven Meisel. This extraordinary publication, the second Tiny Folio to bear the Versace name and outrageous palette, shows the master at the top of his form, as daring and sensual as ever.

This lovely visual valentine collects the most romantic and heart-warming images from the worlds great photographers. Drawn from around the globe, these moving illustrations capture the old and the young, the famous and the not-so-famous, in mid-kiss, mid-clutch, and mid-cuddle, forming an utterly captivating ode to love.

Founded in 1824, the National Gallery houses a rich and comprehensive range of European painting from the Middle Ages to the 1920s. Among the works represented in this colorful and compact survey of the Gallerys collection are masterpieces by Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne, as well as some lesser-known delights. Located on Trafalgar Square, in the heart of London, the original Wilkins Building has recently been extended by the handsome new Sainsbury Wing, which contains some of the worlds greatest paintings.

With masters such as William Blake, William Hogarth, George Stubbs, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney, the Tate Gallery offers work to please every taste. The gallery, which was opened in London in the summer of 1897 by the Prince of Wales, is best known for its modern art collections, but-as this little compendium makes wonderfully clear-it encompasses the full sweep of British art, from ornate aristocratic portraits and vivacious hunting scenes to the Pre-Raphaelites languid femmes fatales.

This full-sized album of Saturday Evening Post covers captures everyday events and historic moments in American history. Although technically Norman Rockwell was an academic painter, he had the eye of a photographer and, as he became a mature artist, he used this eye to give us a picture of America that was famliar — astonishingly so — and at the same time unique. Rockwell best expressed this vision of America in his justly famous cover illustrations for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. 332 of these cover paintings, from beloved classics like «Marbles Champion» to lesser-known gems like «Feeding Time», are reproduced in stunning full color in this large-format volume, which is sure to be treasured by art lovers everywhere.

Since time immemorial, artists have created impassioned images of the goddess as the ultimate generator and destroyer of life, as fertility figure, and as ruler of love and war. Encompassing a variety of media — sculpture, painting, photography, performance art, and film — Goddesses also provides an enlightening text exploring all her many guises.

The Art Institute of Chicago houses some of the most celebrated European and American paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Included in this collection are numerous masterpieces of realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and other aspects of modernism. Today a number of these paintings are revered as icons of modern Western culture, emblems of the inspired experimentation that has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic. For the last century, the Art Institute has supported the achievements of the most distinguished artists from Europe and America, acquiring and exhibiting now-beloved works of Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Georgia OKeeffe, Jackson Pollock, and others. This folio is presented as both an introduction to this collection and as a survey of the styles, subjects, and themes of Western art of the last two centuries, from the linear classicism of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres through the optical studies of Claude Monet and the Impressionists; from the lyrical, colorful abstractions of Vasily Kandinsky to the fractured picture planes of Pablo Picasso and the Cubists; from the enigmatic compositions of Salvador Dali and the Surrealists to the media-appropriated Pop-art portraits of Andy Warhol. These magnificent paintings eloquently narrate the discussions of the nature of art, quality, innovation, style, and form that have defined the modern era in art history.

With its lively narrative and profuse illustrations, this volume captures the visual riches of a remarkable era. Born in controversy, christened in scorn by a sarcastic critic, and developed amid a continuing struggle for recognition and solvency, French Impressionism finally emerged as a powerful and immensely popular artistic movement whose appeal remains undiminished today. «The Great Book of French Impressionism» celebrates the richness and exuberance of the Impressionists world — a world of light and color, of sunlit fields and shimmering waterscapes, of bustling city views and intimate domestic scenes. This handsomely designed Tiny Folio packs over 200 full-color illustrations, faithfully capturing the subtle nuances of light and keen perception that make French Impressionist painting unique. The text traces the development of Impressionism from its roots in landscape and Realist painting through its focus on modern urban life to its ultimate goal: to fix on canvas the fleeting moods and effects of nature in a world that stands still for no one. The works of the major Impressionists and Post Impressionists, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and Cézanne, are featured and show how they influenced others in the movement, ultimately giving rise to the new art of the twentieth century.

