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The first comprehensive survey of the beloved figurative realist painter Fairfield Porter to be published in more than two decades. A figurative realist in the heyday of abstract expressionism, Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) painted himself, his family, and friends in New York City, in Southampton, Long Island, and on an island off the Maine coast, all depicting a relaxed and comfortable world that seemed to mirror his own affluent, well-connected existence. With virtually all of the artist’s previous publications now out of print, this much-anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great American master. Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Along with months in Maine, Porter lived in New York and from 1948 on, in Southampton where he purchased a large, late Federal-style house for his own expanding family. Porter painted several artist friends, including Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. He was also close to the modern poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. With a carefully curated selection of the artist’s best works, John Wilmerding, a specialist in American art, gives full consideration to Porter’s expressive compositions and a color palette influenced by his coastal surroundings. Karen Wilkin discusses Porter’s influences and pictorial creativity. Distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy writes a reflection on one of Porter’s paintings.

About the Authors:

John Wilmerding is Sarofim Professor of American Art, emeritus, at Princeton University. Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and art critic based in New York. She is a contributor to Rizzoli’s Wayne Thiebaud (2015). J. D. McClatchy is the editor of the Yale Review and former president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This book provides insights on Farah Ossouli’s artistic pursuits with miniature painting, explains the historical background of Iranian Contemporary and the challenges of contemporary image-making in the new political and social climate.

Farah Ossouli (born in 1953 in Zandschan, lives and works in Tehran) has explored innovative approaches to the medium painting, most commonly through juxtaposition of images and texts that scrutinize preconceptions about gender and race while undermining collective assumptions in post-revolutionary Iran.

A hallmark of her paintings are exceptionally fine miniatures; her subjects are figurative but nevertheless not easily deciphered. Even through titles can identify what is portrayed, they often only hint at a possible interpretation of the picture. Through most of her works have a private character, Ossouli refers to historical events and occurrences with collective memory internationally, which still disturbs to this day. Ossouli can interpret history through an artwork, since the aesthetics of representation creates a challenge to the ethics of what is represented. The aesthetic quality of the paintings is what first allows the viewers to address his content. The dissolution of subjectivity and its rearticulation in miniature compositions is a major trope. Early on Ossouli began to use mirrors to facilitate this process – as myth and metaphor doubling and redoubling a fragmented vision – returning the viewer to that moment of ego formation described by Jacques Lacan as the mirror stage. Farah Ossouli’s paintings, gouaches, conceptual miniature works, drawings, artist books and texts since the mid-1970s have been characterized by a keen awareness how the conditio humana is a product of its representation in mass media. She has developed a unique aesthetic practice committed to a metaphorical and feminist narration.

For more than four decades, Ossouli has been delving into the violent peripheries of a society mediated by images, in genuine compositions whose fine surfaces contain an unsettling visual poetics, political allure, and hope. Her works are monumental sites of confrontation with ideologies that manipulate and often obliterate the individual. This corporal trauma is expressed in an almost documentary realism with the elements of classical Persian Miniature Paintings that presents little more than the bare facts, it is also reflected in every aspects of composition, from the projection of contemporary political issues and the removal of entire sections in the narration, to unnerving collapse of the figure with space it occupies.

A magnificent, never-before-published collection of every painting and fresco on display in the Uffizi, the Galleria Palatina of the Pitti Palace, the Accademia, and the Duomo, and more — nearly 2,000 works of art — all presented in a practical and elegant paperback format.

The city of Florence is home to dozens of museums and palaces that contain many of the world’s most renowned works of art. Florence: The Paintings & Frescoes is a rich and magnificent collection of thousands of paintings and frescoes that are visited by millions of travelers every year including the art of Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, Correggio, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Rembrandt, van Dyck, El Greco, and hundreds more.

Explore the history of art in Florence through seven essays by Ross King, bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, which connect how the paintings, politics, and every-day lives of Florentines influenced one another. Art historian Anja Grebe, author of The Louvre and The Vatican, also highlights 250 of the most iconic and significant paintings and frescoes in the historic city with details on the attributes of the works, biographical details of the artists, and more.

This spectacular collection of nearly 2,000 paintings and frescoes is a must-have for any art lover, student, or arm-chair traveler.  

