Piero della Francesca

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Sally Yard

Willem de Kooning arrived in the United Sates in 1926 as a twenty-two-year-old stowaway from Holland, soon to become a leading figure in the emergence of abstract expressionist painting in New York. This volume presents over 100 illustrations of every phase of de Kooning's artistic evolution, and explains the personal and art historical background behind his groundbreaking work and its critical reception. Author Sally Yard details the progress of de Kooning's career, from his brief stint as a WPA painter, to his first one-person exhibition of abstract work in 1948. Five years later, an exhibition of women painted in aggressive, lashing gestures stunned contemporaries, not only for the vehemence of the artist's attack, but also for the reversal of direction from abstraction to figuration. The alternation and intertwining of these two genres remained fundamental to de Kooning's work over six decades.

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with essays by Richard Morphet, Anthony Lane

"Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932) is among the most important artists working in Britain today. Nominally abstract, his paintings are, in his words, "representational pictures of emotional situations." Sumptuously illustrated, this book focuses on a selection of Hodgkin's paintings from the last fifteen years. Conceived independently, Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992-2007 will complement recent, retrospective exhibitions and publications, providing a critical coda to current scholarship on this artist's work. Essays by Richard Morphet and Anthony Lane bring together personal responses to Hodgkin's work from this period, with special reference to works in the exhibition at Yale and Cambridge; accounts of the development of his art in the preceding decades; observations on the artist's relationship between his personal circumstances and his art; and discussion of some of the links between Hodgkin's vision and the work of selected other artists in England, continental Europe and the United States of America."--Jacket.

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Doris von Drathen

"A few years ago, The New York Times's Ken Johnson wrote of a series of Pat Steir paintings that "Beauty and Intellect join forces" in them, and that "what saves them from being just pretty pictures is the way they weave together several strands of meaning into a more complex conceptual fabric." Over the decades Steir has been carrying on just the sort of A-list painting career that pulls in accolades like that, putting up installations of her paintings in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. This monograph contains complete biographical and bibliographical information, an essay and an extensive interview between Doris von Drathen and Steir."--BOOK JACKET.

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Jay Boyer

Sidney Lumet, director of landmark motion pictures such as The Pawnbroker, Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, and Network, has proven to be one of America's most enduring and diversified film directors. His singular career as a filmmaker - spanning more than forty years - has embraced both purely commercial projects and ones of enormous complexity and challenge. Lumet has distinguished himself as visionary while tackling every imaginable type of film. In this exhaustive new study of Lumet, Jay Boyer presents the most up-to-date and inclusive analysis yet of the director's films - moving far beyond the limited analyses previously published. Boyer employs an eclectic approach in his appraisal of Lumet, with a strong emphasis toward auteur methods of criticism. An extensively detailed examination of individual films from Lumet's early, middle and recent periods incorporates discussion of technique (camera placement, mise en scene, editing, etc.) in relation to the narrative idea. This probing of the relationship between form and idea is the essence of Boyer's study. He argues convincingly that while Lumet does not see himself as an auteur he is someone who has made a significant mark on motion picture art by making films with recurring ideas and motifs, while employing a restrained cinematic style that permits itself to remain subservient to the film narrative. Boyer also astutely observes and builds a case for Lumet as a director whose finest achievements place him inside a circle of filmmakers who belong to the New York School of Filmmaking. Along with those of his contemporaries John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann, and Martin Scorsese, Lumet's films are often marked by their gritty, urban feel and air of authenticity. Boyer's study is frank in its appraisal of both the distinguished achievements and the shortcomings of Lumet's life work. Highly readable and lucid, it belies the critical assumptions generally applied to Lumet's films to enable a fuller appreciation of his worth.