Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
Edited by Lynne Cooke

Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke, Woven Histories offers a fresh and authoritative look at textiles—particularly weaving—as a major force in the evolution of abstraction. This richly illustrated volume features more than fifty creators whose work crosses divisions and hierarchies formerly segregating the fine arts from the applied arts and handicrafts.
 
Woven Histories begins in the early 20th century, rooting the abstract art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the applied arts and handicrafts, then features the interdisciplinary practices of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and others who sought to effect social change through fabrics for furnishings and apparel. Over the century, the intersection of textiles and abstraction engaged artists from Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks to Rosemarie Trockel, Ellen Lesperance, Jeffrey Gibson, Igshaan Adams, and Liz Collins, whose textile-based works continue to shape this discourse. Including essays by distinguished art historians as well as reflections from contemporary artists, this ambitious project traces the intertwined histories of textiles and abstraction as vehicles through which artists probe urgent issues of our time.

292 pages | 190 illustrations | 9.5 × 11 inches

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Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper
Adam Greenhalgh

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) is renowned for his towering abstract paintings on canvas; joy, despair, ecstasy, and tragedy are among the themes that he sought to express in his luminous works. Despite Rothko’s prominence, few people know that he also created more than 1,000 paintings on paper over the course of his career. The artist viewed these not as preliminary studies but as finished paintings in their own right.

These remarkable paintings range from early figurative subjects and surrealist works to the soft-edged rectangular fields, often realized at monumental scale, for which Rothko is best known. These works challenge our expectations about how painting is defined, as well as popular ideas about Rothko and his career. In this beautifully illustrated volume, Adam Greenhalgh traces the role these works played in the artist’s reception, reputation, and success.

This book accompanies the first major exhibition dedicated to Rothko’s works on paper in forty years and brings together nearly one hundred radiant, rarely displayed examples. Building on the important research conducted by Greenhalgh and his team for the catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s works on paper, this important catalog offers a new appreciation of an underrecognized facet of the artist’s practice.

200 pages | 124 illustrations | 8.75 × 11 inches

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Dorothea Lange: Seeing People
Philip Brookman, Sarah Greenough, Andrea Nelson, and Laura Wexler

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) aimed to make pictures that were, in her words, “important and useful.” Her decades-long investigation of how photography could articulate people’s core values and sense of self helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice.

Lange’s sensitive portraits showing the common humanity of often marginalized people were pivotal to public understanding of vast social problems in the 20th century. Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Drawing on new research, the authors look at Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities—topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.

216 pages | 100 illustrations | 9.25 × 10.5 inches

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The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, heather ahtone, Joy Harjo, and Shana Bushyhead Condill

The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans brings together works by many of today’s most boldly innovative Native artists. These fifty richly illustrated works across a diversity of practices, including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, performance, and video, share the common theme of the land.

A poem by Joy Harjo (Muscogee [Creek] Nation), the twenty-third US poet laureate, opens this groundbreaking book. Essays by exhibition curator and acclaimed artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), heather ahtone (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation), and Shana Bushyhead Condill (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) lend insights into these works by Native American artists.

Featuring both well-known and emerging artists, The Land Carries Our Ancestors shares new perspectives while offering a timely celebration of contemporary Indigenous art in the United States.

176 pages | 150 illustrations | 9.75 × 9.75 inches

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Canova: Sketching in Clay
C. D. Dickerson III and Emerson Bowyer, with Anthony Sigel and Elyse Nelson

The most celebrated sculptor of the neoclassical age, Antonio Canova (1757–1822) established himself as the preeminent artist of his time with his funerary monuments and meticulously carved marbles on classical themes. Although his idealized and sensual sculptures are widely known, this is the first book devoted entirely to the brilliantly expressive clay models that he quickly made in preparation for his marble sculptures. Only 65 of his terracotta models survive today. Extraordinarily modern in their boldness, the models retain the touch of the artist’s hand and yield a revelatory glimpse into Canova’s imaginative and technical process.

288 pages | 200 illustrations | 8.5 × 10.5 inches

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Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice
Peter Humfrey, Susannah Rutherglen, Deborah Howard, Catherine Whistler, Joanna Dunn, Linda Borean, Andrea Bellieni, Sara Menato

Vittore Carpaccio is one of the most beloved painters of early Renaissance Italy, especially admired as the artist who captures the sanctity and splendor of Venice at the turn of the sixteenth century. The richness and diversity of his costumes and architecture embody the very essence of Venice five hundred years ago, a bustling, multiethnic crossroads of West and East. Carpaccio adds a taste for the poetic and fanciful in his work, creating fantastical settings enriched with contemporary detail. His large narrative canvases painted for local religious confraternities bring sacred history to life, but he was equally active in producing smaller paintings to decorate the homes of prosperous Venetians. Usually these were intended as aids to private devotion, but often, too, they were secular in subject, and showed scenes from classical mythology or everyday life. Carpaccio was a consummate draftsman, and he prepared his paintings with numerous drawings, ranging from rough preliminary sketches to beautifully refined studies. A generous selection of both paintings and drawings is presented in splendid detail in this richly illustrated volume.

With new research and insightful scholarship, curator Peter Humfrey, one of the world’s leading experts on Venetian Renaissance art, and this catalog’s seven contributing authors bring new perspectives to the work of this extraordinary artist, showing us why Vittore Carpaccio has long been celebrated as the master storyteller of Renaissance Venice.

352 pages | 300 illustrations | 9.75 × 11.5 inches

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Sargent and Spain
Sarah Cash, Elaine Kilmurray, and Richard Ormond
With contributions by Javier Barón, Nancy G. Heller, Chloe Sharpe, and Catherine Southwick

American artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) experienced Spain, including the picturesque island of Majorca, as a source of rejuvenation and inspiration. Sargent and Spain features scores of the artist’s dazzling watercolors, oil paintings, and drawings, from landscapes and seascapes to architectural studies, scenes of everyday life, and sympathetic portraits of the Roma and other local people he encountered. Immersing himself in the country’s rich culture, he studied Spanish masters old and new, lavishing particular attention on works by Diego Velázquez in the Prado. He rendered the distinctive architecture of the Alhambra as well as other palaces and churches, and he captured lively scenes of ports and villages. Intrigued by Spanish dance and music, Sargent created dynamic views of flamenco and the famous dancer La Carmencita. A map and an illustrated chronology document the artist’s seven trips to and travels through Spain. This handsome book showcases, for the first time, Sargent’s captivation with Spain and the remarkable works of art now associated with it.

256 pages | 230 illustrations | 9.5 x 11.5 inches

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The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900
James Meyer

From ancient mythology to contemporary cinema, the motif of the double―which repeats, duplicates, mirrors, inverts, splits, and reenacts―has captured our imaginations, both attracting and repelling us. The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900 examines this essential concept through the lens of art, from the paired paintings of Henri Matisse and Arshile Gorky, to the double line works of Piet Mondrian and Marlow Moss, to Eva Hesse’s One More Than One, Lorna Simpson’s Untitled (Two Necklines), Glenn Ligon’s Double America, and Rashid Johnson’s The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett).

James Meyer, curator of modern art at the National Gallery, explores four modes of doubling: Seeing Double through repetition; Reversal, the inversion or mirroring of an image or form; Dilemma, the staging of an absurd or impossible choice; and the Divided and Doubled Self (split and shadowed selves, personae, fraternal doubles, and pairs). Authors Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tom Gunning, W.J.T. Mitchell, Hillel Schwartz, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Andrew Solomon consider the double in terms of ethics, psychoanalysis, double consciousness, the queer double, and the doppelgänger in silent cinema.

Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance.

288 pages | 180 illustrations | 8 × 10.5 inches

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American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams  
Sarah Greenough, with afterword by Terry Tempest Williams.

For the first time, the photographs that have come to define Robert Adams’s singular response to the landscape of the American West appear together in one substantive volume. American Silence examines Adams’s reverential act of looking at the world around him and the almost palpable silence of his photographs.

Featuring some 175 black-and-white photographs from Adams’s most important projects, the book includes pictures of suburban sprawl and strip malls in addition to rivers and skies, the prairie, and the ocean. While Adams’s photographs lament the ravages that have been inflicted on the land, they also pay homage to what remains.

304 pages | 215 illustrations | 9.25 × 11.25 inches

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Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya
Rena Hoisington

How can a print replicate the subtlety of ink, wash, and watercolor? Driven by increasing interest in studying, collecting, and multiplying drawings, 18th-century printmakers and collectors answered this challenge by pursuing the possibilities of the aquatint. Within a few decades, this innovative, versatile medium would spread in use across Europe, its distinctive dark tones engendering the creation of a remarkable variety of ingenious imagery.

