Artists discovered and explored the artistic and practical applications of photography at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. This stunning book explores the highly individual ways some of the most influential artists of the period put this wondrous new medium” to use in their painting and sculpture and shows how they enfolded photographs into their creative processes. Paintings, sculpture, and photographs by such artists as Bonnard, Brancusi, Degas, Gauguin, Khnopff, Moreau, Mucha, Munch, Picasso, Rodin, Rosso, Vallotton, von Stuck, and Vuillard are discussed and reproduced. The book also includes an array of photographs by great masters (Steichen, Nadar, Muybridge) and lesser-known figures.

The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso

Arts & Photography

Dorothy Kosinski

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Dallas Museum of Art

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world's finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist's most important patron.

Anne Vallayer Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie Antoinette

Colin Bailey

Eik Kahng

Anne Vallayer-Coster

Marianne Roland Michel

Claire Barry

Melissa Hyde

History & Criticism

Photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954), one of the most intriguing, challenging, and gifted artists to emerge from Europe in the past two decades, has created a beautiful and distinctive body of images depicting the world - its buildings, people, society, and culture - in its present moment of perpetual change. Unlike many of his contemporaries who have investigated photography's fictional potential, Struth has adhered to a straightforward yet formally refined approach that makes his viewers become aware of their world in often entirely new ways. This catalogue is the first to encompass Struth's entire body of work, dating from the late 1970's to the early 2000's. His early black-and-white photographs of deserted city streets, his psychologically penetrating portraits of individuals and families, his renowned "museum pictures," and his large-format color landscapes of nature and industry from around the globe are all represented in this unsurpassed collection of images. Engaging essays by well known photography and art experts chronicle Thomas Struth's career: Charles Wylie examines the development of Struth's art and places him in the context of photographic history of the last century; Maria Morris Hambourg and Douglas Eklund review the artist's aesthetic and intellectual influences and maturation; and Ann Goldstein investigates the role portraiture has played in Struth's art. This survey attests to the unmistakable importance of his photographs and his valued place in the history of photography and contemporary art.

Thomas Struth: 1977-2002

Maria Morris Hambourg

Douglas Eklund

Ann Goldstein

Charles Wylie

Twelve days after the onset of the American Civil War in April of 1861, Frederic Edwin Church, the most successful American landscape painter of his day, debuted his latest “Great Picture”―a painting titled The North. Despite favorable reviews, the painting failed to find a buyer. Faced with this unexpected setback, Church added a broken mast to the foreground and changed the work’s title to The Icebergs. He then shipped the painting to London, where it was finally sold to an English railroad magnate and subsequently disappeared from view for 116 years. This beautiful book tells the fascinating story of The Icebergs and provides a detailed look at the cycle of fame, neglect, and resuscitation of both this masterwork and Church’s career. In 1979, The Icebergs sold at auction for $2.5 million, at the time the highest amount ever paid for an American painting. The sale coincided with an upswing in the popularity and acclaim accorded to American landscape painting, catalyzing the market for American art and contributing to a revival in the prestige of Church and the Hudson River School. Drawing on extensive interviews with many of the people involved with the painting’s rediscovery, sale, and eventual donation to the Dallas Museum of Art, the author considers the way marketing has defined The Icebergs.

The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church's Arctic Masterpiece

Harvey, Eleanor Jones

Jones Harvey, Eleanor

Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection

Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection

Sigmar Polke is one of the world’s most revered and influential contemporary artists. This handsome book documents Polke’s recent work, which continues and deepens the artist’s famed explorations of how images are made, used, and thought about in our media-dominated culture. The works also pose intriguing questions about how the eye and mind become crucial players in the perceptual game we undertake daily. Using topical subject matter―such as the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East and the everyday presence of guns in American life―both for its inherent content and metaphoric possibilities, Polke has created a cohesively thematic yet ingeniously diverse group of monumental paintings and large-scale drawings. The source materials for these images are often drawn from American and European newspapers, magazines, and books. All of this work by Polke reflects a fiercely intelligent yet remarkably accessible interpretation of how we perceive and misperceive the social, political, and aesthetic worlds that we live in. 
In the text, Charles Wylie discusses how Polke’s recent work presents a coherent visual essay on the literal and symbolic construction of images. Noted art critic Dave Hickey provides an interpretive essay on the artist and these new works. Both essays are interspersed with a valuable compendium of Polke’s source materials.

