A work of collaboration between the artist and critic David Humphrey and the graphic designer Geoff Kaplan. As important for current discussions of art-and-design as it is for discussion of contemporary art. Artists drawn into the action include Richard Prince, Chris Ofili, Lucien Freud, John Currin, and Mary Heilmann.

Blind Handshake: Art Writing + Art, 1990-2008

Humphrey, David

Reference

Periscope Pub

In 1883, Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband embarked on a trip that would take them from Boston, across the Unites States and the Pacific, to Japan, China Cambodia and finally, the India of the Raj. Travelling in the wake of recent Western expansion into Asia, they were privileged guests in a world convulsed by colliding forces and identities. They visited ancient temples; met missionaries and colonial officials; toured rubble left but anti-Western riots; camped at Angkhor Wat but took first-class trains throughout India. Isabella kept a diary, bought photographs, and assembled a travel album. Back home, she became a pioneering collector of Asian art. 'Journeys East' reconstructs the Gardners' epic journey with illustrations from Isabella's albums and quotations from her diary and her husband's letters and notes. Isabella's evolving relationship to Asia is the subject of essays by Alan Chong, Noriko Murai, and Christine Guth, amoth other major authorities, that consider a broad range of topics, from the Japanese tea ceremony to her selection and display of Asian art at her extraordinary museum in Boston. A new kind of book, 'Journeys East' combines the history of travel and collecting with the study of East-West relations. Nearly all the 400 illustrations in this oversize book reproduce vintage photographs on her travels. In numerous instances, the photographs document sites long changed beyond recognition. The book will be of exceptional interest to readers of Joseph Conrad.

Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia

Arts & Photography

Cort, Louise Allison

Chong, Alan

Guth, Christine M.E.

Thomas, Greg M.

Abe, Stanley

Murai, Noriko

History & Criticism

Midnight: The Tempest Essays

Nesbit, Molly

Cassoni is the Italian word for the chests, painted with scenes from myth and literature, central to upper-class weddings of the 15th century. Little known today, cassoni deserve recognition as masterworks of the Renaissance. Botticelli, Pesellino, and other superlative artists painted them. And they are precious early examples of the mythopoetic subjects that would form the core of European art until the 20th century. The essays in this book shed new light on the meaning of cassoni through informative discussions of Renaissance wedding rituals, male-female relations, and daily domestic life. A catalogue section on cassoni in the exhibition that this book accompanies provides a unique guide to the stories of love, marriage, and politics depicted on these sumptuous objects.

The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance

Baskins, Cristelle

A mock epic and a work of contemporary art. This title tries to unravel the byzantine history of the Chadwick dynasty. It includes numerous photographs of the Blachly-Shaw assault on the art world, along with a judicious selection of the Chadwick papers now known to be extant.

The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse

Shaw, Lytle

Blachly, Jimbo

Individual Artists

John Cotton Dana (1856-1929) should be a household name. He started out as a reform-minded librarian intent on making libraries into engines of education, hence of opportunity, for women, workers and the business community. He took a similar view of art museums. The museum he established in Newark, still the largest in New Jersey, was planned as an alternative to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dedicated to the display of masterworks.At the Newark Museum, the intrepid Dana showed copies of masterpieces (just as good in his opinion); installed a lending library of art; shared shows with Bamberger's department store; mounted exhibitions of items manufactured in New Jersey; and worked with ethnic groups in Newark to organize exhibitions of native crafts. At one point, he mounted displays of items from five-and-dime stores to prove that "beauty has no price." The genius of the Readymade, Marcel Duchamp, is in Dana's debt. So too are librarians, museum officials and all those concerned with the Progressive legacy in America's ongoing struggle to be a democratic society.

A Matter of Class: John Cotton Dana, Progressive Reform, and the Newark Museum

Carol G. Duncan

This book does reproduce some wondrous shoes by top designers. But its focus lies outside the kingdom of fashion, in the lowly outpost of social history, where shoes generally appear only as modest, utilitarian artifacts. Here, the two worlds are shown to be intimately connected. Drawing on historical sources, paintings and prints, this volume explores how and why shoes or boots with high heels came into common use throughout the last five centuries. The result? A book on shoes unlike any other. It considers the function of high heels in daily life, in the production of class and gender, and in the staging of erotic fantasy, illustrated through stunning shoes from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe

Semmelhack, Elizabeth

Graphic Design

Soon after the Portuguese opened the first direct sea route from Europe to Asia, they established trading centers in India and Sri Lanka. By the early 1500s, the courts and the cities of Europe had become avid consumers of luxury goods imported from South Asia. This book shows how the trade in exotica spurred the development of an extraordinary hybrid art, at once Indian and Portuguese. Many of the featured objects have never before been properly identified or presented to the public.

Luxury for Export: Artistic Exchange Between India and Portugal Around 1600

Carvalho, Pedro Moura

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