In this delightful memoir, Jean Renoir, the director of such masterpieces of the cinema as Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game, tells the life story of his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the great Impressionist painter. Recounting Pierre-Auguste's extraordinary career, beginning as a painter of fans and porcelain, recording the rules of thumb by which he worked, and capturing his unpretentious and wonderfully engaging talk and personality, Jean Renoir's book is both a wonderful double portrait of father and son and, in the words of the distinguished art historian John Golding, it "remains the best account of Renoir, and, furthermore, among the most beautiful and moving biographies we have."

"Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth -- a long, polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole..."

So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the "Vietnam Veterans Memorial" in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the unashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center "Civil Rights Memorial," the Yale "Women's Table, Wave Field" -- her architechture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age.

"Boundaries" is her first book; an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elementsthat make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original design are held together by a deeply personal text. "Boundaries" is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist." (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

The life and work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) have proved endlessly fascinating for later generations. Da Vinci is perhaps best known for his great works of art and his contribution to art theory. However as modern historians have discovered, the scope of da Vinci's achievement is immense -- his equally impressive contribution to science has been preserved in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known in the 20th century -- and cost even Bill Gates a noticeable part of his fortune when he bought the notebooks in a much publicized auction.

In his biography of da Vinci, National Book Award winner and world-renowned writer Sherwin Nuland explores the enormous breadth in this great man's lifelong pursuit of knowledge.

Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dal (1904-1989) was one of the most colorful and controversial figures in 20th-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as "hand-painted dream photographs."
This early autobiography, which takes him through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. It is superbly illustrated with over 80 photographs of Dal and his works, and scores of Dal drawings and sketches. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: "It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer. As a whole, he . . . communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray."
Dal 's flamboyant self-portrait begins with his earliest recollections and ends at the pinnacle of his earliest successes. His tantalizing chapter titles and headnotes -- among them "Intra-Uterine Memories," "Apprenticeship to Glory," "Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts," "Dandyism and Prison," "I am Disowned by my Family," "My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution," and "Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought" -- only hint at the compelling revelations to come.
Here are fascinating glimpses of the brilliant, ambitious, and relentlessly self-promoting artist who designed theater sets, shop interiors, and jewelry as readily as he made surrealistic paintings and films. Here is the mind that could envision and create with great technical virtuosity images of serene Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmarish landscapes of soft watches, burning giraffes, and fly-covered carcasses the next. For anyone interested in 20th-century art and one of its most gifted and charismatic figures, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal is must reading.

A considerable work of assimilative scholarship and common sense...races along merrily.--The Boston Globe.

No Japanese artist is more famous or more beloved than the 19th-century master of ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858). Yet one important dimension of his work has never received the attention it merits -- the fan print. This exquisitely illustrated volume celebrates the outstanding collection of Hiroshige fan prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the largest known holding of its kind in the world.

Published here in its entirety for the first time, the Hiroshige collection at the V&A consists of 126 vivid and varied fan prints, all of which are remarkable for their vibrant colors and striking design. Depicting courtesans in gorgeous costumes, domestic architecture, and rural scenes with flowers and birds, the prints offer compelling insights into Japanese life. Hiroshige's rich, poetic works are as captivating today as when they were first created; they will delight collectors, students of Japanese culture, and all lovers of Japanese art.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was one of the few women artists to have succeeded professionally in her era, and the only American invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Extensively illustrated with paintings, prints and pastels spanning Cassatt's whole career, this volume, published to accompany a travelling exhibition in the USA, contains essays which trace the artist's development from her early influences to her critical role in bringing Old Master and Impressionist art to the United States.

"Stieglitz is as scholarly a production as anyone could wish, crammed with facts and trailing informative appendixes. It is also a loving and occasionally exasperated look at a contentious relative and the intimate circumstances that formed him."
--Time

Georgia O'Keeffe was one of America's preeminent artists and one of the first to experiment with abstract form, though she never abandoned her deep response to and observation of nature. An enormously popular artist, she became identified and respected as an independent American spirit through both her art and her life. At the time of her death in 1986, Georgia O'Keeffe owned more than half of the approximately 2,000 works she had produced during the eighty years she was active as an artist: some 400 works in oil, charcoal, pastel, pencil, and watercolor, as well as more than 700 sketches. For various reasons, she had always kept a portion of her art out of the public eye and these works were not published, exhibited, or available for purchase during her lifetime. Among the works that had been exhibited and sold over the years, some were repurchased by O'Keeffe as they became available. This book explores for the first time the significance of O'Keeffe's collection of her own work. Approximately 75 seminal works, dating from about 1910 through the 1960s and reproduced in full color, document the range and quality of the art that O'Keeffe either chose to retain in her estate or consciously distributed to institutions in her lifetime and as bequests. It reveals her thinking in relation to her oeuvre, providing a unique perspective from which to understand O'Keeffe as artist and collector. The book accompanies an exhibition organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, the principal recipients to date of art from the O'Keeffe estate. The exhibition coincides with the opening of the Milwaukee Art Museum's major addition designed by noted Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

Through his work and his words, this book traces the progress of one of the most influential British designers of the last 100 years, combining Morris's writings with his famous designs for wallpapers, fabrics, tapestries, embroideries, carpets, books, and stained glass.