Yale University Press

This lavishly illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication on the Brooklyn Museum of Art's internationally renowned historic costume collection. The nearly 25,000-object collection comprises fashionable women's and men's garments and accessories from the 18th through the 20th centuries. It features sumptuous 19th-century gowns from the House of Worth, exquisite works by the great 20th-century French couturiers, iconic Surrealist-based designs of Elsa Schiaparelli, sportswear classics from pioneer American designers, and the incomparable draped and tailored creations of Charles James. In 2009, the Brooklyn Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art entered into a groundbreaking long-term partnership to steward Brooklyn's collection. The objects were transferred to The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan, with Brooklyn maintaining curatorial access. Exhibitions of costumes from the collection will be held at both institutions in early May 2010.

The Metropolitan's holdings of late 17th and 18th-century French decorative arts, unrivaled outside Europe, are on display in nine magnificent paneled period rooms and three galleries. This suite of spaces is named for Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, whose extraordinary generosity made the installations possible and who also donated many of the furnishings from their own celebrated collection. The first book on the Wrightsman Galleries since 1979, this beautifully illustrated volume presents detailed descriptions of the period rooms and 116 of the most important artworks on view, including wood paneling and furniture, chimneypieces and fireplace furnishings, textiles and leather, portraits, gilt bronze, porcelain, silver, and decorative boxes, many of which have a royal provenance. The text incorporates the results of recent research and conveys the illuminating comments of contemporaries as expressed in diaries, travel guides, craft manuals, and correspondence.

Two potent myths have traditionally defined our understanding of the artist Edvard Munch (1862–1944): he was mentally unstable, as his iconic work The Scream (1893) suggests, and he was radically independent, following his own singular vision. Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and Myth persuasively challenges these entrenched perceptions. In this book, Jay A. Clarke demonstrates that Munch was thoroughly in control of his artistic identity, a savvy businessman skilled in responding to the market and shaping popular opinion. Moreover, the author shows that Munch was keenly aware of the art world of his day, adopting motifs, styles, and techniques from a wide variety of sources, including many Scandinavian artists. By presenting Munch’s paintings, prints, and drawings in relation to those of European contemporaries, including Harriet Backer, James Ensor, Vincent van Gogh, Max Klinger, Christian Krohg, and Claude Monet, Clarke reveals often surprising connections and influences. This interpretive approach, grounded in Munch’s diaries and letters, period criticism, and the artworks themselves, reintroduces Munch as an artist who cultivated myths both visual and personal. Becoming Edvard Munch features beautiful color reproductions of approximately 150 works, including 75 paintings and 75 works on paper by Munch and his peers.

During the Ming Dynasty numerous new animal themes were created to convey political and ethical messages current at court. As the result a sophisticated language of Chinese animal painting was developed, employing both the animals’ symbolic associations and homonymic puns. Hou-mei Sung’s exciting rediscovery of some of these lost meanings has led to a full-scale investigation of the evolving history of Chinese animal painting. Distinct symbolic meanings were associated with individual motifs, but all animals were assigned a place in the universe according to the Chinese concept of nature. From the very early yin/yang cosmology to later developments of Daoist and Confucian philosophies and ethics, Chinese animals gained new meanings related to their historical contexts. This book explores these new findings, using the colorful animal images and their rich and evolving symbolic meanings to gain insight into unique aspects of Chinese art, as well as Chinese culture and history.

Working in his villa in the south of France, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand—usually everyday domestic scenes—Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist’s daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear at the margins of the canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit or other props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language. The 75 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in this volume, some rarely seen treasures from private collections, all made between 1923 and 1947, are central to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard as a leading figure of French modernism.

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, have investigated newly available documents and testimonies from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions. Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war--well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis. Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.

