Gustave Caillebotte

Sample

Marc Treib

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster is the first large-scale examination of Wurster's fifty-year career and his important place in contemporary American architectural thought. Featured here are photographs, drawings, and plans of over fifty of Wurster's projects, as well as many others by his contemporaries. Essays by distinguished architectural historians and critics provide insight into both his professional and personal life while also exploring the complex interplay of social and political forces that affected housing during the first half of this century.

Sample

Eva Mendgen ... [et al

According to Vincent van Gogh, a painting was not really finished until it was framed; unmounted it was still 'in the raw'. He and many of his contemporaries regarded picture and frame as an aesthetic whole and chose or designed their own frames. Chapters on Historicism, the Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites, the Secessionist movements (Art Nouveau, Symbolism), Impressionism, and early Modernism examine the relationship between picture and frame in the years 1850 and 1920. Hundreds of works have been illustrated for the first time with their frames - paintings by Arnold Bocklin, Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederic Lord Leighton, James McNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Jan Toorop, Fernand Khnopff, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

Sample

Mellissa Chiu and Melissa Ho

"In her mesmerizing films and photographs, Shirin Neshat (Iranian-American, b. Qazvin, 1957) examines the nuances of power and identity in the Islamic world--particularly in her native country of Iran, where she lived until 1975. This book, the companion volume to the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum exhibition of the same name, presents an array of Neshat's most compelling works, illuminating the points at which cultural and political events have inflected her artistic practice. Included are the "Women of Allah" photographs that catapulted the artist to international acclaim in the 1990s; lyrical video installations, which immerse the viewer in imagery and sound; and the photographic series "The Book of Kings"--including its latest chapter, Our House Is on Fire, created in the aftermath of the recent Egyptian revolutions. Commenting on freedom and loss, Neshat's deeply humanistic art is at once personal, political, and allegorical, and this book is an essential testament to its enduring power"--

Sample

Alina Payne

"In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects--cups, saucers, chairs, and tables--began to receive critical attention.Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism: rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken on by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should be seen as the culmination of a conversation about ornament dating as far back as the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the usual suspects of philosophy and science to establish theoretical catalysts for the shift from ornament to object in the varied fields of anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology"--