This title looks at Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's 'Circle of Heads', his twelve large bronze animal heads depicting the ancient Chinese zodiac.

Collects the private correspondence between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, revealing the ups and downs of their marriage, their thoughts on their work, and their friendships with other artists.

Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool accompanies the first career retrospective of the renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from February 7, 2008 through July 13, 2008. Hendricks was born in 1945 in Philadelphia. His unique work contains elements of both American realism and postmodernism, occupying a space between the portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and the pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. Hendricks is best known for his life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. His bold portrayal of his subject's attitude and style elevates the common person to celebrity status. Cool, empowering, and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks' artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists. This richly illustrated book contains 100 color images of paintings created from 1964 to the present. It focuses primarily on the artist's full-figure portraits, as well as lesser known early works and the artist's more recent portal-like landscape paintings. The catalog includes the most comprehensive bibliography on Hendricks to date, a timeline of the artist's life, and an interview with the artist by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. It also includes essays by Barkley L. Hendricks, Duke University art historian Richard J. Powell, exhibition curator Trevor Schoonmaker, and Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection.

alist Peter Watson exposes smuggling and the evasion of customs and national laws--and questions certain practices within and around the venerable art auction house. Using leads provided by the tip, and a huge cache of stolen documents, Watson details genuine experts, tomb robbers, as well as false names and claims, evaluations, despoilation of national treasures, and more. photos.

This volume explores the history of Sotheby's auction house, tracing its beginnings back to 1744. It was in the latter half of the 19th century, when economic instability forced the aristocrats to sell off many of their treasures, that Sotheby's began to lay the foundations of the modern art market. The Sotheby's-Christie's rivalry intensified in the early-1900s and they have been battling it out ever since over the likes of Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh and Monet. Lacey takes the reader through the unprecedented boom of the 1980s, when Van Gogh's Irises went for $53.9 million, and examines the catastrophic effects of an inflation still being felt today.

The Art of the Steal tells the story of several larger-than-life figures - the billionaire tycoon Alfred Taubman; the most powerful woman in the art world, Dede Brooks; and the wily British executive Christopher Davidge - who conspired to cheat their clients out of millions of dollars. It offers an unprecedented look inside this secretive, glamorous, gold-plated industry, describing just how Sotheby's and Christie's grew from clubby, aristocratic businesses into slick international corporations. And it shows how the groundwork for the most recent illegal activities was laid decades before the perpetrators were caught by federal prosecutors.