About the Author:

Ross King is the author of the bestselling Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling, as well as the novels Ex-Libris and Domino. He lives in England, near Oxford.

A focused look at double-figure paintings by the celebrated British artist, whose disturbing portrayals radically altered the genre of figurative painting in the twentieth century.

This book highlights a theme that preoccupied Francis Bacon throughout his career: the relationship between two people, both physical and psychological. At its heart are two of the most uninhibited images that Bacon ever painted: Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954). After completing these interrelated works, Bacon did not return to the subject until 1967, the year that homosexual acts in private were decriminalized in England and Wales, when he painted Two Figures on a Couch, also featured in this volume. In Bacon's paintings, the human presence is evoked sometimes viscerally, at other times more fleetingly, in the form of a shadow or a blurred, watchful figure. In certain instances, the portrayal takes the form of a composite in which male and female bodily traits are transposed or fused. A number of the works in Couplings were inspired by Bacon's own fraught relationships.

Francis Bacon: Couplings features an introductory text by Richard Calvocoressi; a new essay and plate texts by Martin Harrison; and a never-before-published interview with Bacon by Richard Francis and Ian Morrison; as well as studio ephemera and working documents that illuminate Bacon's process.

About the Authors:

Richard Calvocoressi is an art historian and a director and senior curator at Gagosian, London. Martin Harrison, a curator and writer on art and photography, is an authority on the work of Francis Bacon.

In 1949 Francis Bacon found his subject - the human body - and from then on it remained his principal theme. But he did not paint from life. Instead he appropriated images from the mass media that he manipulated into his "studies." This book presents over 200 of these documents, about which Bacon was secretive but which, it emerges, were integral to his creative process.

Culled from thousands of pieces of original material found in his studio, including newspapers, magazines, books, and photographs, these items have each been exhaustively and minutely researched, providing for the first time comprehensive details of the artist's sources. Previously unseen, these visually thrilling documents demonstrate Bacon's tactile, visceral relationship with his sources and his unerring eye for seeking out visual stimulation in the most unexpected places.

This unique selection of material from Bacon's sudio - meticulously documented and compellingly presented - will provide an invaluable insight into both the artist's work and his working methods.

Francis Bacon (19091992) was renowned for his dramatic depictions of the human form; he portrayed the ordeal of the vulnerable, defencelessly exposed body like no other artist of his generation.

At the centre of this volume are about sixty of Bacons disturbing yet captivating studies of the human figure, encompassing works from the late 1940s until his death.

Texts by a range of experts on the artist offer new insights into these radical and often discomfiting images, so brilliantly reproduced on the pages of this book.

With 1,200 works, including 250 paintings created by the artist since the previous edition, this newly expanded book on this much admired and very influential British painter is now available in an accessibly priced edition.

This is the most comprehensive monograph to date on Frank Auerbach (1931–), one of the preeminent artists of our age, widely admired for his vivid, impulsive depictions of the world around him. Often compared to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in terms of the revolutionary and powerful nature of his work, Auerbach crafts depictions of people and the urban landscapes near his London studio that make him one of the greatest painters alive today. Spanning the length of his career from the 1950s to the present, this expanded edition includes 250 additional works to bring it up to date. In the back of the book there is a small-scale chronological sequencing of full-color reproductions, which depicts nearly every painting made by the artist, from his student years up until this publication. At age 90, he looks back over his life and his work, rich with breakthroughs in painting and masterful individuality.

Praise for earlier edition:
“The constant painter: a rare interview with Frank Auerbach... A weighty monograph filled with photographs of his life’s work, written by William Feaver, is published [and] underscore[s] his position as a Grand Old Man of British Painting.”
—London Evening Standard

“This definitive account of Auerbach’s work and life includes excellent large-scale reproductions of 200 paintings and an illustrated catalogue of some 1,000 more, lively, pertinent interpretations from Feaver, the artist’s long-term friend, critical supporter and model, and engaging interviews and photographs.”
—The Financial Times

About the Author:

William Feaver is a painter, writer, critic, and one of Auerbach’s regular sitters. He is the author of Lucian Freud (Rizzoli, 2007) and was the curator of Lucian Freud (Tate, 2002) and Freud & Auerbach (V&A Museum, 2006).

