The Captor's Image

Basil Dufallo

An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. However,...

Artworld Prestige

Leonard Diepeveen , Timothy Van Laar

Why does the artworld often privilege one cultural form over another?Why does it grant more attention to reviews in, say, Artforum over ARTnews? And how can an artist once hailed as visionary be dismissed as derivative just a few years later? Exploring the ever-shifting...

Modernism's Other Work

Lisa Siraganian

Modernism's Other Work challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning-in particular the political meaning-of modernism's commitment to the work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film,...

Art and Homosexuality

Christopher Reed

This bold, globe-spanning survey is the first book to thoroughly explore the radical, long-standing interdependence between art and homosexuality. It draws examples from the full range of the Western tradition, including classical, Renaissance, and contemporary art,...

Optic Antics

Paul Arthur , David E. James , Michele Pierson

Ken Jacobs has been making cinema for more than fifty years. Along with over thirty film and video works, he has created an array of shadow plays, sound pieces, installations, and magic lantern and film performances that have transformed how we look at and think about...

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage

William E. Metcalf

A large gap exists in the literature of ancient numismatics between general works intended for collectors and highly specialized studies addressed to numismatists. Indeed, there is hardly anything produced by knowledgeable numismatists that is easily accessible to the...

From Head to Hand

David Levi Strauss

In his third book, Strauss delves into the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand in the expression of an artwork. How exactly does this happen? It's a question so basic, an act so fundamental to art-making, that it has...

Voyages of the Self

Barbara Novak

Barbara Novak is one of America's premier art historians, the author of the seminal books American Painting of the Nineteenth Century and Nature and Culture, the latter of which was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times and was nominated for...

Mahler's Voices

Julian Johnson

The Hearing Eye

Graham Lock , David Murray

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked.The Hearing Eye makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical...

Prohibiting Plunder

Wayne Sandholtz

For much of history, the rules of war decreed that "to the victor go the spoils." The winners in warfare routinely seized for themselves the artistic and cultural treasures of the defeated; plunder constituted a marker of triumph. By the twentieth century, international...

Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists

Ann Lee Morgan

With the advent of abstract expressionism in the 1940s, America became the white hot center of the artistic universe. Now, in The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Artists, the first such volume to appear in three decades, Ann Lee Morgan offers an informative,...

American Painting of the Nineteenth Century

Barbara Novak

In this distinguished work, which Hilton Kramer in The New York Times Book Review called "surely the best book ever written on the subject," Barbara Novak illuminates what is essentially American about American art. She highlights not only those aspects that appear...

Nature and Culture

Barbara Novak

In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals....

Eakins Revealed

Henry Adams

Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs...

Animal Anatomy for Artists

Eliot Goldfinger

From the author of the classic Human Anatomy for Artists comes this user-friendly reference guide featuring over five hundred original drawings and over seventy photographs. Designed for painters, sculptors, and illustrators who use animal imagery in their work, Animal...

The Expert versus the Object

Ronald D. Spencer , Eugene Victor Thaw

The authenticity of visual art has always commanded the attention of experts, dealers, collectors, and the art-minded public. Is it "real" or "original" is a way of asking what am I buying? What do I own? What am I looking at? And today more sophisticated questions are...

Hollywood Cartoons

Michael Barrier

In Hollywood Cartoons, Michael Barrier takes us on a glorious guided tour of American animation in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, to meet the legendary artists and entrepreneurs who created Bugs Bunny, Betty Boop, Mickey Mouse, Wile E. Coyote, Donald Duck, Tom and Jerry,...

Rodin's Art

Albert E. Elsen , Rosalyn Frankel Jamison , Frank Wing

The late Albert Elsen was the first American scholar to study seriously the work of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the person most responsible for a revival of interest in the artist as a modern innovator--after years during which the sculpture had been...

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England

Michael T. Saler

The Avant-Garde in Interwar England addresses modernism's ties to tradition, commerce, nationalism, and spirituality through an analysis of the assimilation of visual modernism in England between 1910 and 1939. During this period, a debate raged across the nation...