The Hamburg banker’s son Aby Warburg (1866–1929) was one of the most influential art historians and cultural theorists of the 20th century. His life’s work was devoted to tracing antique formulas of representation in the depiction of human passions in Renaissance art. For this epoch-spanning relationship, he developed the term ‘pathos formula’ (Pathosformel). In a lecture given in 1905 in the Konzerthaus in Hamburg, focusing on the young Albrecht Dürer’s Death of Orpheus, Warburg outlined his thoughts in front of the original drawing, which he had borrowed from the rich holdings of the Kunsthalle in order to better illustrate his idea. This drawing, pivotal in the young artist’s development as an ambitious response to classical antiquity, was displayed during the lecture alongside a group of engravings and woodcuts which included not only some of Dürer’s own seminal later prints, such as Melencolia I, but also engravings by Andrea Mantegna which Dürer copied in 1494, the same year he drew the Death of Orpheus. Warburg’s ‘pop-up exhibition’ of eleven works has here been reconstructed and analyzed, using his fascinating lecture notes, sketches and slide lists. First developed by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2011, subsequently on view in Cologne in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and now at The Courtauld Gallery, each institution has interpreted the material slightly differently, while retaining the core Warburg group. Aby Warburg aimed at unlocking the meaning of an art work by excavating its roots in its cultural context. By restaging his legendary display of 1905 with Dürer’s Death of Orpheus at its heart, the exhibition and accompanying book present some of the most skillful and ambitious works on paper ever produced and also seek to introduce into Warburg’s rich intellectual universe to a broader public, hoping thereby to offer both sheer enjoyment and food for thought.

The transient nature of our place in the world has long been an abiding artistic concern of Andrew Beckham. Whether he stands firmly on the ground or star-gazes into the heavens, Beckham, through the frame of his camera, tries to answer questions that have accompanied human life over the millennia: How do we know where and when we fit in the scheme of Life? How do we find a meaningful place for ourselves within Nature? Is one place more or less important than another for contemplating the eternal questions of "Who am I?" and "What am I doing here?"In constructing "visual poems" that include single images as well as visual montages of sequenced photographs, Beckham tries to reconcile these questions by focusing on the synchronicity between the mundane and the infinite. By presenting these images as a new kind of "visual storytelling," Beckham juxtaposes the varying scales of photographic inquiry, from the private spaces near our homes to the expanding and unknowable universe.Firmament is a meditation on place unlike any other. In Portfolio I, Beckham discovers a unique stretch of land, one square-mile in Bear Creek Canyon near his home, where a curious sense of visual order is achieved amongst the chaos of impenetrable bramble and thick woods. For the artist, this is ground incarnate. In Portfolio II, Beckham explores a landscape so wide and vast that space can hardly be contained within the frame of his camera. Here, in the 20,000 square miles known as the Sand Hills, Beckham discovers a place where land and sky meet and often merge within a virtual sea of rolling prairie grassland. In Portfolio III, Beckham turns to the "incalculable distance" between the heavens and Earth, between grounded experience and infinite space. Here, Beckham's artistry is revealed in a visual assemblage of his own photographic work merged with the cosmologies of centuries-old star charts.In viewing Andrew Beckham's work, we see depth and beauty, serenity and enlightenment, and we gain a certain reassurance that there is something greater than ourselves when we contemplate the universe with a sense of reverence and even awe. We also come to realize that we have a sacred duty to understand and respect our individual place within the world, so that we may take better care of that which we have come to know, no matter how small or large the scale.

The transient nature of our place in the world has long been an abiding artistic concern of Andrew Beckham. Whether he stands firmly on the ground or star-gazes into the heavens, Beckham, through the frame of his camera, tries to answer questions that have accompanied human life over the millennia: How do we know where and when we fit in the scheme of Life? How do we find a meaningful place for ourselves within Nature? Is one place more or less important than another for contemplating the eternal questions of "Who am I?" and "What am I doing here?" In constructing "visual poems" that include single images as well as visual montages of sequenced photographs, Beckham tries to reconcile these questions by focusing on the synchronicity between the mundane and the infinite. By presenting these images as a new kind of "visual storytelling," Beckham juxtaposes the varying scales of photographic inquiry, from the private spaces near our homes to the expanding and unknowable universe. Firmament is a meditation on place unlike any other. In Portfolio I, Beckham discovers a unique stretch of land, one square-mile in Bear Creek Canyon near his home, where a curious sense of visual order is achieved amongst the chaos of impenetrable bramble and thick woods. For the artist, this is ground incarnate. In Portfolio II, Beckham explores a landscape so wide and vast that space can hardly be contained within the frame of his camera. Here, in the 20,000 square miles known as the Sand Hills, Beckham discovers a place where land and sky meet and often merge within a virtual sea of rolling prairie grassland. In Portfolio III, Beckham turns to the "incalculable distance" between the heavens and Earth, between grounded experience and infinite space. Here, Beckham's artistry is revealed in a visual assemblage of his own photographic work merged with the cosmologies of centuries-old star charts. In viewing Andrew Beckham's work, we see depth and beauty, serenity and enlightenment, and we gain a certain reassurance that there is something greater than ourselves when we contemplate the universe with a sense of reverence and even awe. We also come to realize that we have a sacred duty to understand and respect our individual place within the world, so that we may take better care of that which we have come to know, no matter how small or large the scale.

