The Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) and his artworks were uniquely poised to embrace both the dawn of modernism and the fading light of the post-impressionist and symbolist movements. Lavishly illustrated, Félix Vallotton traces the artist’s life from his early days as a portraitist and printmaker to his later work as painter who prefigured European modernism. Linda Schädler and Christoph Becker reveal Valloton to be not only the most important Swiss symbolist, but an intelligent observer of his tumultuous times, highly critical of bourgeois convention. His sometimes eerie naturalism, the authors argue, links him to literary fashions of the day as well as reflecting the inception of psychoanalysis. This stunning volume forges a new understanding of landmark paintings from an especially fertile period in art history and the fascinating artist behind them.

This work traces Félix Vallotton's development, bringing to life a multi-talented artist and describing the collectors who admired his works and the painters and writers he mixed with. It draws out the essential features of a style which even today defies categorizing.

A well-to-do bachelor, who sees no more promise in love. A beautiful young woman with a mysterious past. A picture and its price. An auction, which causes an uproar in the art community - and a few who come up short in their desire for the big money. Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, bachelor, upper middle class, art expert at an international auction house, lives in an expansive apartment in the city centre. He is done with love. Until one day a younger woman persuades him - against his customary practice - to take her home with him. The next morning, she is holding on to the balcony... and threatening to jump. Adrian is able to dissuade her, but from now on she makes him responsible for her life. Weynfeldt's settled life becomes untracked - until he finally realizes that nothing is the way it appears.

The Art of Looking Up surveys spectacular ceilings around the globe that have been graced by the brushes of great artists including Michelangelo, Marc Chagall and Cy Twombly. From the floating women and lotus flowers of the Senso-ji Temple in Japan, to the religious iconography that adorns places of worship from Vienna to Istanbul, all the way to bold displays like the Chihuly glass flora suspended from the lobby of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas: this book takes you on a tour of the extraordinary artworks that demand an alternative viewpoint. History of art expert Catherine McCormack guides you through the stories behind the artworks – their conception, execution, and the artists that visualised them. In many cases, these artworks also make bold but controlled political, religious or cultural statements, revealing much about the society and times in which they were created. Divided by these social themes into four sections – Religion, Culture, Power and Politics – and pictured from various viewpoints in glorious colour photography, tour the astounding ceilings of these and more remarkable locations: Vatican Palace, Rome, Italy Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, UK Louvre Museum, Paris, France Dali Theatre-Museum, Figueres, Catalonia Museum of the Revolution, Havana, Cuba Capitol Building, Washington, DC, USA Four eight-page foldout sections showcase some of the world's most spectacular ceilings in exquisite detail. First and foremost, this is a visual feast, but also a desirable art book that challenges you to seek out fine art in more unusual places and question the statements they may be making.

Along with his celebrated drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs, Cy Twombly has left an imposing body of graphic work as well. As early as 1984, the Berlin-based art writer and Twombly expert, Heiner Bastian, compiled the first catalogue raisonné of the artist's printed graphics which has been out of print for 18 years. Now back in print for the first time, this new edition of the catalogue raisonné has been updated and includes the graphic works Twombly created since 1984 until his death in 2011. Cy Twombly's graphic oeuvre is characterized by a variety of graphic and printing techniques. Along with monotypes, etchings, lithographs, and silkscreens, the artist tested his expertise using offset lithographs and the combination of various print and reproduction techniques. The scholarly portion of the catalogue features 96 works created between 1952 and 2008, all of them illustrated in full color.

"For me, people come first," Alice Neel (1900–1984) declared in 1950. "I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being." This ambitious publication surveys Neel's nearly 70-year career through the lens of her radical humanism. Remarkable portraits of victims of the Great Depression, fellow residents of Spanish Harlem, leaders of political organizations, queer artists, visibly pregnant women, and members of New York's global diaspora reveal that Neel viewed humanism as both a political and philosophical ideal. In addition to these paintings of famous and unknown sitters, the more than 100 works highlighted include Neel's emotionally charged cityscapes and still lifes as well as the artist’s erotic pastels and watercolors. Essays tackle Neel's portrayal of LGBTQ subjects; her unique aesthetic language, which merged abstraction and figuration; and her commitment to progressive politics, civil rights, feminism, and racial diversity. The authors also explore Neel's highly personal preoccupations with death, illness, and motherhood while reasserting her place in the broader cultural history of the 20th century.

"Marvelous, beautifully illustrated."--Wall Street Journal Édouard Vuillard was so secretive that he berated himself for betraying his emotions in conversation. He was a reticent, impassioned man, at once a timid stalker and a social climbing anarchist, caught in conflicting desires. From the 1880s until the advent of World War II, using styles from academic to pointillist to Nabi to Fauve, Vuillard's abundant paintings revealed his turmoil of love and hatred: models pose beside a plaster torso cast from the Venus of Milo, women appear without faces, anxiety radiates from many masterpieces--while other works were left unfinished for months or years. Drawing on insights and images from Vuillard's still unpublished diaries, Julia Frey takes us into Vuillard's private world of cabarets, experimental theaters, holiday resorts, and intimate boudoirs, showing how his art reflects his fraught personal relations and his artistic struggles. Frey highlights many of his finest works, from his famous intimate interior scenes to book illustrations and poster designs, and she examines his complex relationships with iconic friends like Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Felix Vallotton, as well as with the women he loved--his mother and sister, penniless models, and rich men's wives.

The Salon de la Rose+Croix : the religion of art / Vivien Greene -- The reception of the Rose+Croix of a symptom of the réaction idéaliste / Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond -- Afterlife : The important and sometimes embarrassing links between occultism and the development of abstract art, ca. 1909/1913 / Ken E. Silver

From a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times), this playful and moving bestselling book of essays invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of everyday life. When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty-first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle's writing, which constantly evokes the humor and even bliss that life affords, is a balm. His essays manage to find, again and again, exquisite beauty in the quotidian, whether it's the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, or a husband's whiskers that a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every morning. Through Doyle's eyes, nothing is dull. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to quiet glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." A life's work, One Long River of Song invites readers to experience joy and wonder in ordinary moments that become, under Doyle's rapturous and exuberant gaze, extraordinary.

"Exhibition organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts, London."