Silvana

Long before there were such terms as Op art or Kinetic art, Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) was making abstractions that dazzled the eye with their chromatic boldness and energetic geometries. His painting Zebra, of 1930, is widely considered the first work of Op art. The Hungarian-born Vasarely settled in Paris in 1930, working as a graphic designer (a calling whose requirement for clarity and precision permeated his art). From early on, Vasarely favored biomorphic shapes, sharp edges, two-dimensional space and a limited palette, but it was in the early 1950s that his canvases began to articulate the extreme rigor for which he became famed. In the 1960s he pursued printmaking, in an effort to make his work more democratically available. With almost nothing on this Op art pioneer currently in print, this volume offers an important opportunity to rediscover Vasarely's rich and radically modern art.

Widely considered the central figure of fifteenth-century painting, Piero della Francesca is also the most modern of all Renaissance painters. To our post-Cubist eyes, Piero's most famous work, his fresco cycle The Legend of the True Cross at Arezzo in Tuscany, conjures nothing so much as Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings; his serene articulations of architecture and perspective bring other modern traditions and painters to mind, such as Giorgio de Chirico. But it was Philip Guston — a major exponent of Piero in the twentieth century — who most eloquently identified what magnetizes us in Piero: A different fervor, grave and delicate, moves in the daylight of his pictures. Without our familiar passions, he is like a visitor to earth, reflecting on distances, gravity and positions of essential forms. Piero's exquisitely subtle palette has meant that he has not been well served by past monographs, which have been scant enough: the last two major overviews, by Ronald Lightbown and Carlo Bertelli, were both published in 1992. This new monograph, benefiting from subsequent advances in color reproduction, therefore constitutes the first in 20 years. Its 150 color plates reproduce all of his works, from the classic Baptism of Christ (1450) at the National Gallery in London to the astounding frescos done for Sigismundo Malatesta at the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. Particular focus is given to the Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle at the Basilica of St. Francis in Arezzo. Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) was born in the town of Borgo Santo Sepolcro in Tuscany, where, in 1442, he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece of the town's church. Two years later he was at work on Malatesta's legendary Tempio in Rimini (where he may have first met Leon Battista Alberti). In 1485 he authored a famous treatise on geometry, and in his last years went blind.

Russian Avant-Garde offers a single-volume overview of an avant-garde that can legitimately claim to have reinvented everyday life in the Soviet era. Bringing together more than 80 Russian masterpieces from museums in Ivanovo, Kostroma, Yaroslavl and Tula, the emphasis of this book's previously unpublished and untranslated essays is on new perspectives and interpretations, with a focus on the Russian school of Expressionism (Goncharova, Filonov, Kandinsky) and Constructivism (Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko). These works are examined alongside one of the most important collections of Russian icons to be found in Western Europe, as well as a collection of Russian propaganda textiles.

The complete oeuvre of the dark genius who revolutionized European painting — and remains as controversial 400 years after his death. Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, was a legend even in his own lifetime.