Admired for finding beauty in everyday surroundings, William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) brought an autobiographical element to his work, earning him a unique place in late-19th-century American art history. This book, the third of four volumes to document the complete works of Chase, traces his career as a landscape painter. Following Chase's training in Munich in the 1870s and his many trips to Spain in the early 1880s, his works became light filled and colorful. These paintings anticipate Chase's well-known park scenes of the 1880s painted in Brooklyn and New York and his 1890s works depicting the hills and shoreline adjacent to his home in Shinnecock Hills, Long Island, now recognized as being among the most important examples of American Impressionism. This book presents all of his known landscapes painted in oil, which include many of his best-loved works, in beautiful reproduction, accompanied by the most current and thorough documentation on them.

Models & Muses explores fashion's reciprocal relationship to iconic beauties that represent the evolution and changing face of the feminine ideal. Featuring a brief historical overview of the phenomenon of the supermodel, the book begins in the early twentieth century and continues to the present day. Dorian Leigh and Lisa Fonssagrives in the 1940s are joined in the 1950s by Dovima, Sunny Harnett, and Suzy Parker. They are followed by Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy in the early 1960s and Lauren Hutton in the 1970s. The 1980s witnessed such enduring personalities as Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista, while the 1990s brought on Kate Moss, whose edgy, street-inflected style has inspired not only fashion designers, editors, stylists, and photographers, but artists such as Chuck Close and Lucien Freud. With an emphasis on styles from the 1950s onward, the book features designs from the great ready-to-wear and couture houses — Madame Gres, Christian Dior, and Balenciaga in the 1950s; Rudi Gernreich, Yves Saint Laurent, and Cardin in the 1960s; Giorgio di Sant'Angelo and Halston in the 1970s; Christian Lacroix, Versace, Comme des Garcons, and Calvin Klein in the 1980s; and, Marc Jacobs, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen in the 1990s.

Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936) ranked among the most innovative furniture makers at the turn of the twentieth century. Praised by the international press and exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, his beautiful works grew out of an interesting mix of styles that included Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and proto-modernism. This book presents the first major study of this important American designer and craftsman, drawing upon new photographs and fresh sources of information. Alongside traditional historical approaches, the book presents detailed formal, structural, and stylistic analyses of Rohlfs’s well-known masterpieces from major museums, together with lesser-known objects in public and private collections. Topics include discovering the contribution of Rohlfs’s wife—mystery novelist Anna Katharine Green—to his designs; the far-ranging sources of his idiosyncratic motifs; his influence on Gustav Stickley’s designs; his commissioned interiors; his efforts at self-promotion and marketing; and his attempts to define a conceptual framework for his artistic endeavor. Handsomely designed and illustrated, the book also features a complete set of unpublished period illustrations of over seventy works.

Faberge, Tiffany, Lalique — these great designers came together only once to display their goods in what was probably the most opulent exhibition ever mounted. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the three strove to position themselves ahead of their many competitors in the luxury market, each presenting his jewelry and home adornments as high art. Their success is explored in this splendidly illustrated catalogue, which elucidates the prewar pinnacle of European culture.The array of displayed objects was mesmerizing: Tiffany glass, Easter eggs to dazzle the Czars, realistic insects created in precious materials as sinister decorations. Many of these bore influences of the advanced art of the time, such as Art Nouveau, Viennese modernism, and symbolism, and of styles from around the world.Four essays discuss the works in the context of their times, illuminate the high societies served by the three masters, and trace the cultural trends behind their extraordinary creations. A treasure of accompanying photographs shows the individual exhibits, scenes from the World's Fair, and the glitterati who wore the jewelry.

Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Jewish theatres became catalysts for modernist experimentation. Working with avant-garde playwrights, actors and producers in a new political environment, artists such as Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, Robert Falk, and Aleksandr Tyshler combined Russian folk art with elements of Cubo-Futurism and Constructivism into a bold new style. This collaboration gave rise to extraordinary productions with highly original stage designs that redefined the concept of theatre itself. From the Jewish mythical and folkloric plays produced at Habima to the daring, expressionistic Yiddish dramas presented at the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (GOSET), this beautifully illustrated book chronicles the flourishing of Soviet Jewish theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. Spanning such topics as Jewish culture and history in the Soviet Union, the volume includes stunning reproductions of Chagall's celebrated murals; fascinating archival materials such as posters, prints, and playbills; designs for costumes and sets; and many other breathtaking works.

As a young man the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was passionate about the sea and deeply knowledgeable about ships and seafaring. Between the ages of 18 and 23, he started his career as a professional painter with a remarkable range of maritime works that form the subject of this exhibition and book. The key works are the two versions of the Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, painted in 1878 on the northern coast of Brittany in France, and the group of studies and sketches around them. The authors relate Sargent's freely handled marine drawings, large and small, to his watercolours, oil sketches, and finished oil paintings of marine subjects. The works demonstrate his transition from a plein-air painter to a tonalist exploring interiors and urban scenes. Also presented is a unique scrapbook, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that includes more than 50 drawings and sketches, mostly of sea scenes, and postcards and commercial photography of works of art, architecture and tourist views. This scrapbook provides an intimate glimpse at the thoughts and experiences of the young artist on his first European voyage.

One of the most exciting fashion designers in the United States, Cuban-born Isabel Toledo has been honored with a National Design Award from the Cooper — Hewitt Museum and a Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion, given by The Museum at FIT. Yet her name and work are recognized only by fashion insiders. This ravishing book brings Toledo's creations to a wider audience, places them within the context of contemporary fashion, and examines her creative process. Interviewing Toledo, her husband (fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo), and other colleagues, clients, and critics, Valerie Steele gives an account of Toledo's career and explains that while she has been heralded by leading fashion magazines and featured in stores in New York and Europe, she has not had the long-term financial backing to break out of the niche market. Patricia Mears investigates the artistic and cultural influences on Toledo's work and analyzes her unusual methods of construction, noting that she designs in three dimensions in her mind and then begins working directly with fabric. Displaying garments Toledo has created since her first show in 1985, this book is a revelatory exploration of a fashion innovator in a mass-market industry.

During the decades from 1900 to 1940, art in France developed in ways that were of paramount importance to 20th-century art. This illustrated account sets these developments within the framework of the unstable social, political, intellectual and artistic worlds of the time and analyses the innovations of artists ranging from Matisse to Picasso, Duchamp to Dali.

Material things transformed the lives of ordinary English men and women between the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the Great Reform Act of 1832. Tea and sugar, the fruits of British mercantile and colonial expansion, transformed their diets. Pendulum clocks and Staffordshire pottery, the products of British manufacturing ingenuity, enriched their homes. But it was in their clothes that ordinary people enjoyed the greatest transformation in their material lives. In calico gowns and muslin neckerchiefs, in wigs and silver-plated shoe buckles, they flaunted the fruits of the nation's commercial prosperity. This book retrieves the unknown story of ordinary consumers in eighteenth-century England and what they wore. John Styles reveals that ownership of new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich. It extended far down the social scale to the small farmers, day labourers, and petty tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. Styles reveals that humble men and women could be beneficiaries of the new kind of commercial society that emerged in eighteenth-century England, and not just its victims. He does so by focusing on three issues: the clothes they wore, the ways they acquired them, and the meanings they attached to them. The clothes worn by ordinary men and women were not all basic or utilitarian. What they called their 'best' clothes reflected the broad trends of high fashion, although they were not worn simply to emulate the lifestyles of the rich. Fashionable display by ordinary consumers was rooted in a world of popular custom, of fairs and holidays, of parish feasts and harvest homes. Popular custom and popular consumerism were allies, not enemies. This inventive and lucid book sheds new light on topics as diverse as crime, authority and retailing in eighteenth-century Britain, as well making a major contribution to broader debates around consumerism, popular culture and material life.

