Art & Art History

Examines sixty Japanese surimono, or woodblock prints that combine poems with still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and scenes from plays, and discusses the background of each print.

More than a hundred years before Japanese comics swept the globe, the master engraver Hokusai was producing beautiful, surreal, and often downright wacky sketches and drawings, filled with many of the characters and themes found in modern manga. These out-of-context caricatures, which include studies of facial expressions, postures, and situations ranging from the mundane to the otherworldly, demonstrate both the artist’s style and his taste. In addition to the landscapes for which he is beloved, Hokusai’s mangas reveal his compassion for farmers, artisans, and peasants, as well as his keen eye for the absurd.

Without a doubt, Katsushika Hokusai is the most famous Japanese artist since the middle of the nineteenth century whose art is known to the Western world. Reflecting the artistic expression of an isolated civilisation, the works of Hokusai - one of the first Japanese artists to emerge in Europe - greatly influenced the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, such as Vincent van Gogh. Considered during his life as a living Ukiyo-e master, Hokusai fascinates us with the variety and the significance of his work, which spanned almost ninety years and is presented here in all its breadth and diversity.

Utagawa Hiroshige holds an assured place in the history of art as one of the greatest and best-loved masters of the woodblock print. His immensely popular works capture the beauty and delicacy of Japan's landscape. This superb overview of Hiroshige's oeuvre is arranged according to subject matter: prints of birds and flowers; scenes of his native city; landscapes; still-lifes; a selection from his renowned series, One Hundred Famous Views in Edo; images of mist, snow, rain, and moonlight; and drawings and other works related to the artist's prints.

Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Though he captured a variety of subjects, his greatest talent was in creating landscapes of his native Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and his final masterpiece was a series known as "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-1858). This resplendent complete reprint pairs each of the 120 large-scale illustrations with a description, allowing readers to plunge themselves into Hiroshige’s beautifully vibrant landscapes.

Considers the influence of Japanese culture on Western art since 1858 through an examination of side-by-side displays of Japanese and Western art, grouped by subject matter.

This exhibition catalog examines the extensive body of Japanese folklore and literature dealing with supernatural subjects and the treatment of these subjects in various media (prints, paintings, sculpture, netsuke, masks) and by many artists. There are essays of varying quality on ghosts, demons, and other supernatural phenomena, illustrated with good color and black-and-white plates; each author attempts to connect the artistic treatments of the subjects with social events and daily life of the times, which provides some thought-provoking reading.

This exciting new art series combines the most popular artists with expert text and a fresh, unique, format destined to appeal to children and adults alike. Each of the Rizzoli Quadrifolios features sixteen foldout pages that open into huge poster-sized reproductions of the work, allowing readers to feel as though they have leaped into work itself. The series begins with two artists whose work continually compels audiences: Michelangelo and Van Gogh. Vincent Van Gogh features a variety of the best-known paintings by the Dutch artist, whose work continually breaks records at auctions.

This choice selection of beautifully reproduced drawings spans the full length of van Gogh's brief but prolific career. The works range from his early impressions of peasant life to drawings that served as studies for the great canvases he painted at the close of his life, including Landscape with Cypresses and Starry Night.

Until the publication of this book, the sketchbooks of Vincent van Gogh were available to only the few scholars who traveled to the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam, where the sketchbooks have been preserved, on permanent loan from the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. Since Van Gogh's death, a limited number of these drawings from the sketchbooks have been reproduced in various publications on the artist. Now, however, the seven sketch- books are published in their entirety with approximately 150 drawings from the sketchbooks published for the first time. For this special publication, the pages from the sketch¬books have been reproduced in their original size. Further- more, the author, Johannes van der Wolk, has been able to reconstruct through careful research the sketchbooks that have not remained intact. Van der Wolk, formerly director of the Rjksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, is now Van Gogh curator at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in Otterlo, The Netherlands. In his text Van der Wolk guides the reader through his search for the original form and subsequent reconstruction of the sketchbooks. The results are exhaustive, but not final-the reader is invited to make his own discoveries as well. The sketchbook drawings are also discussed in relation to Van Gogh's major works and are reproduced in the text section next to the paintings for which they were the gene¬sis. For anyone interested in Van Gogh and his work, this book offers new insight into his working processes as well as an extraordinary opportunity to see many works by the hand of Van Gogh rarely seen before.

A compilation of works from the Bridgeman Art Library

This catalog for a recent exhibition in West Germany highlights paintings, poster designs, and drawings from major public and private collections in Europe and the United States. An insightful supplement to the existing Lautrec literature, it focuses attention on the artist as portraitist. Adriani examines Lautrec's distinctive stylistic and technical evolution, provides detailed biographical information, and reproduces rare photos of the entertainers and prostitutes who attracted the artist. Beautifully illustrated (217 illustrations, 95 in color) and admirably translated, this scholarly book assumes substantial knowledge of 19th-century French art and literature.

In more than 125 color and 250 duotone reproductions, the art of Monet is freshly examined. Scores of new images, gathered from private collections, expose the painting problems that Monet confronted throughout his life. Text includes Monet's unpublished documents, personal letters and architectural plans.

In this book the author provides a fresh context for these canvases. The author also proposes that Monet's series paintings were not only an artistic response to the beauties of nature but were also related to contemporary events in France and to Monet's determination to provide active leadership for his nation's artistic production.

This is the catalogue of the exhibition which opened at the National Gallery of Art in May 1988 before travelling to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris. The exhibition contained more than 200 of Gauguin's works of art, including paintings, ceramics, sculpture, drawings and prints. The text, by curators of the participating museums, all experts on Gauguin, illuminates and reappraises early works and also suggests new approaches to the study of Gauguin and his art.

Paul Gauguin "painted and dreamed at the same time," yet he forecast much of what became basic to 20th-century art. A magnificent sampling of the artist's paintings is provided here, along with an absorbing introduction and commentaries by Robert Goldwater, a noted scholar on primitivism in art.