A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

In this series accomplished authors accurately cover a range of subjects using up-to-date methodologies and impressive visual formats. This is the first book to present a broad overview of the art of the Renaissance from Northern Europe within its historical context. KEY TOPICS: It includes well known works and artists as well as a diverse selection of novel and intriguing images. It discusses issues and ideas of interest today, such as the status of women, elite vs. popular inspiration, and art as an instrument of propaganda, among others and provides comprehensive coverage of the Netherlands, Germany, and France in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Grimms’ fairy tales, originally collected in 1812, are a timeless chronicle of the possibilities our lives all have, and the full range of human nature. The stories remain just as relevant today as when they were first published over 200 years ago. To introduce these tales to a new generation, Uzzlepye Press presents Mirror Mirrored: An Artists' Edition of 25 Grimms' Tales, a special visual edition of 25 of the stories. It includes not only almost 2,000 vintage Grimms' illustrations remixed into the book alongside the story texts, but also work from 28 contemporary artists visually reimagining these stories.

“Exuberant, astute, and splendidly illustrated history of world art . . . draws fascinating parallels between artistic developments in Western and non-Western art.”—Publishers Weekly In this beautifully written story of art, Julian Bell tells a vivid and compelling history of human artistic achievements, from prehistoric stone carvings to the latest video installations. Bell, himself a painter, uses a variety of objects to reveal how art is a product of our shared experience and how, like a mirror, it can reflect the human condition. With hundreds of illustrations and a uniquely global perspective, Bell juxtaposes examples that challenge and enlighten the reader: dancing bronze figures from southern India, Romanesque sculptures, Baroque ceilings, and jewel-like Persian manuscripts are discussed side by side. With an insider’s knowledge and an unerring touch, Bell weaves these diverse strands into an invaluable introduction to the wider history of world art.

Steiner (English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) delivers a lucidly written elaboration of "interactive aesthetics" first broached in her examination of the revival of beauty in contemporary art, Venus in Exile (2001). Here the focus is the artist's model, broadly conceived as a paradoxical site of reality/artificiality and power/lack of power. Steiner incorporates a wide range of material to explain early history (the Pygmalion myth, Galatea, Eve, and Pandora), the postmodernist turn (Edie Sedgwick, muse of Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan), and recent developments (Second Life, blogging, Wikipedia, bioethics). Concepts (mimesis, spectacle), literature (Kathleen Rooney's Live Nude Girl of 2008, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year of 2007, Milton, Keats, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Vladamir Nabokov, Nathaniel Hawthorne); art (Michelangelo, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hannah Wilke, Vanessa Beecroft, Gillian Wearing, Oron Catts, Helena Almeida, Ann Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frederick Hart, John Kindness, Peter Eisenman, Rachel Whiteread), theory (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Rene Girard), and art history (Michael Fried, Sir Kenneth Clark) are woven into a rich tapestry informed by Steiner's favorite semioticians, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by E. K. Mix.

Edgerton shows how linear perspective emerged in early fifteenth-century Florence out of an artistic and religious context in which devout Christians longed for divine presence in their daily lives and ultimately undermined medieval Christian cosmology.

This biography introduces the remarkable career of Antonio Ligabue (1899-1965) to the American audience for the first time. A self-taught painter and sculptor, Ligabue lived most of his life in a rude hut beside the Po River, not emerging from obscurity until the 1950s when articles and reviews began appearing in Italy. In 1961 he was awarded Grand Prize at the National Art Exhibit. Known as the "Van Gogh of Italy", Capra is pleased to present a lively telling of the life of this enigmatic artist who worked purely by passion and instinct. As he said, "Sometimes they ask me why I use such strong colors, but how can you explain that you feel fire in your arms?" Ligabue was a true "outsider", not only in how we might categorize his art, but in the unfortunate facts of his life. All but ostracized by human society because of mental, physical, and emotional "deficiencies", Ligabue lived isolated in his hut, where he sculpted his animals from the river clay. Eventually he acquired oils and painted on canvas his fantastic, mysterious visions of animals, insects, birds, and landscapes, but also, and most dramatically, his tortured self-portraits. Critics have labeled him Naif, Expressionist, Primitive, Fauvist, and Visionary. He is all these things; as one critic put it, "We are dealing with an alchemistic mixture, full of that magical quality we call poetry because we haven't got a better way of defining it". Ligabue's life and art form a whole, reflecting not only the beauty and genius of the human spirit, but its agony and sorrow as well. A permanent collection of his works is at the Ligabue Institute in Parma.