The Wyeths


Book Description

N. C. Wyeth was one of America's greatest illustrators and the founder of a dynasty of artists that continues to enrich the American scene. This collection of letters, written from his eighteenth year to his tragic death at sixty-one, constitutes in effect his intimate autobiography, and traces and development and flowering of the "Wyeth tradition" over the course of several generations. -- Amazon.com.




Draw a Family


Book Description

Over the span of his 40-year career, Julian Schnabel has moved effortlessly across mediums, working in film, design and the fine art world. Draw a Family returns our focus to Schnabel's seminal career as a painter, reminding us that this is the field in which he has continuously thrived since the 1970s. This massive, clothbound volume is comprised of paintings made between 1973 and 2013 and includes artwork from nearly every stage in the artist's oeuvre-from his early oil on canvas works to his most recent flag paintings. The nearly 400 color images in Draw a Family look back at the early genius that made Schnabel an international name and show how this New York artist continues to redefine the parameters of painting. Julian Schnabel was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His first solo show was at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1976, but it was with his 1979 exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York that Schnabel first asserted his presence as a figurehead for new possibilities in painting. Retrospectives of his work have been mounted by Tate Gallery, London (1983), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1987) and Museo Nacionale Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid (2004), among many others. He made his cinematic debut in 1996 with his account of the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which starred Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly earned him Best Director both at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globes, and an Academy Award nomination in the same category.




Manet and the Family Romance


Book Description

Édouard Manet's paintings have long been recognized for being visually compelling and uniquely recalcitrant. While critics have noted the presence of family members and intimates in paintings such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Nancy Locke takes an unprecedented look at the significance of the artist's family relationships for his art. Locke argues that a kind of mythology of the family, or Freudian family romance, frequently structures Manet's compositional decisions and choice of models. By looking at the representation of the family as a volatile mechanism for the development of sexuality and of repression, conflict, and desire, Locke brings powerful new interpretations to some of Manet's most complex works. Locke considers, for example, the impact of a father-son drama rooted in a closely guarded family secret: the adultery of Manet père and the status of Léon Leenhoff. Her nuanced exploration of the implications of this story--that Manet in fact married his father's mistress--makes us look afresh at even well-known paintings such as Olympia. This book sheds new light on Manet's infamous interest in gypsies, street musicians, and itinerants as Locke analyzes the activities of Manet's father as a civil judge. She also reexamines the close friendship between Manet and the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who married Manet's brother. Morisot becomes the subject of a series of meditations on the elusiveness of the self, the transience of identity, and conflicting concerns with appearances and respectability. Manet and the Family Romance offers an entirely new set of arguments about the cultural forces that shaped these alluring paintings.




Art Workshop for Children


Book Description

Art Workshop for Children is not just another book of straightforward art projects. The book's unique child-led approach provides a framework for cultivating creative thinking and encourages the wonder that comes when children are allowed to freely explore the creative process and their materials. As children work through these open-ended workshops, adults are guided on how to be facilitators who provide questions, encourage deep thinking, and help spark an excitement for discovery. Children explore basic materials and workshops that use minimal supplies, and then gradually add new materials to fill the art cabinets as well as new skills and more complex workshops. Most workshops are suitable to preschool-aged children, and each contains ideas for explorations and new twists to engage older or more experienced artists. Interspersed throughout are sidebar essays that introduce perspectives on mess-making, imperfection, the role of adult, collaborative art, and thoughts on the Reggio Emilia method, a self-guided teaching philosophy. These pieces underscore the value of art-making with children, and support the parent/teacher/care-giver on how to successfully lead, question, and navigate their children through the workshops to result in the fullest experiences.