Sigmar Polke: History of Everything, Paintings and Drawings 1998-2003

Dave Hickey

John R. Lane

Ellsworth Kelly is one of this generation’s most important artists. Over the course of his career, Kelly has developed a special relationship with the city of Dallas and its art community, and major holdings of his work in all media can be found there. This handsomely designed book brings together works from the Dallas Museum of Art and private collections to present a select overview of his career, ranging from a youthful 1947 self-portrait drawing to a towering wood sculpture from the mid-1990s.
Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas offersa succinct survey of Kelly’s achievements in translating the visual world of the everyday into commanding paintings, sculpture, and works on paper―all of which demonstrate the artist’s groundbreaking use of form, line, color, and volume. Included are an introduction and essays on key works by Charles Wylie, Yve-Alain Bois, Robert Storr, and Wood Roberdeau. Together the images and text document one of the most consistently inventive and sustained careers of any American artist.

Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas (Dallas Museum of Art Publications)

Individual Artists

This book traces the visual and conceptual relationships evident in the works of Marcel Duchamp (1887―1968), Joseph Cornell (1903―1972), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), and Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925). Although scholars have previously explored the biographical contact between these four artists, this is the first close look at the aesthetic consequences of their interactions. Dorothy Kosinski argues for a notion of dialogic exchange rather than influence, noting a number of shared characteristics in these artists’ works including iconography (for example, appropriation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa), process (assemblage and collage), form (boxes), integration of text into the visual field (sardonic subtitles, nonsense inscriptions, etc.), and shared fascination with simple machines.Featuring around 50 major works by these pivotal artists, including Duchamp’s Green Box and Johns’s Device, Dialogues reveals the complex and rich exchange manifested in their art.

Dialogues: Duchamp, Cornell, Johns, Rauschenberg

Kosinski, Dorothy

Robert Ryman is considered one of the preeminent abstract painters of the last fifty years. This remarkable book features over two dozen of Ryman’s works from the 1960s to the present, all of which demonstrate his keen desire to investigate the essential properties of a paintingits color, surface, texture, support, and relationship to the wall on which it is displayedin order to achieve direct and unmediated painterly effects. The book comprises works from the artist’s own collection as well as from private and museum collections and includes a number of paintings that have never before been published. The beautiful illustrations document the artist’s career-long experimentation with and deviation from whitea basic, universal, and supposedly neutral color that becomes highly flexible and suggestive in Ryman’s handsas well as his interest in using a variety of surfaces, from industrial metal to linen to canvas. Ryman has created an unexpectedly varied, complex, and broad body of work within his chosen boundaries and continues to create some of today’s most challenging paintings.

Robert Ryman

Wylie, Charles

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) viewed wheat as a central metaphor of the cycle of life and the creative process. As such, it was a theme that he consistently explored throughout his career. This book examines the artist’s personal and visual fascination with wheat, analyzing the significance that the motif––and by extension, the peasant at work in nature––played within the social and cultural framework of 19th-century France and in the works of other artists of the time. Focusing on his Sheaves of Wheat at the Dallas Museum of Art––one of thirteen canvases completed in the last month of his life––this beautiful book features illustrations of Van Gogh’s works as well as personal correspondence and letters. Related images by such prominent contemporary artists as Emile Bernard, Jules Breton, Charles F. Daubigny, Paul Gauguin, Jean-François Millet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro are also included. Together these works reveal the larger social and political trends of 19th-century France.

Van Gogh's Sheaves of Wheat

Fratello, Bradley

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Dallas Museum of Art publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dallas Museum of Art