From National Book Award winner Deirdre Bair, the definitive biography of Saul Steinberg, one of The New Yorker's most iconic artists. The issue date was March 29, 1976. The New Yorker cost 75 cents. And on the cover unfolded Saul Steinberg's vision of the world: New York City, the Hudson River, and then...well, it's really just a bunch of stuff you needn't concern yourself with. Steinberg's brilliant depiction of the world according to self-satisfied New Yorkers placed him squarely in the pantheon of the magazine's--and the era's--most celebrated artists. But if you look beyond the searing wi... View More...
For more than three decades Southern California artist Eleanor Antin has been an acclaimed figure on the American art scene. During that time she has created a body of work that is remarkable for its inventiveness, its wit and its poignancy. This is the first comprehensive survey of this pioneer in the development of video, performance, conceptual and installation art. View More...
A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art. New York, 1921: acclaimed photographer Alfred Stieglitz celebrates the success of his latest exhibition--the centerpiece, a series of nude portraits of his soon-to-be wife, the young Georgia O'Keeffe. The exhibit acts as a turning point for the painter poised to make her entrance into the art scene. There she meets Rebecca Salsbury, the fianc of Stieglitz's prot g... View More...
Only now can we see Paul Cezanne as the invisible genius at the very inception of modern art. Recent exhibitions of his early works reveal an artist very different from the serene landscapist we thought we knew. What was it that made these disturbingly dark and troubled paintings, with their violence and psychological truth, as important to him as, later, his huge series of bathers, an obsession with the nude that continued to the end? With the last full-length biography written more than a quarter century ago, the demand for a new life of Cezanne has never been greater. In Lost Earth, Philip ... View More...
Tamara de Lempicka captured the whirlwind decade of the 1920s on canvas, painting (and charming) the rich and famous of Europe in Art Deco portraits. The threat of a second world war sent Tamara packing to America, where she reveled among the famous in Hollywood and the wealthy of New York, In the 1970s she was rediscovered when a gallery owner in Paris mounted a retrospective of her work, and today paintings that were unsellable for three decades fetch many hundreds of thousands of dollars.Much of the story of de Lempicka's amazing life is told in moving detail by her daughter, whose recollec... View More...
When Lisa Fittipaldi went blind at the age of forty-seven, she descended into a freefall of anger and denial that lasted for two years. In this moving memoir, she paints a vivid picture of the perceptual and emotional darkness that accompanied her vision loss, and her arduous journey back into the sighted world through mastery of the principles of art and color. The challenge of a child's watercolor set, thrown down like a gauntlet by her frustrated husband, opened the door to a new life. Discovering that her ability to master the small world of the canvas enabled her to navigate the wide worl... View More...
For four hundred years Caravaggio's (1571-1610) staggering artistic achievements have thrilled viewers, yet his volatile personal trajectory-the murder of Ranuccio Tomasini, the doubt surrounding Caravaggio's sexuality, the chain of events that began with his imprisonment on Malta and ended with his premature death-has long confounded historians. In a bravura performance, Andrew Graham-Dixon delves into the original Italian sources, presenting fresh details about Caravaggio's sex life, his many crimes and public brawls, and the most convincing account yet published of the painter's tragic deat... View More...
Everybody knows her smile, but no one knows her story: Meet the flesh-and-blood woman who became one of the most famous artistic subjects of all time--Mona Lisa. A genius immortalized her. A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek to view her portrait in the Louvre.Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a book of discovery--about the world's most recognized face, most revered artist, and most praised and parodied pai... View More...
Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they brought him personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class. Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his por... View More...