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is one of the most fascinating and important personalities in the history of American art. His memorable and much-loved scenes of rowing, sailing, and boxing as well as his deeply moving portraits are renowned for their vibrant realism and dramatic intensity. This beautiful and insightful book, published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the life and career of Eakins — the first in twenty years — presents a fresh perspective on the artist and his remarkable accomplishments. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins's most significant paintings, watercolours, drawings, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived. The contributors also discuss how Eakins applied his French academic training to subjects that were distinctly American and part of his own immediate and complex experience. Eakins's own photographs, which he used as part of his unique creative process, are also examined for the first time in the full context of his life's work. The exhibition Thomas Eakins will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 4th October, 2001 to 6th January, 2002; the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, from 3rd February to 12th May, 2002; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 10th June to 15th September, 2002.

Distinguished historian of the Soviet period Robert V. Daniels offers a penetrating survey of the evolution of the Soviet system and its ideology. In a tightly woven series of analyses written during his career-long inquiry into the Soviet Union, Daniels explores the Soviet experience from Karl Marx to Boris Yeltsin and shows how key ideological notions were altered as Soviet history unfolded. The book exposes a long history of American misunderstanding of the Soviet Union, leading up to the «grand surprise» of its collapse in 1991. Daniels's perspective is always original, and his assessments, some worked out years ago, are strikingly prescient in the light of post-1991 archival revelations. Soviet Communism evolved and decayed over the decades, Daniels argues, through a prolonged revolutionary process, combined with the challenges of modernization and the personal struggles between ideologues and power-grabbers.

Tiepolo is a brilliant example of the specifically pictorial intelligence. This book is both a study of his art and an argument for fuller recognition of the peculiarities of the painter's representational medium. Alpers and Baxandall locate distinctive modes of Tiepolo's representation of the world and human action; follow his process of invention from first pen drawings, through small oil sketches, to great frescoes; and analyse his best and biggest painting, the Four Continents in the Stairway Hall of the Prince-Bishop's Residence at Wurzburg, illustrated with photographs specially taken for the book. The topics taken up include: painting's resistance to enacted narrative drama, its engagement with indeterminacies and repetitions, the senses in which a painter may 'perform' both past art and himself, the constructive roles of gestural drawing, exploitation of shifts of scale between design and finished work, dialogue between the changing natural site lighting and in-picture lighting, contributions made by the beholder's own mobility, the expressive scope of tensions between two and three dimensions, the deep rationale of rococo formal structure, and the sources of the moral force of pictures without an explicit moral. The book — both art criticism and a practical polemic — ends with an annotated gazetteer for travellers, listing those Tiepolo paintings that can still be seen in the places and conditions for which he painted them.

Lindsey Hughes, author of the classic account of Russia during the reign of Peter the Great, here provides the definitive shorter biography of this dramatic, appealing and unconventional character. The book tells the story of Peter the Great (1672-1725) from birth to death in twelve chapters, including two final chapters on his legacy and posthumous reputation with the aim of providing a vivid sense of the dynamics of his life and reign. The focus is firmly on Peter himself: his actions, deliberations, decisions, relationships, tastes and possessions, and includes the more bizarre aspects of his character, such as his interest in dwarfs, the use of disguises, clowning and vandalism. The main sources are his letters and papers, both published and unpublished, as well as other contemporary accounts and letters. The narrative comprises both the public and private life, the life Peter lived as well as his significant fantasy world. Hughes offers fascinating new material on the 'alternative' or 'parallel' history of Peter's many disguises and pseudonyms, his deference to a number of mock superiors (Prince-Caesar, Prince-Pope, the mock Chief Surveyor), and his relationships with individuals such as his second wife Catherine and his favourite Alexander Menshikov. In each chapter she explores Peter's image in painting and sculpture, bringing the story to the present day with a discussion of controversial monuments in Moscow and St Petersburg.