This book provides an engaging narrative about the medium’s flourishing as a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan phenomenon that contributed to the rise of art publishing, connoisseurship, leisure travel, and drawing instruction as well as the spread of neoclassicism. Thoughtful, focused examinations of key projects and themes offer insight into the sophisticated experiments of artists including Francisco de Goya, Katharina Prestel, Paul Sandby, and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince. Written by Rena Hoisington, curator and head of old master prints at the National Gallery of Art, and generously illustrated with rare works from the National Gallery’s collection of early aquatints, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience interested in printmaking and how it was harnessed toward the exchange of information and ideas in Europe during the Enlightenment.

288 pages | 150 illustrations | 8.25 × 10.25 inches

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Clouds, Ice, and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

For more than two decades, Lee and Juliet Folger have worked closely with the National Gallery of Art to acquire exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings. Clouds, Ice, and Bounty honors this remarkable group of paintings and the collaborative relationship that has brought them into the nation’s collection. To date, twenty-five works (including one British painting) have been purchased for the Gallery by the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. The same fund also enabled the construction of the Dutch and Flemish Cabinet Galleries. These intimate spaces, nestled among the grand galleries of the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, encourage quiet contemplation of the sort of masterful, small-scale works to which the Folgers are drawn.

The Folger paintings highlight the everyday pleasures of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, a period of relative peace, prosperity, optimism, and reflection. An array of still lifes envelops the senses with enticing foods, lush blossoms, and impossibly fragile insects. Landscapes and seascapes explore the Netherlandish lowlands and waterways, recording minute shifts in color and terrain as land and water spread out beneath towering skies. Genre scenes capture the fashion, pastimes, and personalities of the period.

All twenty-five paintings donated to the Gallery by the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund are reproduced and discussed in this book. Luxurious illustrations allow close examination of the many charming details and expansive vistas found in the Folger paintings. Catalog entries consider composition and technique as well as the broader historical context and meaning of each work. An introductory essay by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. tells the story of Lee and Juliet Folger’s connection to the Gallery and their thoughtful collecting practice. A volume as exquisite as the art it celebrates, this book contains a treasure trove of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century painting.

172 pages | 81 illustrations | 9.25 × 10.75 inches

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The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler
Margaret F. MacDonald; with contributions by Charles Brock, Patricia de Montfort, Joanna Dunn, Grischka Petri, Aileen Ribeiro, and Joyce H. Townsend

The American-born artist James McNeill Whistler and Irish-born model Joanna Hiffernan met in 1860 and began a close professional and personal relationship that lasted over two decades. Hiffernan posed for many of Whistler’s most famous works, including his controversial “Symphony in White” paintings that fascinated and challenged Victorian audiences with their complex associations with sex and morality, class and fashion, genre and spiritualism, popular fiction, and the aesthetic movement.

This luxuriously illustrated volume provides the first comprehensive account of Hiffernan's partnership with Whistler during a period when he was forging a reputation as one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. It transforms perceptions of their relationship—and the art arising from that collaboration—through a series of essays packed with new insights into the creation, marketing, and cultural context of Whistler's iconic works.

232 pages | 170 illustrations | 8.75 × 10.5 inches

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The New Woman Behind the Camera
Edited with text by Andrea Nelson. Foreword by Kaywin Feldman. Preface by Andrea Nelson and Mia Fineman. Contributions by Elizabeth Cronin, Mila Ganeva, Kristen Gresh, Elizabeth Otto, and Kim Sichel.

During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art—including photography. This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those “new women” who embraced photography as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography, and photojournalism. Featuring work by over 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Eslanda Goode Robeson, Tsuneko Sasamoto, and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

288 pages | 277 illustrations | 9.5 × 12 inches

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Philip Guston Now
Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin

Philip Guston—​perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory—​has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. His winding career, embrace of “high” and “low” sources, and constant aesthetic reinvention defy easy categorization.

Published to accompany the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston’s art in 15 years, this book traces the unconventional path of this hugely important painter (1913–1980). Incisive essays from leading art historians reveal Guston’s thematic influences and interests, while an authoritative, illustrated chronology shares many new discoveries about his life and work.

We also hear from 10 of the most relevant artists of our day—including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Amy Sillman, and Art Spiegelman—for whom Guston’s bold, often provocative work has served as inspiration.

Featuring a magnificent array of color plates derived from exquisite new photographs of Guston’s paintings, this generously illustrated volume also highlights rarities including little-known cartoons drawn by Guston in his youth and intimate, previously unpublished photographs of his studio and painting materials.

This book offers the first truly balanced examination of Guston’s career—from socially committed public art in the 1930s and ’40s, to abstract expressionism in the 1950s, to his defining, defiant turn away from abstraction—and toward the figure—in the late 1960s and ’70s. This final decade was also his most productive, when he created large canvases of cartoon-inspired, antiheroic figures that combine the personal and the political, the comic and the apocalyptic, and the abstract and the figurative in memorable ways that resonate with artists and art-loving audiences today more than ever.

280 pages | 278 illustrations | 9.5 × 11.5 inches

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Poor Richard by Philip Guston
With an afterword by Harry Cooper

Inspired by the life and career of Richard Nixon, this volume reproduces 73 satirical, imaginative drawings also featuring Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew, and John Mitchell, including an original title page, all created by Philip Guston—one of the 20th century’s most inventive artists—​in 1971. Conceived as a book, the drawings were unpublished during Guston’s lifetime (1913–1980) and were not exhibited until September 2001 in New York.  

96 pages | 76 illustrations | 8.5 × 7 inches

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A Superb Baroque: Art in Genoa, 1600–1750
Jonathan Bober, Piero Boccardo, Franco Boggero, et al.

In the 17th century, Genoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power of old, feuding families into the banking center of Europe.  Accumulating enormous wealth, the leading Genoese turned to cultural investment. Genoese artists and their patrons created an art of extraordinary material sumptuousness, visual splendor, and exuberant feeling—a singularly rich and beautiful expression of baroque style.

The catalog and exhibition at the National Gallery of Art—the first of this scope and scale on Genoese baroque art in the United States—bring together some 140 paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, drawings, and prints. A Superb Baroque features works by the city’s few well-known painters such as Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and Alessandro Magnasco. Key works by artists drawn to Genoa’s flourishing environment—Rubens, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Orazio Gentileschi, Van Dyck, and Francesco Solimena—are also presented. Sculptures provide a counterpoint to the paintings, including several full-size statues by the principal figures—Pierre Puget, Filippo Parodi, Anton Maria Maragliano—as well as terracotta sketches and smaller-scale repetitions of monumental groups. The decorative arts are represented by spectacular ceremonial silver objects, while many of the choice drawings and prints are by the same artists who executed the paintings and objects shown.

384 pages | 250 illustrations | 9.75 × 11.5 inches

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Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History
Volume 4: Series, Multiples, Replicas
Edited by Daphne Barbour and Suzanne Quillen Lomax

Volume 4 of the Gallery’s biennial conservation research journal Facture examines the complex themes of series, multiples, and replicas. With a broad historical purview that spans from the Renaissance to the 20th century, this publication considers various modes of replication—by the artist’s own hand or workshop, as a posthumous creation, or as a preferred practice—and their motivations. Drawing on new research into materials and techniques, nine essays focus on works in diverse media by artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Auguste Rodin, and Robert Rauschenberg. The authors present intriguing conclusions about the nature of serialization and the relationships among multiple versions of a composition. Filled with spectacularly detailed photographs and fresh discoveries, this volume provides exceptional insight into these extraordinary works of art and offers the possibility of exciting new avenues of inquiry.

288 pages | 246 illustrations | 8 × 11 inches

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Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain
C. D. Dickerson III, Mark McDonald, et al.

Alonso Berruguete (c. 1488–1561) revolutionized the arts of Renaissance Spain with a dramatic style of sculpture that reflected the decade or more he had spent in Italy while young. Trained as a painter, he traveled to Italy around 1506, where he interacted with Michelangelo and other leading artists. In 1518 he returned to Spain and was appointed court painter to the new king, Charles I. Eventually, he made his way to Valladolid, where he shifted his focus to sculpture, opening a large workshop that produced breathtaking multistory altarpieces (retablos) decorated with sculptures in painted wood.

