In his works, Hopper poetically expressed the solitude of man confronted to the American way of life as it developed in the 1920s. Inspired by the movies and particularly by the various camera angles and attitudes of characters, his paintings expose the alienation of mass culture. Created using cold colours and inhabited by anonymous characters, Hopper’s paintings also symbolically reflect the Great Depression. Through a series of different reproductions (etchings, watercolours, and oil-on-canvas paintings), as well as thematic and artistic analysis, the author sheds new light on the enigmatic and tortured world of this outstanding figure.

The biography, entitled Mary Cassatt – A Woman’s Art, provides an insightful account of the life and career of Mary Cassatt . She was one of a select few women who managed to establish a presence in the male-dominated art world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cassatt, originally from the United States, spent most of her life in France, where she became a prominent member of the Impressionist movement alongside Degas and Monet. This book, which features approximately 100 reproductions of her works, demonstrates how Mary Cassatt , with her distinctive female perspective, transcended the prevailing artistic …

For Claude Monet the designation ‘impressionist’ always remained a source of pride. In spite of all the things critics have written about his work, Monet continued to be a true impressionist to the end of his very long life. He was so by deep conviction, and for his Impressionism he may have sacrificed many other opportunities that his enormous talent held out to him. Monet did not paint classical compositions with figures, and he did not become a portraitist, although his professional training included those skills. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved …

Housed in the Hermitage Museum along with other institutes, libraries, and museums in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union are some of the most magnif icent treasures of Persian Art. For the most part, many of these works have been lost, but have been catalogued and published here for the first time with an unsurpassed selection of colour plates. In a comprehensive introduction, Vladimir Loukonine, Director of the Oriental Art section of the Hermitage Museum, and his colleague Anatoli Ivanov have broadly documented the major developments of Persian Art: from the first signs of civilisation on the …

Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He moulded his draughtsmanship, bent it, twisted it, and stretched it to the extreme limits of possibility. There are not any landscapes in Michelangelo's painting. All the emotions, all the passions, all the thoughts of humanity were personified in his eyes in the naked bodies of men and women. He rarely conceived his human forms in attitudes of immobility or repose. Michelangelo became a painter so that he could express …

Taiwan's specific situation in Asia is the source of its thorn past. Situated in the South East of China, Taiwan was at the crossroads of many maritime routes and squeezed between its neighbors, China and Japan. After centuries of foreign occupation, Taiwan has a unique history. Taiwan, Art and Civilization sheds light on Taiwan's beautiful scenery as well as its colorful history in the form of a true initiatory trip. Through magnificent illustrations, Taiwan reveals its secret beauty, its fauna and flora intertwined with its unique architecture. Home of the traditional and the modern, the gorgeous island is also the …

In the 1920s, Berlin, once perceived as a puritan city, became the capital of lust and the debauchery of morals. It was in this capricious town that an exceptional museum dedicated entirely to eroticism opened its doors. Abandoning all aspects of voyeurism, the Erotic Museum in Berlin is a magical place in which the imagination of man and the most refined works of art interact. This remarkable book is comprised of more than 350 rare illustrations, and accompanied by a major study written by, history professor, HansJürgen Döpp. It covers various aspects of erotica throughout time and continents.

Cézanne was perhaps the most complex artist of the 19th century. One of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, his works and ideas were crucial to the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne’s ambition, in his own words, was "to make out of Impressionism something as solid and durable as the paintings of the museums". He aimed to achieve the monumental in a modern language of glowing, vibrating tones. Cézanne wanted to retain the natural colour of an object and to harmonize it with the various influences of light and shade trying to destroy it; …

The strict prohibition on the representation of the human form has channeled artistic creation into architecture and architectural decoration. This book is a magical tour through Central Asia - Khirgizia, Tadjikistan, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan - a cradle of Ancient civilisations and are pository of the Oriental arts inspired by Buddhism and Islam. There are magnificent, full-colour photographs of the abandoned cities of Mervand Urgench, Khiva, the capital of the Kharezm, with its mausoleum of Sheikh Seid Allahuddin,and, the Golden Road to Samarkand, the Blue City, a center of civilisation for 2,500 years.

Ethnographic Insights and Rare Photographs from the Early 20th Century. This remarkable volume brings together rare archival photographs from the Ethnological Museum of St. Petersburg and a deeply researched ethnographic narrative that illuminates the spiritual worlds of Siberian and Korean shamans. Captured in the early 1900s, these images bear witness to a time when ritual, myth, and everyday life were inseparable. Through detailed commentary and vivid illustration, the book explores shamanic cosmologies, ceremonial practices, healing rites, and the social roles of shamans within their communities. From the trance dances of Korean mudang to the animistic traditions of Siberian kam, each …

For more than a millennium, from its creation in 330 CE until its fall in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was a cradle of artistic effervescence that is only beginning to be rediscovered. Endowed with the rich heritage of Roman, Eastern, and Christian cultures, Byzantine artists developed an architectural and pictorial tradition, marked by symbolism, whose influence extended far beyond the borders of the Empire. Today, Italy, North Africa, and the Near East preserve the vestiges of this sophisticated artistic tradition, with all of its mystical and luminous beauty. The magnificence of the palaces, churches, paintings, enamels, ceramics, and mosaics from …