Exploring what motivates artists to paint or photograph themselves, the author selects over 100 self-portraits from the National Portrait Gallery to examine the style, techniques and personalities of the sitters, including William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffmann, and more.

Since the late 1960s, photographer Ken Ohara has concentrated his efforts on expanding the limited conventions for the human portrait. At the age of twenty, Ohara moved from Tokyo to New York in 1962. Eight years later he published his extraordinary first book ONE, which consisted of a series of uniformly tight close-ups of a multitude of diverse faces that he photographed on the streets of New York. A portion of this project was first exhibited at MoMA in 1974 in New York. Over the next thirty years, Ohara has continued his portrait studies, all the while exploring a variety of means to alter the interaction between photographer, subject, and the resulting portrait image. This retrospective book and exhibition considers for the first time Ohara's seven major projects that systematically explore a variety of elements that shape and reshape the possibilities of photographic portraiture. Ohara's series present striking results from his different approaches to defining the character of the portrait transaction - ranging from radical close-ups of hundreds of anonymous faces, to one extended self-portrait comprised of the photographer's self-exposure made every minute for a period of 24 hours, to journals composed systematically of one view looking outward and a second view including the photographer's image for each day of a year that the photographer compiled in the compressed format of the leporello or folded book. Also included in this retrospective are a collaborative series of photographs made by others for Ohara, and a more recent series of 100 portraits in which each "sitting" was deliberately designed to register the subject's dynamic contribution by lasting an hour. As photographic historian and guest curator Sally Stein proposes, in its rigorously varied breadth the work of Ken Ohara not only offers one of the most sustained examinations of space and time in photographic portraiture but also provokes a rethinking of the conventional limits of photographic depiction. Co-published with Museum Folkwang, Essen.

“Seymour Slive, who should be considered the dean of scholars of 17th-century Dutch art, brings a lifetime of study and erudition to Rembrandt Drawings. . . . You would have to go a long way to find a better guide than Mr. Slive.”—Wall Street Journal Written by renowned Rembrandt scholar Seymour Slive, this gorgeous volume explores the artist’s extraordinary achievements as a draftsman by examining more than 150 of his drawings. Reproduced in color, these works are accompanied by etchings and paintings by Rembrandt and others, including Leonardo and Raphael. Unlike other publications of Rembrandt’s drawings, here they are arranged thematically, which makes his genius abundantly clear. Individual chapters focus on self-portraits, portraits of family members and friends, the lives of women and children, nudes, copies, model and study sheets, animals, landscapes and buildings, religious and mythological subjects, historical subjects, and genre scenes. Slive discusses possible doubtful attributions, which account for the considerable reduction from earlier times in the number of drawings now ascribed to the master.

'The mirror, above all - the mirror is our teacher', wrote Leonardo da Vinci. Portraits are an endless source of fascination, responding as they do to the basic human impulse to scrutinize a face and strive to peer into the person behind it. Self-portraits have the added fascination that comes from looking into the mirror and trying to study one's own face and the elusive self lurking behind its surface. This striking and sensitive compilation presents an uninterrupted sequence of 500 self-portraits, in chronological order, all the way from ancient Egypt to the late twentieth century and including painting, drawing, sculpture and photography. The challenge of interpreting and re-creating their own likenesses has proven irresistible to artists throughout the ages. Included here are powerfully evocative works by many of the world's greatest painters and sculptors, from Dürer and Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol. Each image is both a work of art and a rigorous exploration in psychology and self-perception: a concept brought to life even by the book's mirrored jacket, on whose surface the reader's own face becomes the 501st self-portrait. Presented without commentary, these works speak for themselves: a compelling collection for every student of art and human nature. The illuminating introduction is by the renowned painter and writer Julian Bell.

The first major examination of Anthony van Dyck's work as a portraitist and an essential resource on this aspect of his illustrious career This landmark volume is a comprehensive survey of the portrait drawings, paintings, and prints of Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most celebrated portraitists of all time. His supremely elegant style and ability to convey a sense of a sitter's inner life made him a favored portraitist among high-ranking figures and royalty across Europe, as well as among his fellow artists and art enthusiasts. Showcasing the full range of Van Dyck's fascinating international career with more than 100 works, this catalogue celebrates the artist's versatility, inventiveness, and influential approach to portraiture. Works include preparatory drawings and oil sketches that shed light on Van Dyck's working process, prints that allowed his work to reach a wider audience, and grand painted portraits. Some of the masterpieces are drawn from the exceptional holdings of The Frick Collection, while other works are presented here for the first time. Also included are drawings by some of Van Dyck's contemporaries--including his teacher Peter Paul Rubens--that illuminate the lineage of his working method. With insightful contributions by a team of international scholars, this unparalleled study of Van Dyck offers a compelling case for the distinctiveness and importance of the artist's work.

Deadly Seven is a Psychological Thriller and Gothic screenplay based on a psychologist's seven clients, who each represent a deadly sin. As Amanda Burke, the psychologist, begins to lack control over guiding her clients' thoughts and actions, she allows their obsessions to take over their life and lead them to ultimate chaos and destruction.

"Seven Studies for a Self Portrait," Jee Leong Koh's third book of poems, subjects the self to an increasingly complex series of personal investments and investigations. Ever-evolving, ever-improvisatory, the self appears first as a suite of seven ekphrastic poems, then as free verse profiles, riddles, sonnet sequences, and finally a divan of forty-nine ghazals. The discovery the book makes at the end is that the self sees itself best when it is not by itself. Contents: "Seven Studies for a Self Portrait," "Profiles," "I Am My Names," "What We Call Vegetables," "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet," "Bull Eclogues" and "A Lover's Recourse."

In this elegant new study Galen Johnson retrieves the concept of the beautiful through the framework of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful. In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.