Art : History

Together with the National Library of Ireland, Architectural Press presents seventy previously unpublished drawings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.The identification in the National Library of Ireland of three sketchbooks, from which these drawings have been selected, represents a significant addition to the body of early drawings by Mackintosh. The sketches date from a crucial period in the young man's development, spanning his highly successful student years and the beginnings of his professional career. Each of the three sketchbooks covers an area central to his growth as an artist: the architecture of his native Scotland, an important scholarship journey in Italy and, Mackintosh's first love and greatest influence, the study of plants and growing things. Essentially private, these little known and unique works provide privileged access to significant moments in the artist's intellectual and emotional life. In this book Elaine Grogan attempts to take them out of the library display-case and bring them to life in the hands of the reader. She invites us to look over Mackintosh's shoulder on his early tentative steps towards fulfilment as a creative genius. Connections are traced, both backwards in time to his training and forwards to his great successes and eventual bitter eclipse. more...

Price: $34.95

It's a typical summer Friday night and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Throngs of fans jam into air-conditioned multiplexes to escape for two hours in the dark, blissfully lost in Hollywood's latest glittery confection complete with megawatt celebrities, awesome special effects, and enormous marketing budgets. The world is in love with the blockbuster movie, and these cinematic behemoths have risen to dominate the film industry, breaking box office records every weekend. With the passion and wit of a true movie buff and the insight of an internationally renowned critic, Tom Shone is the first to make sense of this phenomenon by taking readers through the decades that have shaped the modern blockbuster and forever transformed the face of Hollywood. more...

Price: $17.99

The French artist Orlan is infamous for performances during which her body is surgically altered. Responding to Orlan’s definition of her performance surgeries as “carnal art,” C. Jill O’Bryan considers how the artist’s ever-fluctuating face questions idealized beauty and female identity, and complicates the notion of identity—and its relation to the body—at the boundary dividing art from identity. more...

Price: $75.00

In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculptureÑcolor. Considering three major worksÑHiram PowersÕs Greek Slave, William Wetmore StoryÕs Cleopatra, and Edmonia LewisÕs Death of CleopatraÑshe explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in terms of colonial histories of visual representation. more...

Price: $82.50

A Companion to Contemporary Art is a major survey covering the major works and movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, social, political, and aesthetic issues in contemporary art since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context. Collects 27 original essays by expert scholars describing the current state of scholarship in art history and visual studies, and pointing to future directions in the field. Contains dual chronological and thematic coverage of the major themes in the art of our time: politics, culture wars, public space, diaspora, the artist, identity politics, the body, and visual culture. Offers synthetic analysis, as well as new approaches to, debates central to the visual arts since 1945 such as those addressing formalism, the avant-garde, the role of the artist, technology and art, and the society of the spectacle. more...

Price: $94.95