An Eye for Art


Book Description

Lavishly illustrated with hundreds of full-color images, this family-oriented art resource introduces children to more than 50 great artists and their work, with corresponding activities and explorations that inspire artistic development, focused looking, and creative writing. This treasure trove of artwork from the National Gallery of Art includes, among others, works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Henri Matisse, Chuck Close, Jacob Lawrence, Pablo Picasso, and Alexander Calder, representing a wide range of artistic styles and techniques. Written by museum educators with decades of hands-on experience in both art-making activities and making art relatable to children, the activities include sculpting a clay figure inspired by Edgar Degas; drawing an object from touch alone, inspired by Joan Miro’s experience as an art student; painting a double-sided portrait with one side reflecting physical traits and the other side personality traits, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de' Benci; and creating a story based on a Mary Cassatt painting. Educators, homeschoolers, and families alike will find their creativity sparked by this art extravaganza.




The Art of Free Travel


Book Description

Patrick, Meg and their family had built a happy, sustainable life in regional Victoria. But in late 2013, they found themselves craving an adventure: a road trip. But theirs was a road trip with a difference. With Zephyr (10), Woody (1) and Zero their Jack Russell, they set off on an epic 6,000km year-long cycling journey along Australia’s east coast, from Daylesford to Cape York and back. Their aim was to live as cheaply as possible − guerrilla camping, hunting, foraging and bartering their permaculture skills, and living on a diet of free food, bush tucker, and the occasional fresh road kill. They spent time in Aboriginal communities, joined an anti-fracking blockade, documented edible plants, and dodged speeding cars and trucks on the country’s most dangerous highways. The Art of Free Travel is the remarkable story of a rule-breaking year of ethical living.




The Bellanti Family


Book Description

This publication is the first to delve in depth into the artistic and cultural achievements of different members of the Bellanti family. Michele Bellanti (1807-1883) was a major Maltese artist, active from the 1840s onwards and who has contributed most significantly to the post-Baroque Maltese artistic scene. While his paintings, sketches and lithographs have always been appreciated and greatly sought after for their artistic merits, no detailed study on the artist or on the significance of his work had as yet been undertaken. Michele's elder brother, Giuseppe (1787-1861), was also a cultured individual who was a keen collector of artistic works and of books. A significant part of Giuseppe's collection is now to be found in Malta's National Museum of Fine Arts. Between 1812 and 1838 Giuseppe was the librarian of the Biblioteca Pubblica. The National Library collection still comprises books previously owned by Giuseppe, notably a number of incunabula. Giuseppe was moreover the author of a manuscript work on Maltese orthography, which is the subject of a study featured in the present publication. As aptly described in Patricia Camilleri's contribution, Paul F. Bellanti (1852-1927) was a man of many talents. As an archaeologist, linguist and author, Paul Bellanti gave a significant contribution in all these fields during a time when the assertion of Maltese identity required individuals to do so. The studies contained in this publication not only constitute a detailed corpus describing the achievements of the Bellanti family, but should, moreover, serve to stimulate academic interest in other, as yet unstudied individuals and families, who gave a sterling contribution to various aspects of Maltese intellectual, cultural and artistic development during different periods.




Mary Cassatt


Book Description

Discusses the life and the work of the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, as told from a child's point of view.




Sally Mann


Book Description

Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of ber woodland summer home in Virginia, Sally Mann's extraordinary, intimate photographs of hcr children : Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia reveal truths that embody the individuality of ber immediate family and ultimately take on a universal quality. Mann states that ber work is "about everybody's memories, as well as their fears," a theme echoed by Reynolds Price in his eloquent, poignantly reflective essay accompanying the photographs in Immediate Family. With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Mann's pictures explore the eternal struggle between the child's simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy, the holding on, and the breaking away. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made : impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in Sally Mann's astonishing photographs. A traveling exhibition of Immediate Family, organized hy Aperture, opened at the Instituts of Contemporary Art in Philadclphia in the fall of 1992. All of the photographs in Immediate Family were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera.




The Art of the Jewish Family


Book Description

In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles--both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women's lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women's studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives. The Art of the Jewish Family was the winner of three 2020 National Jewish Book Awards: the Celebrate 350 Award for American Jewish Studies, the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History, and the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies.