Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Loge (The Theater Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery's collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a loge epitomizes the Impressionists' interest in the spectacle of modern life. At the heart of the painting is the complex play of gazes enacted by these two figures. In turning away from the performance, Renoir focused instead upon theater as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display.

An illustrated introduction to internationally acclaimed glass artist Stephen Rolfe Powell's career, this book charts the evolution of Powell's remarkable body of work. Dazzling photographic close-ups not only detail the luminous murrini patterns that have become Powell's signature but also reveal new ways of appreciating the complex interplay of color and texture in his art. Biographical and analytical essays by Mark Lucas, Laurie Winters, and James Yood explore such topics as the teamwork that is so critical to Powell's unique glassmaking process; his teaching and learning experiences on the road, from the former Soviet Union to Salt Lake City during the Olympics; and the story of the two freak injuries that deeply affected his work and how he thinks about it. Reflections by Kenn Holsten, Marvin Lipofsky, Dante Marioni, Bonnie Marx, John Roush, and Lino Tagliapietra further supplement the book. The book's stunning photographs encourage the viewer to see Powell's work from different viewpoints, and they highlight the unique interactions between transparent, opaque, and translucent glass and Powell's bold color combinations. Stephen Rolfe Powell: Glassmaker vividly portrays the tension and excitement involved in the artist's nontraditional, collaborative approach to working with molten glass.

Adam Elsheimer is first recorded in 1600 and by 1610 he was dead. But, rather like Giorgione, who had died young in Venice 100 years earlier, Elsheimer was influential on the coming century to a degree out of all proportion to his brief career and small oeuvre. He developed a wonderful mastery of light, a dramatic chiaroscuro that gave new depth to his subject-matter, and a rather less definable poetic feeling that gives a very special savor to all his painting. “What is remarkable about this volume is the number of quality reproductions of the artist's work that can be seen together for the first time. This collection of paintings demonstrates more comprehensively than ever before Elsheimer's extraordinary intuition for light and atmosphere” (Antiques Magazine).

This handsome volume presents 161 pairs of matching before and after photographs of Pittsburgh. A treasury of images for those who remember the old Pittsburgh, those who are curious about its past, and anyone interested in Pittsburgh's fascinating evolution from \u201csmoky city\u201d to the city it is today.

America was once full of small, lively places that produced things. But then factories closed, mills shut down, mines quit hiring. Steelworkers, textile workers, automakers, and coal miners were laid off, phased out, downsized, outsourced, given the axe, or otherwise told to get lost. Once proud towns gave way to vacant storefronts, empty streets, and wounded people struggling with anger and bitterness. Through words and pictures After the Smoke Clears takes readers into the communities of Homestead and Braddock, Pennsylvania; Lewiston, Maine; Matewan, West Virginia; and Flint, Michigan. Each of these company towns had staked its fortune to a single industry. And each has suffered for it. Steve Mellon focuses on the human face of that suffering. Again and again, men and women fighting to make ends meet freely admit that the blows to their sense of self and sense of community were more hurtful than the economic damage caused by the departure of the mill or mine or plant. As he explores the complex relationship between work, loss, and identity, Mellon offers thought-provoking reflections on the hidden costs of economic policies and business decisions made by multinational corporations to abandon the small towns that made them strong.

This inspired collection of over sixty original paintings, stone carvings and woodcut prints by Greg Tricker portrays the human suffering, exultation, compassion and joy of the life of St Francis; with their visionary quality, they present a fresh contemporary image of St Francis. Greg Tricker travelled to Assisi to research St Francis, drawing inspiration from the small church of San Damiano where the saint prayed and the square of San Rufino where he preached; and by walking through the beautiful olive groves and hills that surround Assisi.The plates, many of which have not been seen before, are complemented by a lively text on the historical background and life of St Francis by artist and teacher Johannes Steuck, and a spirited introduction by writer and philosopher Jeremy Naydler.