Against the commonly held opinion that ancient Judaism was an artless culture, this sumptuously illustrated book offers new ways of looking at art in Jewish antiquity. Leading experts, under the editorship of Sarah Pearce, skilfully explore different functions of images in relation to their prohibition by the Second of the Ten Commandments. The visual world of ancient Judaism often reflects a tense confrontation between Mediterranean, artful classical culture and the image-filled, yet law-inspired biblical literature. Readers will encounter a rich collection of objects and texts analysed in different contexts, from Solomon’s Temple to late antiquity. The imageless God of monotheistic Judaism combated the polytheistic cults of Israel’s neighbours with the use of symbols. Figurative, floral and geometrical embellishments of synagogues served as decoration and not for worship. Narrative biblical scenes in the Dura-Europos synagogue played an educational and political role in Jewish society on the outskirts of the Roman Empire. Antique Jewish art exercised a profound influence on medieval Islam and even on the modern Western visual world. This book is aimed at both the scholarly world and all readers interested in religion and art.

Romans attached nuanced implications to color-terms which went beyond their literal meaning, using these terms as a form of cultural assessment, defining their social values and order. By analyzing the use and color words in specific contexts, we can gain greater insight into the Roman mind.

This is the first study to investigate the sources of the creative processes in the painting of Kazimir Malevich, from Neo-Primitivism to Suprematism, 1911-1920. These sources are found in 19th century scientific investigations into optics, especially those of Hermann von Helmholtz, the artist adapting the laws of optical light and colour and the laws of optical structures of seeing in space and in depth to his painting. Malevich’s creative processes culminated in his non-objective canvases, Suprematism, between 1915 and 1920, the painting of pure seeing.

Russia: A World Apart is a haunting evocation of the ruined country estates of the Russian aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries. Revolution, civil war, invasion, anarchy and casual indifference have conspired against many of the grand buildings of Russia’s rich and complex past. The architectural riches of Moscow and St Petersburg still exist for everyone to see, but when the photographer Simon Marsden and author Duncan McLaren entered the Russian countryside, away from the obvious tourist trails, they encountered a very different world. McLaren relates how “The further from Moscow and St Petersburg, the more desolate and derelict the landscape became. Endless pot-holed roads pass through one dead or dying village after another whose vandalized churches are now the refuge of owls and pigeons. This is the plight of modern-day Russia where the countryside is dying and its population declining while the big cities are thriving. Hidden away within all this desolation and chaos, many devastated country estates can be found. The statuary and formal gardens gone forever, replaced by an overgrown wilderness where stray dogs forage amongst the crumbling outhouses, garbage and rotting tyres.”This book, the result of four trips undertaken by Marsden and McLaren, illustrates a diverse mix of pre-revolutionary buildings and memorials, manor houses, palaces, churches, statuary and tombs, interspersed with more recent monuments from Soviet times. Each picture tells its own tale. In the newly found freedom and optimism of the post-communist era, some of these estates are being restored by individuals and organizations whose immense dedication to rescuing their past is nothing short of inspiring. Others will simply crumble to dust in the face of indifference from the majority of the population making Russia: A World Apart a beautiful and melancholy testament to the glories and grandeur of the past few centuries.

The figure of Carmen has emerged as a cipher for the unfettered female artist. Dance historian and performance theorist Ninotchka Bennahum shows us Carmen as embodied historical archive, a figure through which we come to understand the promises and dangers of nomadic, transnational identity, and the immanence of performance as an expanded historical methodology. Bennahum traces the genealogy of the female Gypsy presence in her iconic operatic role from her genesis in the ancient Mediterranean world, her emergence as flamenco artist in the architectural spaces of Islamic Spain, her persistent manifestation in Picasso, and her contemporary relevance on stage. This many-layered geography of the Gypsy dancer provides the book with its unique nonlinear form that opens new pathways to reading performance and writing history. Includes rare archival photographs of Gypsy artists.

As an American living in England, a conscious Jew who utilized Christian symbols, a skillful modeler who introduced direct carving into England, and a modernist who eventually came to dislike abstraction for its own sake, Epstein did not fit neatly into the artistic categories of his time. Apart from his still widely admired naturalistic bronze portraits, Epstein’s oeuvre remains poorly understood and his reputation is dominated by his famous Rock Drill from before World War I. As this book shows, Epstein remained an avant-garde artist throughout his life, even if he ignored modernist dogma as well as man-in-the-street prudery. Gilboa’s text reveals the man in all his genius, interpreting many works in the light of Epstein’s personal circumstances.In an atmosphere of polarized attitudes to art and polite anti-Semitism at the end of the 1920s growing rather less polite thereafter, the outsider Jew Epstein deliberately became estranged from London’s art world. He responded to society’s attitude towards him in a series of bold projects – the monumental Genesis (1930) and Primeval Gods (1931–32); the smaller carvings Chimera and Elemental (1932); Behold the Man (1934–35); Consummatum Est (1938–39); Adam (1938) and Jacob and the Angel (1940); the bronze Lucifer (1944–45) and again a carving, Lazarus (1947). One cannot ignore the symbolic names of these sculptures. The discussion in this book will reveal that in each case the name has a definite relation to the sculpture’s theme and essence, as well as to the personal concerns of the sculptor.Almost all of these sculptures that Epstein produced from the 1930s aroused a public outcry, causing one critic to state that “a new carving by Mr. Epstein – good, bad or indifferent – can still steal the headlines when criminal assault, private or political, is out of season”. It was only during the 1950s, following the trauma and emotional shock of World War II, that new requirements for the expression of ideas and emotions rather than for mere forms with which to play renewed the demand for ‘an Epstein’ and his kind of ‘content’ sculpture, mainly in public commissions. Epstein, by then in his seventies, was flooded with work, and his sculpture – which employed Christian imagery to convey universal ideas of consolation and hope to a war-weary England – became newly relevant, gaining him the status of grand old master of English sculpture.

West Rock and East Rock are bold and beautiful features around New Haven, Connecticut. They resemble monumental gateways (or time-tried sentinels) and represent a moment in geologic time when the North American and African continents began to separate and volcanism affected much of Connecticut. The rocks attracted the attention of poets, painters, and naturalists when beliefs rose about the spiritual dimensions of nature in the early 19th century. More than two dozen artists, including Frederick Church, George Durrie, and John Weir, captured their magic and produced an assortment of classic American landscapes. In the same period, the science of geology evolved rapidly, triggered by the controversy between proponents and opponents of biblical explanations for the origin of rocks. Lavishly illustrated, featuring over sixty paintings and prints, this book is a perfect introduction to understanding the relationship of geology and art. It will delight those who appreciate landscape painting, and anyone who has seen the grandeur of East and West Rock.

Over the course of a dozen years, photographer Georgia Sheron took numerous photographs of her next-door neighbor, "Uncle John" Ludorf, a farmer who plowed with horses and milked cows by hand into his late nineties. Her striking prints, accompanied by John's observations as garnered in a number of interviews, offer an artful, nuanced, and unsentimental look at a bygone way of life."I love the way certain photographs overwhelm with the sheer immediacy and vastness of the terrain, so that it takes a few moments to realize there's a tiny person there. In other photographs, we're persuaded to perceive the way the photographer does: John's spread fingers are not so very different from the splayed branches of the towering tree; his veins are only the living version of the shape he holds." -From the introduction by Ann Beattie

Inspired by the recent identification of a third autograph version of Gainsborough’s masterpiece The Cottage Door, this book examines the significance of the multiple versions of designs that the artist produced during the 1780s. It demonstrates that without the pressure of exhibiting his work annually at the Academy and without a string of sitters waiting for their finished portraits, Gainsborough’s work became more personal, more thoughtful. This study of the last phase of the artist’s work is a totally fresh interpretation of not only The Cottage Door but other key works such as Mrs Sheridan and Diana and Acteon. Gainsborough’s creative energies changed around 1780. He became restless and wanted to promote his landscape painting more effectively. He started to paint coastal scenes using an innovative painting technique to depict the water and he embarked on a series of ‘fancy’ pictures that he would position him as a descendant of an Old Master tradition. He was never happy with the constraints of the Royal Academy and he was at odds with the dictatorial opinions promoted by its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Removing himself from the Academy enabled him finally to do what he wanted.He began to turn to portrait compositions that he had developed and refined over a number of years. With subtle alterations they could be made suitable for a variety of sitters. The subtlety of his skilled observation was less easy to accommodate in standard-sized full-length canvases and in these portraits he sometimes resorted to rhetoric gesture that fought against the closely observed likenesses in his best portraits. The margin between ‘fancy’ pictures and portraits became blurred and the categorization of some of these paintings changed while they were on the easel. Always finding composition difficult, rather than begin something new he often revisited earlier designs that had pleased him. He would paint them again and make slight changes of tone and emphasis that would radically change the concept and intention of the design. The subject matter in some of his late paintings veers towards the autobiographical and shows a certain rift between him and his family.