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Пролистать книгу Frank Auerbach: Revised and Expanded Edition

A rich overview of the fascinating life and career of internationally renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), this volume features the artist’s complex and diverse paintings, a series of thoughtful essays about her and her oeuvre, and a detailed illustrated chronology.

As a woman artist who confronted many taboo subjects — and herself — head-on, Kahlo produced groundbreaking work that shifted the terrain of the art world. In these pages, new high-resolution photographs present the most accurate reproductions ever of her visionary artworks, including many ravishing details. That astounding fidelity and the detailed analysis of the artist’s life and process combine to make this a must-have book for Kahlo’s legions of fans worldwide.

Readable and illuminating, Frida Kahlo is illustrated with rarely seen paintings from private collections alongside iconic favorites, including many of Kahlo’s striking self-portraits and her sensual still lifes. Archival and personal photographs, insightful descriptions of her works, and numerous excerpts from her intimate diaries and letters provide context and imbue Kahlo’s work with additional meaning. Authors Héctor Tajonar and Roxana Velásquez — the world’s foremost authorities on Frida Kahlo — deftly untangle the many threads of Kahlo’s complex persona. Kahlo was a charismatic force. Fiercely political and proud of her Mexican heritage, she maintained a dense network of romantic and platonic relationships, including two marriages to fellow artist Diego Rivera. But her childhood illness and the tragic accident she suffered as a teenager left her physically vulnerable. Understanding that duality is key to fully appreciating Kahlo’s extraordinary work. With this deeply researched, stunningly designed volume in hand, readers can do just that.

About the Author:

Roxana Velásquez is the director of the San Diego Museum of Art and previously served as director of the Palace of Fine Arts (2007–2010), the National Art Museum (2004–2007), and the San Carlos National Museum (1997–2004) in Mexico. She has garnered international recognition as an expert on Frida Kahlo and for organizing major exhibitions, including Frida Kahlo 1907–2007 as well as National Homage (which attracted a record-breaking 420,000 visitors) at the Palace of Fine Arts in 2007.

This dazzling book showcases dozens of Paul Gauguin’s most celebrated works and presents a new consideration of the artist’s relationships.

This vibrant examination of Paul Gauguin’s life and work features more than fifty pieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek collection in Copenhagen, including paintings, wood carvings, and ceramics along with Oceanic art and Gauguin’s works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s permanent collections. Each piece is reproduced in exquisite detail, offering a superb opportunity to enjoy Gauguin’s groundbreaking use of color, line, and form. 

Essays examine Gauguin’s relationships and reveal the struggles, indulgences, awakenings, and betrayals of his personal and professional life. Other essays provide new insights into Gauguin’s travels to the far reaches of the French colonial empire in the Pacific and explore his cultural identity, sexuality, and spirituality. 

Beautifully designed to complement Gauguin’s extraordinary oeuvre, this book offers a refreshing take on an artist whose life and work continue to fascinate to the present day.
 

Georg Baselitz enters a dialogue with the Old Masters - invited by Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the acclaimed German painter and sculptor engages in a visual conversation. Baselitz himself curated this selection of works, focusing exclusively on nude painting. Both the exhibition and the catalogue revolve around this elemental human state, and its fundamental role in European art.

From the beginning of his career, Baselitz’s work has been informed by a pronounced awareness of art history, above all he was inspired by Mannerism’s break with classical rules. Insights into the history of nude painting, as well into the topicality of painting itself, emerge from this encounter of Baselitz’s works with historical paintings of an idealized beauty from Kunsthistorisches Museum. The carefully chosen juxtapositions open up a space in which one can reflect and experience the essence of painting anew.

About the Artist:

Georg Baselitz (*1938, Deutschbaselitz) is without a doubt one of the most influential painters and sculptors of our time. His work eludes easy categorization, but has continuously returned to his search for a new approach to updating classic figurative painting. In a celebrated turning point in 1969, he literally turned his paintings upside down and thereby managed to change the public’s viewing habits, and to sharpen their perceptions.

