This is a timely study of the life and work of L.S. Lowry, as well as his contribution to the development of 20th-century British art.

Accompanies a long overdue retrospective of the much-loved British painter L.S. Lowry at Tate Britain, 26 June - 20 October 2013. Bringing together around eighty works, the aim is to re-assess Lowry's contribution as part of a wider art history and to argue for his achievement as Britain's pre-eminent painter of the industrial city.

The book begins with the previously unpublished transcripts of the broadcasts which cast a unique light on Lowry's art and developing reputation. In addition to all the usual elements of an art historical monograph on this scale, Rosenthal has devoted chapters to Lowry's technique, his visual friendship with his fellow painter David Carr; and a serious analysis and rebuttal of a theory that has advanced the view that Lowry suffered from Asperger's Disease.With 256 illustrations of which 205 are in full colour, Rosenthal's book is, and will remain, an indispensable guide to Lowry's extensive oeuvre and the cultural and psychological forces that shaped it.

From T.J. Clark comes this provocative study of the origins of modern art in the painting of Parisian life by Edouard Manet and his followers. The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was a brand-new city, recently adorned with boulevards, cafés, parks, Great Exhibitions, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of the habits of commerce and leisure that we ourselves know as "modern life." A new kind of culture quickly developed in this remade metropolis, sights and spectacles avidly appropriated by a new kind of "consumer": clerks and shopgirls, neither working class nor bourgeois, inventing their own social position in a system profoundly altered by their very existence. Emancipated and rootless, these men and women flocked to the bars and nightclubs of Paris, went boating on the Seine at Argenteuil, strolled the island of La Grande-Jatte—enacting a charade of community that was to be captured and scrutinized by Manet, Degas, and Seurat. It is Clark's cogently argued (and profusely illustrated) thesis that modern art emerged from these painters' attempts to represent this new city and its inhabitants. Concentrating on three of Manet's greatest works and Seurat's masterpiece, Clark traces the appearance and development of the artists' favorite themes and subjects, and the technical innovations that they employed to depict a way of life which, under its liberated, pleasure-seeking surface, was often awkward and anxious. Through their paintings, Manet and the Impressionists ask us, and force us to ask ourselves: Is the freedom offered by modernity a myth? Is modern life heroic or monotonous, glittering or tawdry, spectacular or dull? The Painting of Modern Life illuminates for us the ways, both forceful and subtle, in which Manet and his followers raised these questions and doubts, which are as valid for our time as for the age they portrayed.

Essay by Robert Storr. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.

For the past 30 years, American artist Chuck Close (b. 1940) has concentrated on essentially one subject: the human face. This volume, the most comprehensive assessment of Close's work yet published, includes portraits of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, Lucas Samaras, and others. It accompanies a mid-career retrospective opening at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in February 1998. 178 illustrations, 113 in color.

Text by Ralph Rugoff, Kaja Silverman, Barry Schwabsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Martin Herbert.

A study which combines personal reminiscences with careful historical research, the myth of the 'good old days' is summarily dispensed with; Robert Roberts describes the period of his childhood, when the main affect of poverty in Edwardian Salford was degredation, and, despite great resources of human courage, few could escape such a prison.