This handsomely illustrated catalog is the first in English to treat Berruguete’s art and life broadly. It follows his career from his beginnings in Castile to his final years in Toledo, where he produced his last great work, the marble tomb of Cardinal Juan de Tavera. Enriching the chronological narrative are discussions of important aspects of Berruguete’s life and practice: his complicated relationship with social status and wealth, his activity as a draftsman and use of prints, how he worked with his many assistants to create his wood sculptures, and his legacy as an artist.

272 pages | 175 illustrations | 9.25 × 11.5 inches

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Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence
Edited by Andrew Butterfield with contributions by Charles Dempsey, Gretchen Hirschauer, Alison Luchs, Lorenza Melli, Dylan Smith, Elizabeth Walmsley, et al.

Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488) was one of the most versatile and inventive artists of the Italian Renaissance. He created art across media, from his spectacular sculptures and paintings to his work in goldsmithing, architecture, and engineering. His expressive, confident drawings provide a key point of contact between sculpture and painting. He led a vibrant workshop where he taught young artists who later became some of the greatest painters of the period, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Domenico Ghirlandaio.

This beautifully illustrated book presents the first comprehensive survey of Verrocchio’s art, spanning his entire career and featuring some 50 sculptures, paintings, and drawings, in addition to works he created with his students. Through incisive scholarly essays, in-depth catalog entries, and breathtaking illustrations, this volume draws on the latest research in art history and technical investigations by conservators and scientists to show why Verrocchio was one of the most innovative and influential of all Florentine artists.

"Truly monumental in format and size, and filled with hundreds of crisp, detailed photographs that permit close looking in a way sometimes not possible in situ or even in a gallery, the sheer visual force of the book is matched by the excellent research esssays.... This is a book to be visited and savored, bringing sculpture to life on the page, a sensual experience of the artist’s work as well as an essential reference for Verrocchio studies.”
     — Sally Hickson, Renaissance and Reformation, Summer 2020

384 pages | 279 illustrations | 9.5 × 11.75 inches

The Life of Animals in Japanese Art
Robert Singer et al.

Drawing upon Japan’s unique spiritual heritage, rich literary traditions, and currents in popular culture, its artists have long expressed admiration for animals in sculpture, painting, lacquerwork, metalwork, ceramics, textiles, and woodblock prints. Spanning 16 centuries, the nearly three hundred works in this volume present animals in a variety of guises, from messengers of the divine and symbols of power or good fortune, to comical or satirical actors, and manifestations of the beauty of the natural world. Real and fantastic creatures are meticulously rendered, often with humor and whimsy, by artists ranging from Itō Jakuchū and Utagawa Kuniyoshi to Kusama Yayoi and Nara Yoshitomo.

Contributions by an international team of Japanese art experts show how these artists employed creatures to teach virtuous behavior, mock customs, exemplify bravery, and celebrate life. Also featured are essays by leading scholars of Japanese literature, religion, and scientific inquiry. Richly illustrated, this volume reveals the connections between the natural world and visual and creative expression.

344 pages | 475 illustrations | 9 × 12 inches

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The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists
Linda S. Ferber, Nancy K. Anderson, et al.

Early in the 1840s, the influential English critic John Ruskin urged artists to follow nature with exact discipline, painting landscape subjects out of doors in precise detail. An inspirational figure for the artists who became known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Great Britain, Ruskin also exerted enormous influence in America. Though less well known than their counterparts across the Atlantic, Ruskin’s American followers produced a substantial body of work in oil and watercolor, including detailed figural compositions, stunning landscapes, and innovative still lifes.

More than three decades have passed since the Brooklyn Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition introduced this group of artists to scholars and the public. Since that time, a substantial number of works by the founding members of the group have come to light. Scholarship on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and American art during the second half of the 19th century has expanded to consider the social and cultural history that is critical to an understanding of the mission and works of these artists. This catalog looks afresh at this innovative but under-explored chapter in American art history.

312 pages | 210 illustrations | 9.5 × 10.5 inches

Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice
Robert Echols, Frederick Ilchman, et al.

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518 /1519–1594) was described by his contemporary Giorgio Vasari as “the most extraordinary brain that painting has ever produced.” Considered to be one of the three great painters of 16th-century Venice, along with Titian and Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto is particularly admired for his bold and expressive brushwork, his dramatic treatments of sacred narrative subjects, and his insightful portraits of the Venetian aristocracy.

Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice features more than 65 of the artist’s paintings, including many large-scale works that convey the breadth and power of his narrative paintings, along with a sample of his finest drawings. Edited by guest curators Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, it comprises contributions from an international group of leading Tintoretto scholars, based upon the most recent research. This lavishly illustrated volume provides a fundamental point of reference for modern scholarship and an ideal introduction to the artist’s career and oeuvre for the general reader.

312 pages | 238 color illustrations | 9.75 × 11.75 inches

Corot: Women
Mary Morton et al.

Camille Corot (1796–1875) is best known as the great master of landscape painting who bridged the French neoclassical tradition with the impressionist movement of the 1870s. His figure paintings constitute a smaller, less well-known portion of his work but are arguably of equal importance to the history of art, in particular for founders of modernist painting such as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque.

Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art, leads this new appraisal of Corot’s images of women, which were rarely exhibited during his lifetime. Dressed in rustic Italian costume or reclining nude on a grassy plain, Corot’s women read, dream, and gaze directly at the viewer, conveying an independent spirit and a sense of their inner lives. Corot’s sophisticated use of color and his deft, delicate touch applied to the female form resulted in pictures of quiet majesty.

179 pages | 99 illustrations | 9 × 11 inches

Sharing Images: Renaissance Prints into Maiolica and Bronze
Jamie Gabbarelli et al.

Inspired by the acquisition of the important William A. Clark maiolica (glazed Italian ceramics) collection from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and drawing largely on the Gallery’s newly expanded holdings, Sharing Images: Renaissance Prints into Maiolica and Bronze highlights the impact of Renaissance prints on maiolica and bronze plaquettes, the two media most dramatically influenced by the new technology of image replication. Focusing on designs by major artists such as Andrea Mantegna, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Parmigianino, and Albrecht Dürer, Sharing Images tells the story of how printed images were transmitted, transformed, and translated onto ceramics and small bronze reliefs, creating a shared visual canon across artistic media and geographical boundaries. The catalog provides a comprehensive introduction to different aspects of the phenomenon, from the role of 15th-century prints and the rediscovery of ancient art to the importance of illustrated books and the artistic exchanges between Italy and northern Europe.

156 pages | 98 illustrations | 9.5 × 10.75 inches

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Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Sarah Greenough et al.

For more than forty years, Sally Mann (American, born 1951) has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature’s magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work is that it is all bred of a place, the American South. A native of Lexington, Virginia, Mann has long written about what it means to live in the South and be identified as a southerner. Using her deep love of her native land and her knowledge of its fraught history, she asks provocative questions—about history, identity, race, and religion—that reverberate across geographic and national boundaries. Featuring more than 100 photographs, the exhibition and its accompanying catalog consider how Mann’s relationship with this land has shaped her work and how the legacy of the South—as both homeland and graveyard, refuge and battleground—continues to inform American identity.    

332 pages | 230 illustrations | 10.75 × 11.375 inches

Outliers and American Vanguard Art
Lynne Cooke et al.

While self-taught artists contributed to the history of modernism in significant ways, they have been largely overlooked in official narratives. Over the past century, American vanguard artists found affinities and inspiration in the work of these marginalized creators and became staunch advocates of their work. But museums that showed their work failed to contest the divide between those at the center and those on its periphery.

Outliers and American Vanguard Art focuses on three periods when the intersection of trained and untrained artists was at its most fertile. It is the first to explore how those key moments—coinciding with times of American social, political, and cultural upheaval—challenged traditional hierarchies and assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist. With some 250 works by more than 80 schooled and unschooled artists, this exhibition argues for a more diverse and inclusive representation in the cultural arena.

416 pages | 480 illustrations | 10 × 12 inches

Michel Sittow: Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe
John Oliver Hand, Greta Koppel et al.

Undoubtedly the greatest Renaissance artist from Estonia, Michel Sittow (c. 1469–1525) was born in Reval (present-day Tallinn). After relocating to Bruges, where he likely studied with Hans Memling, Sittow went to Spain to work at the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. He later worked at Danish and Netherlandish courts before returning to Reval during his final years. Sittow painted religious subjects, but was especially renowned as a portraitist.

Through some twenty rare and exquisite works, Michel Sittow: Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe represents most of Sittow’s relatively small output. The exhibition offers an opportunity to consider works attributed to Sittow and to examine his oeuvre in the broader context of his artistic milieu. International art experts, including John Oliver Hand, Greta Koppel, and others, have contributed to the beautifully designed, fully illustrated catalog.  