Two hundred years ago, the doors of the Louvre opened to the public for the very first time. The palace of the French kings had been transformed into a museum that today stretches over an enormous architectural ensemble right in the heart of Paris. The royal collections first assembled by Francis I in the sixteenth century were later transferred to the Louvre palace, and this prestigious core was further enriched with artistic treasures during the Revolutionary period. The collections have been growing ever since, and are today divided into seven departments. Oriental Antiquities, Egyptian Antiquities, and Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities illustrate the art and culture of the ancient Near East and Middle East and the Mediterranean countries. The other four so-called «modern» departments — painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and drawing — span Western art from the height of the Middle Ages to the mid-nineteenth century. With superb reproductions of nearly 400 of the museums most renowned masterpieces, this glorious little volume provides a grand tour in miniature of the Louvres unparalleled collection, and highlights the extraordinary range of artistic traditions that have gradually found their place in this museum.

More than one hundred heartwarming illustrations, many in full color, by the acclaimed artist offer an inspirational portrait of uniquely American towns, families, traditions, and more, all captured with Rockwell's trademark understanding of everyday human existence.

A compact survey of Degass art from early portraits to late nudes and bathers. Edgar Degas (1834-1917), a founding member of the Impressionist movement, was one of the groups most original and independent artists. This Tiny Folio TM offers insight into the themes and preoccupations that make his paintings, sculptures, and brilliant pastels so well-loved today. As sublime as it is thorough, this survey of Degass life and art illustrates his famous and perceptive portraits, his enchanting pictures of Parisian life, his beloved and popular racehorse scenes, his late nudes and bathers, and his celebrated depictions of the opera and ballet.

When it opened on November 19, 1819, the Prado Museum, in Madrid, consisted entirely of works from the Spanish royal collections. Numerous treasures have been added since opening day, but the unique strengths of the Prados collection can still be traced to that original core of remarkable works-many acquired or commissioned from the artists themselves during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The Prado is internationally renowned for its unsurpassed collection of masterpieces by Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, and Peter Paul Rubens. As this richly illustrated little volume makes clear, it also possesses a brilliant collection of paintings and drawings by other artists throughout Europe as well as fascinating decorative arts and notable sculptures.

This delightful compendium presents the National Gallerys superb collection of much-loved Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawing.

With more than 100 illustrations — approximately 48 in full color — this innovative series offers a fresh look at the most creative and influential artists of the postwar era. Modern Masters form a perfect reference set for home, school, or library.

This abundantly illustrated oversize volume presents the definitive account of the sale of Russia's cultural patrimony by the Soviet government in the interwar years. Selling Russia's Treasures documents one of the great cultural dramas of the twentieth century: the sale, by a cash-hungry Soviet government, of the artistic treasures accumulated by the Russian aristocracy over the centuries and nationalized after the October 1917 revolution. An astonishing variety of objects, from icons and illuminated manuscripts to Faberge eggs and Old Master paintings, entered the collections of wealthy Westerners like Andrew Mellon and Armand Hammer in the 1920s and 30s. Written by the leading experts in the field and long regarded as the definitive book on the subject, the original Russian edition of Selling Russia's Treasures is sought after scholars and laymen alike. Now, for the first time, it is made available in English, in a revised and expanded edition that includes a new chapter on the secret files of the Hermitage, previously considered lost, as well as new research on the sale of religious art, and of twentieth-century French masterworks from the Museum of New Western Art. Numerous color plates reunite long-dispersed works in a virtual museum that illustrates the powerful blow inflicted on Russia's cultural heritage by these secretive sales, and rare photographs and archival documents help bring this buried history to light. Distributed for the M.T. Abraham Center for the Visual Arts Foundation.