As a historical record of the gifts given to the Philadelphia

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1826) has long been recognized as the greatest European portrait sculptor of the late eighteenth century, flourishing during both the American and French Revolutions as well as during the Directoire and Empire in France. Whether sculpting a head of state, an intellectual, or a young child, Houdon had an uncanny ability to capture the essence of his subject with a characteristic pose or expression. Yet until now, Houdon's exquisite sculptures have never been the subject of a major exhibition. This lavish exhibition catalogue will immediately take its rightful place as the definitive work on Houdon. With more than one hundred color plates and two hundred black and white halftones, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment illustrates every stage of the sculptor's fascinating career, from his early portrayals of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to his stunning portraits of American patriots such as George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed the images we hold dear of legendary Enlightenment figures like Diderot, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Voltaire are based on works by Houdon. More than mere representations, these sculptures provide us fascinating, intimate glimpses into the very core of who these figures were. Houdon's genius animated even his less illustrious subjects, like his portraits of his family and friends, and filled his sculptures of children with delicacy and freshness. Accompanying the images of Houdon's masterworks are four insightful essays that discuss Houdon's views on art (based in part on a newly discovered manuscript written by the artist) as well as his prominence in the highly varied cultures of eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Russia. From aristocrats to revolutionaries, actors to philosophers, Houdon's amazingly vivid portraits constitute the visual record of the Enlightenment and capture the true spirit of a remarkable age. Jean-Antoine Houdon finally gives these gorgeous works their due.

Over the last 30 years, Martin Puryear has created a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture that looks at identity, culture & history. This book accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art that follows Puryear's development from his first solo show to works being presented for the first time.

The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud's poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today. Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud's poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a century: selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel Sally Hemings in the late '70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late '80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released, her first new and collected volume of verse.

Of Latitudes Unknown is a multi-faceted study of James Baldwin's radical imagination. It is a selective and thoughtful survey that re-investigates the grounds of Baldwin studies and provides new critical approaches, subjects, and orientations for Baldwin criticism. This volume joins recent critical collections in “un-fragmenting” Baldwin and establishing further conjunctions in his work: the essay and the novel; the polemical and the aesthetic; his use of and participation in visual forms; and his American as well as international identities. But it goes beyond other recent studies by focusing on new entities of Baldwin's radical imagination: his English and French language selves; his late encounters with Africa; his appearances on French television and interviews with French journalists; and his unrecognized literary journalism. Of Latitudes Unknown also addresses Baldwin's relations with the Arab world, his anticipation of contemporary film and media studies, and his paradoxical public intellectualism. As it reassesses Baldwin's contributions to and influences on world literary history, Of Latitudes Unknown equally explores why the critical appreciation of Baldwin's writing continues to flourish, and why it remains a vast territory whose parts lie open to much deeper exploration and elaboration.

"This fully illustrated catalogue features entries on more than one hundred significant works by artists including Stieglitz Circle painters Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove; Precisionists Charles Demuth, Ralston Crawford, George Ault, and Charles Sheeler; and Philadelphia modernists Arthur B. Carles, Hugh Henry Breckenridge, and Earl Horter. Sculptures by Elie Nadelman, John Storrs, Alberto Giacometti, and Louise Nevelson are included. Of special note is Thomas Hart Benton's painting The Apple of Discord and a rare landscape drawing by American Regionalist Grant Wood."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes section: Notes and reviews.

"Accompanying the largest monographic exhibition of trailblazing artist Barbara Chase-Riboud's (b. 1939, Philadelphia) work to date, Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale: The Bronzes traces the full output of the artist's remarkable career from the 1950s to the present. The catalogue features both celebrated and never-before-seen artworks, highlighting the artist's groundbreaking role in the field of contemporary sculpture. In addition to some fifty sculptures, the book presents twenty works on paper, as well as a selection of Chase-Riboud's internationally acclaimed poetry. It also includes excerpts from an interview with the artist conducted for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. The catalogue offers a careful consideration of the many diverse aspects of the artist's practice, and in doing so, it provides unprecedented insights into her meditations on form, memory, and monument, while revealing a rich array of global art-historical and literary points of inspiration"--