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"Norman Rockwell's Models: In and out of the Studio is the first book to detail the lives of Norman Rockwell's rural Vermont models and their experiences posing in his studio. The fact that the author, S.T. Haggerty, grew up in West Arlington with the models in the same setting makes the book come alive"--

Norman Rockwell’s tremendously successful, prolific career as a painter and illustrator has rendered him a twentieth-century American icon. However, the very popularity and accessibility of his idealized, nostalgic depictions of middleclass life have caused him to be considered not a serious artist but a “mere illustrator”–a disparagement only reinforced by the hundreds of memorable covers he drew for The Sunday Evening Post. Symptomatic of critics’ neglect is the fact that Rockwell has never before been the subject of a serious critical biography. Based on private family archives and interviews and publishes to coincide with a major two-year travelling retrospective of his work, this book reveals for the first time the driven workaholic who had three complicated marriages and was a distant father —so different from the loving, all-American-dad image widely held to this day. Critically acclaimed author Laura Claridge also breaks new ground with her reappraisal of Rockwell’s art, arguing that despite his popular sentimental style, his artistry was masterful, complex, and far more manipulative than people realize.

#1 New York Times Bestseller 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”-with predictable results-the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies-an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades-the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.

Eight-part series published in the Saturday Evening Post, February 13 - April 2, 1960. Ties in with the publication of his autobiography under the same title, published by Doubleday in 1960.

Modern aesthetics is in as much a quagmire as modern art is. Since the nineteenth century, there has been no serious attempt at defining beauty, while the great many of theorists focus their attention on a concocted concept that is foreign and unnatural to say the least: the aesthetic. Art theory, on the other hand, failed utterly in its fundamental task when it handed the artist and the so-called artworld a carte blanche-in the form of the institutional theory of art-to decide by themselves what art is and is not. This study attempts to fill both niches thus left gaping. The work is divided into five parts: Part I and Part II provide an objective definition of art. Part III provides an objective definition of beauty. Part IV provides "guidelines" for judging or appreciating any work of art. And Part V provides a rather personal interpretation of what went on in the arts during the twentieth century.

Humorous illustration is a lively art, as varied in attitude as in means of execution. For the illustrator who specializes in humor or the artist who wishes to refine that aspect of his work, the problem of translating a comic point of view into a graphic reality is vital. The illustrators in this book, whose work appears in comic strips, magazines, paperbacks, books, greeting cards, and on television, explain how they manage to capture on paper the spontaneity, the essence, of their particular brands of wit. The twelve highly successful artists represented here offer a remarkably diverse sampling of subject matter, technique, and approach. This behind-the-scenes look at their lives and work explores the unique creative process of each. -- From publisher's description.