A small group of Army soldiers witnessed it all.
They photographed Germany's last push, the Battle of the Bulge, and they rode into Germany to witness unimagined destruction. They documented the Burma Road, which opened Mainland China to supplies, and saw war atrocities as far away as the Philippines.
These soldier photographers are acclaimed for their war photographs, but their work showing the impact of total war has never been compiled in a book.
As towns fell and the result of years of war were being laid bare, the world began to comprehend the impact of the war. Ruined cities were unearthed. The gates of concentration camps were flung open. Former prisoners, captured soldiers, and desperate refugees scoured the landscape for food and shelter.
These GIs used cameras instead of guns, witnessing and capturing the loss and destruction on film. Their work is a remarkable record of pictures that is now housed at the National Archives. The photos they left behind are beautiful and brutal: cemeteries and churches. POWs and DPs. Surrenders and suicides. Liberators and prisoners.
Many of the photos have never before been seen. None have been seen like this--scanned directly from original negatives for this book. Aftershock is a permanent record that shows what these soldiers saw. And it tells the story of these young photographers, whose lives were changed forever because of 1945.
The Art Institute of Chicago, although renowned for its holdings of works by the French Impressionists, also houses a wealth of superb examples by American proponents of this distinctive style. The breadth of the museum's collection of American Impressionism is rich, with a substantial body of paintings and watercolors by Winslow Homer, who is seen today as a precursor to Impressionism, as well as impressive portfolios of work by Americans living in Europe, such as James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, and the only American who was officially part of the French group, Mary Cassatt. In addition, important paintings and watercolors by notable artists such as Cecilia Beaux, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, George Inness, Mauric Prendergast, and John Twachtman are included, along with handsomely reproduced images by lesser-known artists who worked in the Impressionist vein.
Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin's austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be associated in turn with Minimalist, feminist, and even outsider artists. She moved through some of the liveliest art communities of her time while maintaining a legendary reserve. "I paint with my back to the world," she says both at the beginning and at the conclusion of a documentary filmed when she was in her late eighties. When she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century.
Agnes Martin, the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts, was championed by critics as diverse in their approaches as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss. The whole engrossing story, now available in paperback, Agnes Martin is essential reading for anyone interested in abstract art or the history of women artists in America.
The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities of Albertus Seba (1665-1736) is one of the 18th century's greatest natural history achievements and remains one of the most prized natural history books of all time.
Though scientists of Seba's era often collected natural specimens for research purposes, the Amsterdam-based pharmacist was unrivaled in his passion. His amazing collection of animals, plants, and insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of every specimen and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalogue. The nature Wunderkammer featured everything from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, birds, and butterflies, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. Many illustrations mixed plants and animals into a single scenic plate.
This reproduction is taken from a rare hand-colored original and features an introduction to the natural history and collecting traditions in which Seba played such an important role.
After attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1949, Katz bought a studio in the rural town of Lincolnville, Maine in 1954 and began to spend his summers there. The effect on his work was immediately apparent. While he continued to produce striking New York cityscapes, he also began to paint the quieter landscape he saw in Maine. The elegance of New York interiors, meanwhile, gave way in the Maine months to paintings of outdoor leisure activities. And close-up portraits of urban faces of which Katz was a master were replaced with portraits of memorable trees, thickets against late-evening light, and flower-strewn meadows.
A fully comprehensive survey of Katz s work, this beautifully produced volume offers a new way to understand the whole of his remarkable career.
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The man who launched the Golden Age of album cover design
"I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music." --Alex Steinweiss Alex Steinweiss invented the album cover as we know it, and created a new graphic art form. In 1940, as Columbia Records' young new art director, he pitched an idea: Why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months its record sales increased by over 800 per cent. His covers for Columbia--combining bold typography with modern, elegant illustrations--took the industry by storm and revolutionized the way records were sold. Over three decades, Steinweiss made thousands of original artworks for classical, jazz, and popular record covers for Columbia, Decca, London, and Everest; as well as logos, labels, advertising material, even his own typeface, the Steinweiss Scrawl. He launched the golden age of album cover design and influenced generations of designers to follow. Less well known--but included here--are his posters for the U.S. Navy; packaging and label design for liquor companies; film title sequences; as well as his fine art. Includes essays by three-time Grammy Award-winning art director/designer Kevin Reagan and graphic design historian Steven Heller; Steinweiss' personal recollections from an epic career; and extensive ephemera from the Steinweiss archive. Record collectors and graphic designers rejoice! Previously available in a limited edition, the book is finally available in an affordable trade version.