Arts & Crafts Books and Resources

In Ai Weiwei's widely anticipated memoir, "one of the most important artists working in the world today" tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, the nation's most celebrated poet.

This volume reproduces more than 100 of Mark Rothko's paintings, prints and drawings, including many of his rectangle paintings. It features commentary on various formal aspects of Rothko's work, interviews with contemporary artists, and a chronology of his life."

Accompanying a highly anticipated exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this monumental publication is the most comprehensive volume on Willem de Kooning yet published. "

Bronze Winner for Photography in 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Georgia O'Keeffe remains an icon, continuing to inspire generations to break barriers and embrace the natural world in both art and life. Featuring sixty-four lush, full-color photographs, this stunning new work captures O'Keeffe as she neared her ninetieth birthday, showcasing her homes and companions at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú and the landscapes that inspired her. While O'Keeffe and her environs have been the subject of many photographers' work, only Varon was specifically chosen by O'Keeffe to photograph her work in color. This book is the first collection of photographs to portray O'Keeffe and her surroundings in color. Varon includes an insightful reflection on his experiences with O'Keeffe in which he brings the photographs to life in an intimate way. Cody Hartley, the director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, and Barbara Buhler Lynes, the foremost O'Keeffe scholar, provide further context to Varon's photographs.

Ansel Adams is one of America's most popular and enduring photographers, his work noted for its timeless celebration of the beauty of America's landscape. This book presents 97 examples of Adams' work, accompanied by Eric Peter Nash's text.

Throughout his tenure as a registry clerk with the Immigration Division of Ellis Island, Augustus F. Sherman systematically photographed more than 200 families, groups, and individuals while they were being held by customs for special investigations. This volume provides an essential revaluation of Sherman's striking portraits, which predate August Sander's cataloging efforts by several years. A historical document of unprecedented worth, "Augustus F. Sherman: Ellis Island Portraits" includes almost 100 portraits taken from 1905 through 1920. The subjects are frequently dressed in elaborate national costumes or folk dress, emphasizing the variety and richness of the cultural heritage that came together to form the United States. Romanian shepherds, German stowaways, Russian vegetarians, Greek priests and Ghanaian women in elaborately patterned dresses, are treated with equal gravitas. The resulting body of work presents a unique and powerful picture of the stream of immigrants who came through Ellis Island. In its time, the material contributed to the larger project of ethnographic categorization and typology typical of the early twentieth century, much as Edward S. Curtis's portraits romanticized the "last Indians" or John Thomson's "Street Life in London" identified and codified social class in the late 1800s. Though originally taken for his own personal study, Sherman's work appeared in the public eye as illustrations for publications with titles such as "Alien or American," and hung on the walls of the custom offices as cautionary or exemplary models of the new American species. In this book, Peter Mesenhöller, Research Associate with the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of Anthropology in Cologne, Germany, provides new critical context and analysis of this rich collection, but also addresses the individual images as powerful, engaging photographs created by a master portraitist. The publication is accompanied by a traveling exhibition that will open at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in the summer of 2005.

Leonardo's Last Supper, one of the most important works of the Renaissance if not all of Western art, was painted between 1494 and 1498 in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. From the moment that the prior at the monastery complained to Leonardo that the work was taking too long, the Last Supper has endured centuries of controversy, neglect, and difficulty. Leonardo, The Last Supper, translated from the Italian, is the definitive document of the recently completed project to reverse these centuries of decline by restoring the painting and preserving it in a manner that generations of conservators have failed to do. The technical problems with the Last Supper began as soon as Leonardo started to paint it. He jettisoned the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster, a method unsuited to Leonardo's slow and thorough execution, and created the work instead with an experimental technique that involved painting directly on the dry plaster. With this renegade method, Leonardo rendered one of the most enduring painting techniques volatile and unstable. Added to this initial complication have been centuries of pollution, tourists, candle smoke, and the ravages of age, not to mention food fights in the refectory staged by Napoleonic soldiers and Allied bombs in 1943. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Last Supper was in desperate need of a complete restoration. Pinin Brambilla Barcilon was chosen to head this twenty-year project, and Leonardo, The Last Supper is the official record of her remarkable effort. It first documents the cleaning and removal of the overpainting performed in the other attempts at restoration and then turns to Barcilon's meticulous additions in watercolor, which were based on Leonardo's preparatory drawings, early copies of the painting, and contemporary textual descriptions. This book presents full-scale reproductions of details from the fresco that clearly display and distinguish Leonardo's hand from that of the restorer. With nearly 400 sumptuous color reproductions, the most comprehensive technical documentation of the project by Barcilon, and an introductory essay by art historian and project codirector Pietro C. Marani that focuses on the history of the fresco, Leonardo, The Last Supper is an invaluable historic record, an extraordinarily handsome book, and an essential volume for anyone who appreciates the beauty, technical achievements, and fate of Renaissance painting.