Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including...

Acclaimed and beloved for her paintings of women and children in intimate, informal settings, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was the only American artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists in Paris. Cassatt celebrated women in an age of rapid female...

In the fall of 1956, Hungarians led a successful rebellion against Soviet control. How-ever, after only ten days of freedom, the uprising was brutally crushed, and the Soviet-aligned minister Janos Kadar assumed power. Focusing on the Kadar era (1956...

Ahh, the impact of Indian art and culture on a Dutch artist in the late 1650s! Pairing Rembrandt's twenty-two surviving drawings of Shah Jahan, Jahangir, Dara Shikoh, and other Mughal courtiers with Mughal paintings of similar compositions, the book...

"The Poetry of Nature" offers an in-depth look at more than 40 extraordinary Japanese paintings that represent every major school and movement of the Edo period, including Kano, Rinpa, Nanga, Zen, Maruyama-Shij?, and Ukiyo-e. The unifying theme is a...

Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is renowned for a single, monumental, modernist artwork, "Life? or Theatre?" ("Leben? oder Theater?"), comprising 784 paintings and created between 1941 and 1942. This major art-historical study sheds new light on the re...

This eloquent and generously illustrated book asserts that artists were fascinated by and extremely skilled at still life significantly earlier than previously thought. Instead of the genre beginning in the early 17th century, noted scholar David Eks...

In ancient China (2000-221 b.c.) elaborate bronze vessels were used for rituals involving cooking, drinking, and serving food. This fascinating book not only examines the cultural practices surrounding these objects in their original context, but it...

South African-born Belgian artist Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to MAY 1968 as a performance, effectively giving birth to himself as a work of art. His artistic practice weaves together African animism, European mysticism, and socio-politic...

Since the last century, the relationship between vanguard and self-taught artists has been defined by contradiction. The established art world has been quick to make clear distinctions between trained and untrained artists, yet at the same time it ha...