Luke Swank: Modernist Photographer reintroduces the work of an important artist who had been relegated to virtual anonymity after his untimely death in 1944. As both a biography of Swank (1890-1944) and an analysis of his work, the book focuses on his essential contribution to the modernist movement and positions Swank alongside contemporaries Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. In 1930, at age forty, Luke Swank was selling cars in his hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Just two years later, his five-part photo mural “Steel Plant” was featured in Murals by American Painters and Photographers, the first show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to include photography. Although Swank’s images share stylistic similarities with many of the modernists, they also reveal his unique visual poetry. His compositional exploration, technical virtuousity, and use of intense highlight and shadow and geometric forms and lines affirm his contributions to the modernist movement and the emerging art of photography.

This collection of seventeen essays explores the dramatic changes in Western conceptions of the body, encompassing the cultural shifts that occurred across Empire, religion and science, from antiquity to the eighteenth century.

This book is devoted to a monumental and superbly illuminated very large early fourteenth-century Mamluk Qur'an in muhaqqaq script. It constitutes the final part (Juz' 30) of a superb two-volume Qur'an of which the first volume is preserved in the National Museum in Damascus while the second volume, from which the present section originates, is widely dispersed. Remarkably, here the final part of the Qur'an is reunited with its magnificent and richly decorated double finispieces, thus reassembling what must have been among the most striking and lavishly illuminated sections of the entire manuscript. The high degree of inventiveness along with the overall quality of the manuscript point to the work of a master artist. Especially the geometric proficiency suggests the work of Muhammad ibn Mubadir, one of the leading illuminators in Mamluk Cairo at the turn of the thirteenth century. Although little is known of the life of this artist, his illumination in the Baybars al-Jashnagir Qur'an, now in the British Library, and a Qur'an copied in 1306-10 for an unknown patron, now in the Chester Beatty Library, constitute some of the most celebrated achievements of Mamluk Qur'an illumination.

Novelist and essayist Hilary Masters recreates a moment in 1940s Pittsburgh when circumstances, ideology, and a passion for the arts collided to produce a masterpiece in another part of the world. E. J. Kaufmann, the so-called "merchant prince" who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, was a man whose hunger for beauty included women as well as architecture. He had transformed his family's department store into an art deco showcase with murals by Boardman Robinson and now sought to beautify the walls of the YM&WHA of which he was the president. Through his son E.

This book is an illustrative description of the Holy Land, with direct references to Biblical passages. It is designed for general and popular reading rather than for the professional student.

While other artists moved to New York or Paris, painter Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972) never left the city he called home. From the age of twelve, when he took his first art class at a settlement house in Pittsburgh's Hill District, through a vigorous career that spanned six decades, Rosenberg was challenged by the complex city whose artistic legacy he did much to shape. In Pittsburgh, Rosenberg created more than five hundred paintings, engaged with the dynamic progress of American painting in the twentieth century, and inspired generations of students. This book is the first full study of his work and influence.The constancyof Rosenberg's career was change. He began as a portraitist (1915-1930), influenced by Velazquez, Rembrandt, Matisse, and later, Picasso. In the 1930s, however, Rosenberg turned to portray the city around him. Inspired by the steep hills, densely polluted atmosphere, crooked houses, and layered immigrant populations with intersecting poverties, he created emotional urban landscapes that ensured Pittsburgh's place in the American regionalist art movement.Rosenberg's focus was the Hill District, where he lived as a young man. In poignant, socially conscious paintings, he traced the transitions of this gritty, multiethnic neighborhood through the Great Depression and Pittsburgh's early experiments in urban renewal. "Yes, I know there are artists in town who sneer at Pittsburgh, who want to go to Venice and paint canals," Rosenberg told a reporter. "But the artist who dislikes the town should . . . stay here and put his hate into pictures of the Pittsburgh scene. In doing so, he would have something to say."In the 1940s, responding to the horrors of World War II, Rosenberg's subjects became more universal and allegorical. In paintings such as Israel (1945), his most reproduced work, haunting human figures do not allow viewers to remain indifferent to the world situation. Here he began experiments with abstraction and the quality of light, a search he would continue for the rest of his life.From 1949 until his death in 1972, Rosenberg developed his own form of abstract expressionism, translating emotion with color, but without entirely abandoning representation. Using sequential layers of translucent color and transparent glazes, Rosenberg was able to achieve a penetrating, shimmering effect in his work. His paintings from this period are reminiscent of stained glass windows in that they seem to emit light rather than reflect it.Samuel Rosenberg's paintings were exhibited widely, from the World's Fair (1939) to the nation's preeminent museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He had twenty-six solo exhibitions during his lifetime, and he was accepted into the prestigious Carnegie International in 1920, 1925, and every subsequent exhibition from 1933 to 1967.But it is possible that Rosenberg's most enduring legacy is his teaching. For more than forty years he taught drawing and painting at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where his students included Philip Pearlstein, Mel Bochner, and Andy Warhol-whom Rosenberg saved from expulsion in 1947. He chaired the art department at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College). He directed art programs and taught for decades at two community art schools: the Irene Kaufmann Settlement in the Hill District and the Isaac Seder Educational Center for the Young Men's and Women's Hebrew Association, which merged in 1961. A revered and devoted master teacher, he awakened several generations of Pittsburgh artists to the "adventure," as he called it, of art.Samuel Rosenberg: Portrait of a Painter accompanies the first major retrospective of his work since 1960. In a thorough and carefully researched essay, accompanying eighty-two color and fifty black-and-white reproductions, curator Barbara L. Jones tells the story of Rosenberg's life, his evolving artistic vision, and his teaching legacy. She also provides biographical, exhibition, and award chronologies, along with a complete catalog of paintings and preparatory sketches. Lively sidebars by regional historians Barbara Burstin, Eric Davin, and Laurence Glasco, and by artist and former student Bennard Perlman, give social and cultural context, recreating the Pittsburgh in which this remarkable artist lived and worked.