176 pages | 130 illustrations | 9.625 × 11.5 inches

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Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures
Yuriko Jackall

Situated at the intersection of social history, fashion history, and new scientific technologies, this catalog explores the fantasy figures of Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806). Rapidly executed and brightly colored, these paintings of lavishly costumed individuals are among his most mysterious: produced for unknown reasons, perhaps representing real individuals, perhaps not.

The recent emergence of a drawing covered with 18 thumbnail-sized sketches and apparently annotated in the artist's own hand has upended several long-held assumptions about this series—not only populating his professional networks with hitherto unknown clients and models, but also extending as far as the National Gallery of Art's own Young Girl Reading.

Carefully presenting and examining new findings, this catalog takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of the series as a whole. 

176 pages | 140 illustrations | 9.75 × 12.25 inches

Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History
Volume 3: Degas
Edited by Daphne Barbour and Suzanne Quillen Lomax

Facture, a biennial journal presenting peer-reviewed scholarly articles, addresses issues from conservation treatment and technical art history to scientific research, fostering a dialogue among art historians, scientists, and conservators in the international community. Volume 3 is devoted to the corpus of Edgar Degas. Articles focus on finish in his paintings; analysis of his posthumous bronze casts; and his unconventional use of materials, including tracing paper for a late pastel, wax for his sculpture, and the degree to which he pushed traditional techniques beyond conventional boundaries. Two shorter pieces explore Degas’s soft ground etchings and his sonnet on the contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on art.

200 pages | 150 illustrations | 8 × 11 inches

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America’s National Gallery of Art
Philip Kopper et al.

Seventy-five years ago, on the brink of World War II, the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, DC. Founded by Andrew W. Mellon and accepted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on behalf of the nation, the museum housed Mellon’s stunning art collection in the beautiful neoclassical structure designed by John Russell Pope. Since that time, the Gallery’s singular status as the nation’s art museum has continued to attract generous donors who have added tens of thousands of magnificent works of art and whose generosity has made possible such expansions as I. M. Pei’s East Building in 1978, the Sculpture Garden in 1999, and, most recently, new tower galleries and a rooftop sculpture terrace in the East Building. In celebration of the momentous anniversary of a beloved cultural institution, this volume tells its history in lively prose and a lush, cinematic sequence of images. 

408 pages with gatefold | 730 illustrations | 10.25 × 11.75 inches

Awards: AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal (2017)

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Highlights from the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Curators of the National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art is home to the nation’s art collection and a preeminent showcase for the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. This completely new handbook includes beautiful reproductions and insightful commentaries on more than 400 masterworks selected by the Gallery’s curatorial staff from some 145,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, decorative arts, and new media that make up the present collection. Various mediums appear side by side in chronological groupings, a schema that emphasizes the diversity and wealth of the Gallery’s holdings and provides readers with a well-rounded picture of the Western world’s artistic production over time. This handsome, compact guide is available in English, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish editions.

368 pages | 435 illustrations | 6 × 9 inches

Awards: AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal (2017)

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The Altering Eye: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art
Sarah Greenough, Sarah Kennel, Diane Waggoner, and Andrea Nelson

Since 1990 the National Gallery of Art has acquired nearly 15,000 American and European photographs dating from 1839 to the present. This richly illustrated book marks the 25th anniversary of the Gallery’s photography collection, celebrating the vitality, breadth, and history of its holdings. It features some of the most significant and compelling photographs in the collection, charting the development of the medium and revealing the beauty and versatility of photography since its invention 175 years ago.

360 pages | 315 illustrations | 11.75 × 11.25 inches

National Gallery of Art: Architecture + Design
Maygene Daniels and Susan Wertheim

This souvenir book presents a brief history of the National Gallery of Art campus with an emphasis on the beauty and rationale of its design. Developed over the course of almost 75 years, the Gallery offers visitors from the United States and around the world an opportunity to see art in an architectural and landscape setting of striking beauty. The West Building (1941) and East Building (1978), joined by a subterranean concourse and a street-level plaza, as well as the Sculpture Garden (1999), all embody the institution’s rich cultural contribution to public life today.

64 pages | 61 illustrations | 6 × 5.5 inches