The chief art critic for "The New York Times" gives a painter's-, sculptor's-, and photographer's-eye view of art as he explores museums with some of today's most important artists. Photos throughout.

Portrait painting is inherently difficult and requires a unique understanding of and sensitivity to the sitter. This practical book considers the historical context of portrait painting and its contemporary practice. Written by a professional portrait painter, it describes the intricacies of making a portrait not just for the technically minded but also for those who are interested in a painter's perspective on the role and importance of portraiture.Step-by-step demonstrations of portraits and self-portraits.Techniques that use colour to introduce subtleties and presence.Advice on catching a likeness and overcoming difficulties.Discussion about the significance of copying and photography.Insights into the artistic process of the portrait painter.Work of contemporary and distinguished painters.'What fascinates me most, much much more than anything else in painting, is the portrait, the modern portrait.' Vincent van Gogh. A practical guide that considers the historical context of portrait painting and its contemporary practice.Aimed at beginners and more experienced; untutored groups and individual artists of portrait painters.Gives step-by-step demonstrations of portraits and self-portraits.Covers use of colour to introduce subtleties and presence.Superbly illustrated with 180 colour illustrations.Anthony Connolly is a professional portrait painter and won the prestigious Prince of Wales Award for Portrait Drawing in 2004.

Automobiles, trucks and SUVs make their way through Manhattan traffic on a daily basis, clogging the thoroughfares with a constant barrage of noise and pollution. Here Michael Spano concentrates on the person behind the wheel, honing in on facial expressions and upper-body positions trapped within, yet protected by, the rigid structure of the automobile. The drivers appear unaware of the busy metropolis, revealing a segment of American car culture grounded in the urban locale.

Elie Wiesel called the genocide of the Armenians during the First World War ‘the Holocaust before the Holocaust’. Around one and a half million Armenians - men, women and children – were slaughtered at the time of the First World War. This book outlines some of the historical facts and consequences of the massacres but sees it as its main objective to present the Armenians to the foreign reader, their history but also their lives and achievements in the present that finds most Armenians dispersed throughout the world. 3000 years after their appearance in history, 1700 years after adopting Christianity and almost 90 years after the greatest catastrophe in their history, these 50 ‘biographical sketches of intellectuals, artists, journalists, and others...produce a complicated kaleidoscope of a divided but lively people that is trying once again, to rediscover its ethnic coherence. Armenian civilization does not consist solely of stories about a far-off past, but also of traditions and a national conscience suggestive of a future that will transcend the present.’ [from the Preface]

In his fascinating survey, art historian Omar Calabrese reveals that self-portraits through the ages are both a reflection of the artist and of the period in which the artist lived. Organized thematically, the author first presents a basic definition of the genre of the self-portrait, interpreting the picture to be a manifestation of self identity, and including examples from an Egyptian tomb painting and pictures on stained glass during the Middle Ages and continuing to modern times. The next chapter focuses on the turning point for the establishment of the genre during the Renaissance when the status of the painter or sculptor was raised from artisan to artist and, as a result, portraits of the artist were considered worthwhile pictures. At first a self-portrait was hidden in a narrative painting: an artist would paint his image as part of a crowd scene, for example, or as a mythological figure. On the other extreme, once the genre was accepted, it was practiced by some artists—Rembrandt, van Gogh, Munch, and Dali, for instance—as almost an obsession. In contemporary art the self-portrait can become a deconstructed genre with the artist hiding or satirizing himself until he nearly disappears on the canvas. Among the 300 pictures featured here are examples by such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Velazquez, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Ingres, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gainsborough, Matisse, James Ensor, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, and Roy Lichtenstein. This intriguing book is a fresh way to appreciate the history of art and to understand that a self-portrait is far more complex and meaningful than merely a portrait of the artist.

"An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two—texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday —Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts."--Amazon.com.

A collection of celebrity portraits from a contemporary master of the genre, this book includes some of White's best known, and unknown, work. 100 illustrations.