Turning what architect Rem Koolhaas famously referred to as “junkspace”, the spatial flotsam of the Anthropocene, into candy-coloured dreamscapes, George Byrne depicts the gritty urbanism of Los Angeles in sublime otherworldliness. Arriving a decade ago, the Australian artist was immediately enthralled by the sprawling cityscape, mesmerized by the way the sunlight transformed it into two-dimensional, almost painterly abstractions, underpinned by a distinctive pastel color palette. Extending his practice beyond the confines of the lens by extracting elements from various images, his series Post Truth dwells in the liminal space between real and imagined.

Reassembling the urban landscape into striking, ascetic collages of color and geometric fragments, Byrne creates postmodernist oases in the metropolis that masterfully harness the malleability of the photographic medium. Byrne’s compositions evoke associations with Miami Beach’s Art Deco, the Memphis Group’s designs, as well as the work of David Hockney or Ed Ruscha, and at the same time tap into the specific aesthetics of today’s visual culture played out on Instagram. They are filled with a sense of suspended reality ― and never fail to convey a feeling of joy.

About the Artist:

Born in Sydney in 1976, George Byrne graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2001, and traveled extensively before settling in Los Angeles in 2010. Today, he is internationally recognized for his large-scale photographs shot with medium-format film. Byrne has exhibited internationally, and was named the Minimalist Photographer of the Year in 2020.

The definitive monograph on the iconoclastic painter George Condo

With his arresting, unsettling style, George Condo emerged out of the dynamism of the New York art scene in the early 1980s, and he has been restlessly painting, drawing and sculpting – bringing forms into the world in one way or another – ever since. Condo’s originality lies in his transformation of references and inspirations, in both style and content, which include the canon of Western art history; from his journey through Greek classical sculpture to an unlimited and free exchange of painterly languages ranging from Rembrandt and Velasquez to Picasso and Warhol, and a unique vision of literary and popular culture.

With his ‘fake’ Old Masters, reconfigured Manets, impossibly intricate paintings that seem abstract only from a distance, fractured and multifaceted ‘psychologically Cubist’ portraits, and the orgiastic misdemeanours of a host of butlers, bankers and priests, Condo has invented, mastered and expanded not just one painterly language but an entire lexicon.

Working closely with Condo, Simon Baker has combined biographical, chronological and thematic approaches to survey the artist’s work and career to date. An introductory essay on Condo’s contradictory nature and a chapter exploring his phenomenal early career are followed by three thematic chapters that look at the years from 1984 to the present, tracing Condo’s systematic reconstruction of the techniques of painting, exploring his relationship to the concept of abstraction, and probing the darker side of his psychological iconography in drawing, painting, sculpture and writing.

George Condo is the definitive monograph on this unique artist. It will appeal to artists, art students and those with a general interest in art.

About the Author:

Simon Baker is Director of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (MEP). He was formerly Senior Curator, Photography and International Art, Tate. Prior to becoming Tate’s first curator of photography, he was Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham. He has written widely on surrealism, photography and contemporary art.

The first overview in decades of the eerie allegories of de Chirico, the forefather of surrealism and genius of uncanny connections

An innovative analysis of the artistic poetics of the master of metaphysical painting.

Through a selection of important works made during this master’s career, this volume aims to conduct a critical revision of the artist’s complex practice for the centenary of his so-called volte-face in 1919, the year he was criticised for leaving metaphysical painting (1910-1918) in favour of styles and techniques inspired by Classicism and the grand masters.

Edited by the most important experts of De Chirico, The Face of Metaphysics promotes an innovative interpretation of the artist’s oeuvre (both metaphysical, where the traditional confines of linear time and space are replaced by the doctrine of cyclical coexistence); an arrangement according to themes and not chronology underlines the idea that, despite the many changes in style, technique and subject, composition and colour tone, all of De Chirico’s works may offer tangible visions of the intangible philosophical concept of Metaphysics, advanced by Nietzsche in the late 1800s: constant metaphysics.

Divided into six sections (The Eternal Return; Metaphysical Exteriors; Metaphysical Protagonists; Metaphysical Interiors; Metaphysical nature; Metaphysics Encounters Tradition), this volume gathers around 90 works from some of the most prestigious private museums and collections in Italy and from the Fondazione de Chirico and also offers a rich core of archive documents including letters, period photos and exhibition catalogues.