The Moscow Yiddish Theater (later called GOSET) was born in 1919 and almost immediately became one of the most remarkable avant-garde theaters in Europe. It flourished in the 1920s but under Bolshevik pressure soon lost much of the originality that had distinguished it. In 1948, Stalin's henchmen slaughtered GOSET's legendary actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, and the theater was liquidated. This book focuses not on how the theatre was persecuted, but on its ambitious beginnings as a revolutionary organization of passionate artistic exploration. The book brings to English readers for the first time selected writings that reflect the aesthetics and politics of the Yiddish revolutionary theater. The book also incorporates miraculously salvaged images of Marc Chagall's famous theater murals, as well as paintings of costumes and stage sets created by the best artists of the day. These illustrations, discovered only after the fall of the Soviet Union, have never been published before. With emphasis on the theater's early achievements and its centrality in Moscow's burgeoning theater world, the book makes a major contribution to the understanding of modern Jewish culture and the art of theater.

Ivan IV, 'the Terrible' (1533-1584) is one of the key figures in Russian history, yet he has remained among the most neglected. Notorious for pioneering a policy of unrestrained terror — and for killing his own son — he has been credited with establishing autocracy in Russia. This is the first attempt to write a biography of Ivan from birth to death, to study his policies, his marriages, his atrocities, his disordered personality, and to link them as a coherent whole. Isable de Madariaga situates Ivan within the background of Russian political developments in the sixteenth century. And, with revealing comparisons with English, Spanish and other European courts, she sets him within the international context of his time. The biography includes a new account of the role of astrology and magic at Ivan's court, and provides fresh insights into his foreign policy. Facing up to problems of authenticity (much of Ivan's archive was destroyed by fire in 1626) and controversies which have paralysed western scholarship, de Madariaga seeks to present Russia as viewed from the Kremlin rather than from abroad and comprehend the full tragedy of Ivan's reign.

In this powerful book, a renowned environmental leader warns that despite all the international negotiations of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth's environment are not succeeding. He explains why this is so and presents eight specific steps that governments and citizens can take to achieve a sustainable future. For this new paperback edition the author has added an Afterword that brings the narrative up to date. Gus Speth brought global environmental concerns to the world's attention nearly a quarter of a century ago. His extraordinary new book is an impassioned plea to take these issues seriously before it is too late. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to read Red Sky at Morning and take action while we can. Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States The ultimate insider offers a devastating critique of global environmental efforts. Eugene Linden, Time A profoundly sobering study of the nation's failure to address the probability of global warming. New York Times Book Review Balanced and pragmatic. Economist A particularly useful summary... Careful and judicious. Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books.

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), an Italian painter and printmaker renowned for his simple yet stunning still lifes, is also famous for his legendary reputation as a recluse, an artist who resided in a world bound by the walls of his Bologna studio. Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence is the first and only study in English to cover Morandi's career in its entirety as well as in the sociopolitical and cultural context of Italian art. Janet Abramowicz, Morandi's former teaching assistant, takes the reader through half a century of Italian art history and its most significant movements — Futurism, Pittura Metafisica, Valori Plastici, Strapaese, Novecento — most of which have received scant attention from English-language scholars. Abramowicz shows how Morandi worked in close proximity to mainstream contemporary European art and tells the story of his relationship to the Fascist politics and patrons of his time, illustrating how his connections to this period were muted after the fall of the regime in post-World War II Italy in an effort to establish the artist as apolitical. Morandi was the only Italian modernist to emerge from Fascism unscathed. An important new addition to scholarship on twentieth-century Italian art history, this book features many rare and previously unpublished images and will fascinate admirers of Morandi and his quietly transcendent work.

The unicorn tapestries are one of the most popular attractions at The Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Traditionally known as The Hunt of the Unicorn, this set of seven exquisite and enigmatic tapestries was likely completed between 1495 and 1505. The imaginatively conceived scenes, displaying individualized faces of the hunters and naturalistically depicting the flora and fauna of the landscape, are beautifully captured in silk, wool, and metal yarns. Written by one of the world's leading authorities on medieval textiles and illustrated with many lovely colour reproductions, The Unicorn Tapestries traces the origins of the tapestries as well as possible interpretations of their symbolic meaning. This is an essential book for any lover of medieval art and textiles.