Stephanie Byram was an active, athletic young woman entering the prime of her life. She held dreams of earning her doctorate, pursing a career, falling in love, and starting a family. A doctor's visit, shortly after her thirtieth birthday, changed everything. She had been concerned about a painful, swollen right breast, and tests confirmed the presence of a tumor. Stephanie was diagnosed with highly aggressive, highly malignant breast cancer-Stage IIIb infiltrative ductal carcinoma-and within two months she underwent a double mastectomy. Doctors gave her a 50 percent chance of surviving five years.Despite this prognosis, Stephanie looked to the future, and refused to be deterred by the obstacles thrown suddenly into her path. Though she was rarely cancer-free and suffered recurrences that were progressively more invasive and damaging to her body, over the course of the next eight years she would live a life of her choosing.Stephanie fell in love, married, and bought a home. She earned her Ph.D., and even found the time and energy to revise her dissertation topic to how women make medical decisions after they have been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. She traveled to London, Tibet, and Hawaii; went on safari in Zambia and Botswana, rang in the millennium atop the Great Barrier Reef; hiked the grueling, thirty-five-mile Inca trail to Machu Picchu on her honeymoon, just weeks after a devastating recurrence; and visited the Grand Canyon before her death in June 2001.Stephanie came to appreciate the details and experiences found in a typical day. Learning to live in the moment, she found joy while playing with her cats, tending her garden, observing the birds jostling at the feeder, walking in the park by moonlight, laughing with friends. And running.Always an avid runner, Stephanie placed even greater importance on the sport following her diagnosis. She vowed to be the first person to run in each Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and would eventually run in thirty out of sixty-one events. To help publicize this uncommon feat, she approached Charlee Brodsky about taking some photographs for inclusion in a press packet. What eventually evolved was much more.As their working relationship grew, so did their bond. Stephanie was Brodsky's subject, but they became collaborators and closer friends. They developed art exhibitions, a video, and often gave lectures, presentations, and inspirational talks to groups across the country. And, now, together they have created this book. Knowing Stephanie combines Brodsky's photographs and Stephanie's dialogue, which along with Jennifer Matesa's biographical essay, "Reconstructing a Life," paints a complete and compelling portrait of an extraordinary woman.For Stephanie, this project was an opportunity to visualize herself-her life and her body-differently. According to Brodsky, "She was able to transform her profound disappointment with the cards she was dealt into a life that was about living." In so doing, Stephanie has provided a treasure for us all.

Indicates the place of painting in the Islamic world, both in relation to those theological circles which condemned the practice of it, and to those persons who, disregarding the prohibitions of religion, consulted their own taste in encouraging it.

This guide provides advice on legal issues such as Copyright and Rights Management when creating and using digital picture resources, technical advice on software and producing good quality images, standards for data documentation, project management, storage and preservation, and innovative creative techniques, including web design and virtual reality.