About the Author:

Victoria Noel-Johnson is an art curator and historian specialised in early 20th-century Italian art. Recognised as one of the greatest experts of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, from 2008 to 2017 she was the scientific curator at the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, where she managed the art collection and international exhibition programme for the Foundation.

Zorzi da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione: is an artist who has so few confirmed works attributed to him, and about whose life little is known.

Yet, after a career span of just over ten years, Giorgione has achieved a fame that has remained unchanged over the centuries. Starting from Giovanni Bellini’s lessons on spirituality and harmony between man and nature, and from the use of colour by Giovan Battista Cima da Conegliano, the master from Castelfranco offers a very particular synthesis of musical lyricism, connecting bodies and landscape with a soft and dense light.

This tonal painting, set by Cima and Bellini, becomes with Giorgione the language of initiation of the formidable brood protagonist of the great Venetian 16th century, the season of Palma il Vecchio, Sebastiano del Piombo and Tiziano Vecellio.

CHAPTER I
Zorzi’s Hidden Canvases. Visits with an Exceptional Guide

CHAPTER II
Gypsy Women and Philosophers: Giorgione’s Enigmas. Open Work, Context and Readings

CHAPTER III
A Façade and a Frieze. Debut and Early Success amidst Classicism and Astrology

CHAPTER IV
An Altarpiece for Castelfranco. Certain and Uncertain Family Ties: Costanzo and Barbarella

CHAPTER V
“With Time” and in a Hurry. Portraits of the Young and Old

CHAPTER VI
The Competition between the Arts. The Young Man from Castelfranco in the Venetian Melting Pot

CHAPTER VII
Portraits, Self-Portraits, Personalities and Interpreters. Giorgione’s Gallery

CHAPTER VIII
The Legend of the Libidinous Painter. A Myth and its Creators

Bibliographical notes

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Пролистать книгу Giorgione

A monograph of works dedicated to Giotto with author Francesca Flores d'Arcais drawing on an impressive range of sources, from 14th-century documents to the most recent art-historical investigations

Vasari famously wrote that Giotto "recovered the true method of painting, which had been lost for many years before him," and indeed, he is traditionally considered a founder of the Italian Renaissance.

Producing a series of commissioned works for the church and upper classes in his native Tuscany and surrounding regions, Giotto changed the course of European art by breaking away from the rigid, stereotyped figures of the Byzantine and medieval traditions. His innovation was to give his characters natural movement and expression. His great fresco cycles, such as the lives of the Virgin and Christ in the Scrovegni (or Arena) Chapel, Padua, are populated with realistic depictions of three-dimensional figures; secondary characters, both comic and tragic, display the range of the painter's wit and invention.

And Giotto's treatment of perspective was just as revolutionary as his approach to the human form: the dramatic power of his scenes is heightened by the convincing illusionistic spaces in which he places them. In this authoritative survey of Giotto's life and work, Francesca Flores d'Arcais draws on an impressive range of sources, from 14th-century documents to the most recent art-historical investigations. Her research leads her to important reattributions of Giottesque paintings and to new conclusions regarding the execution and dating of both famous and lesser-known works. In this second edition of her study, d'Arcais also discusses the earthquake of September 26, 1997, that damaged the frescoes of the Upper Basilica of San Francisco in Assisi, some of which are attributed to the young Giotto; she explains not only the extent of the damage, but also the art-historical insights that emerged from the subsequent restoration effort.

More than three hundred illustrations, most in full colour and some on double gatefold pages, reproduce all of Giotto's significant frescoes in exquisite detail, as well as his moving crucifixes and jewel-like polyptychs. These splendid images and d'Arcais's insightful text, now, for the first time, in an affordable paperback edition, make this the definitive monograph on the greatest of trecento masters.

About the Author:

Francesca Flores d'Arcais is a professor of art history at the University of Verona, Italy. An expert in the field of northern Italian painting, she has made numerous contributions to the study of medieval and Renaissance art over the course of her distinguished teaching career.