This work contains illustrations of the thirteenth century Byzantine New Testament at the Rockefeller-McCormack collection in Chicago with a full description of its text, provenance, and the artistic and theological significance of the miniatures.

People love dogs, and dogs love people. Walking a dog is one of the most visible and mutually beneficial manifestations of that bond. It is a ritual steeped in affection and obligation. It doesn’t have a day off. It doesn’t pay the bills or clean the dishes or do the laundry. Still, people and dogs alike gain the benefits of exercise, socialization, shared experiences and observations. Another benefit, often overlooked, is the pleasure of mutually indulging a trait that ordinary dogs share with extraordinary people: curiosity. This book is, in many ways, an ode to curiosity. Walking Magpie is about a dog and what a dog sees. It is also a work of serious photography by a well-known and pioneering landscape artist: Chuck Forsman, who, for more than forty years, has been a keen observer of the interface between landscape and culture as expressed through his paintings and photographic art. As a result, Forsman often goes to places that might not be on everyone’s radar screen. In this book, Forsman took a camera with him during his walks with Magpie, the family dog. Often, these walks are in the neighborhood and surrounding hills where Forsman lives: near the Flatirons in Boulder. But Magpie joins Forsman on other adventures, from Alaska and the Northwest Territories of Canada to Florida, Ohio, and New York City. The intent is to turn these experiences into art. With each picture we sense mystery rather than clarity, questions about place rather than answers. We hardly can know what a dog knows, but with this book we can appreciate better what a dog sees and senses and experiences, helping the human and canine imagination to meld, at least a little. Walking Magpie is published in conjunction with a retrospective of Chuck Forsman’s photographs at the Denver Art Museum in October 2013. Published in association with the Denver Museum of Art.

This beautifully illustrated memoir by Pete Hogan is the follow-up instalment to his highly acclaimed The Log of the Molly B. After the adventures of building his own boat and sailing it from Canada down the west coast of the US, through the Panama Canal and across the Atlantic to Ireland, Pete decided to settle down and dedicate his life to his art in the remote surroundings of Achillbeg island, just south of Achill, County Mayo. As he describes it: "I was not in the mood for compromise. I wanted to live on an island and make art. If Paul Gauguin could quit his job as a stock broker and paint pictures on an island, so could I, but in the west of Ireland. If James Joyce could be an exile in Trieste and 'forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race', then so could I, but on an island in the west of Ireland and. If Andy Warhol could rule the art world and become famous from some night club in New York, then so could I - from an island in the west of Ireland. I would be famous, aloof, celebrated and revered - from an island in the West of Ireland. Or so I thought. I parked my engineless, gaff-rigged ketch. I unloaded my dreams. I kicked open the door of my house and I settled in. I kept a journal that winter. What follows is based on what I wrote." Lavishly illustrated with dozens of full colour plates, The Artist on the Island is a remarkable record of one man's attempt to forego modern-day conveniences and social conventions in order to focus on what is truly important.

At one time, sardines were an inexpensive staple for many Americans. The 212 photographs in this elegant volume offer a striking document of this now vanished industry. Generations of workers in Maine have snipped, sliced, and packed the small, silvery fish into billions of cans on their way to Americans' lunch buckets and kitchen cabinets. On April 15, 2010, Stinson's Seafood, once the home of Beach Cliff Sardines, shut down the packing line that had made the name world famous. Begun in 1927, Stinson's empire eventually included sardine canneries spread along the Maine coast and a fleet of ships to supply them. With this closing, however, the end of the entire sardine industry in Maine had finally arrived. Photographer Markham Starr was privileged to spend several days at the Stinson factory in Prospect Harbor, one month before it was dismantled, emerging with a collection of remarkable images that transform the parts of the cannery into works of art and capture the resilience of the workers faced with the loss of jobs many had held for decades. This book includes a short essay, and shows the heartland of Maine at its finest.