The seventeenth century was the beginning of a new era of commercialism, in which artists increasingly catered to affluent collectors. This title highlights the most important artists, works, concepts, and theories of the period, accompanied by 400 full-colour illustrations.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer turns his eye to the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of this new place, he threw himself into the Dutch museums. Soon, he found himself unearthing the strange, inspiring and sometimes terrifying stories of the artists who shaped one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity, the Dutch Golden Age.

As he explored the hidden wor...

From the extreme edge of the firmament, Hildegard contemplates the wheel of creation that springs from the heart of God, a cosmological instrument in which mankind resides, described in size and proportions, and in the internal movements of the soul and the body. This is the scenario in the Book of Divine Works. It is a long sequence of ten scenes that invites human beings to climb the road of virginitas, towards the re-composition of their own selves in union with the divine Caritas.

Frida Kahlo transcended art history like no woman artist before her. She was a key figure of Mexican revolutionary modern art and a pioneer of the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism. This monograph combines Kahlo’s paintings with rare photos, diary pages, and an illustrated biography.

A pioneering artist who subverted conventions in her depictions of the nude, self-portraits, and still-lives. An iconoclast in her own time, Modersohn-Becker is today considered an icon of modernity.

Throughout her career, Paula Modersohn-Becker boldly experimented with styles while steadfastly pursuing the truth of everyday life and her own female experience. This monograph looks at the entire spectrum of her work-figure drawings, still-lifes, self-portraiture, landscape, nudes, a...

Male bonds were omnipresent in nineteenth-century European artistic scenes, impacting the creation, presentation, and reception of art in decisive ways. Men’s lives and careers bore the marks of their relations with other men. Yet, such male bonds are seldom acknowledged for what they are: gendered and historically determined social constructs. This volume shines a critical light on male homosociality in the arts of the long nineteenth century by combining art history with the insights of g...

In Anarchy of the Body, art historian KuroDalaiJee (a.k.a. Kuroda Raiji) sheds light on vital pieces of postwar Japanese avant-garde history by contextualizing the social, cultural, and political trajectories of artists across Japan in the 1960s. A culmination of years of research, Anarchy of the Body draws on an extensive breadth of source material to reveal how the practice of performance by individual artists and art groups during this period formed a legacy of resistance against instituti...

Rather than centring on the well-known collections in Western European and North American museums, Collecting Asian Art turn to museum collections of Asian art in Central Europe which emerged from the late 19th century onwards. Highlighting the dimensions of Central European connectedness, this volume explores how these collections evolved and changed under changing cultural and political conditions from the pre-World War I to the post-World War II periods. With a primary focus on collections...