Featuring thirty-five outstanding abstract paintings made between 1950 and 1975 from the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, this fascinating book casts a new glance at a renowned period in the history of art, including works by Ly...

This striking, oversized book, designed to evoke encyclopaedias, is a highly creative amalgam of collage with a political bent and poetry. From 2011 to 2012, American artist Mel Chin (b. 1951) extracted all of the images from a twenty-five-volume set...

In October 1962, a set of blurred surveillance photographs brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The pictures themselves demonstrated little, and explanatory captions were necessary to identify the dang...

The concept of an encyclopedic museum was born of the Enlightenment, a manifestation of society's growing belief that the spread of knowledge and the promotion of intellectual inquiry were crucial to human development and the future of a rational soc...

On October 27, 1960, art critic Pierre Restany named a group of Paris-based artists the "Nouveaux Realistes" (New Realists) in a founding declaration that stated, "The New Realists recognize their collective singularity. New Realism = new perceptual...

The contemporary art world has been challenged and invigorated by outsider art – works by self-taught practitioners who, by definition, have little to do with mainstream art production, but are nonetheless actively engaged with the visual culture of...

The term "Neo-Dada" surfaced in New York in the late 1950s and was used to characterize young artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns whose art appeared at odds with the serious emotional and painterly interests of the then-dominant movemen...

Sun Ra (1914-1993) – self-proclaimed visionary extraterrestrial of the "Angel Race", prophetic jazz band leader and composer, and lyrical proponent of Afro-futurism – was one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century music. Though many of...

The great Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) exhibited a lifelong fascination – some might say "obsession" – with the work and personality of French artist Edgar Degas (1834-1917). In this groundbreaking study, noted Degas scholar...

This handsome book examines the remarkable new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago, designed by Renzo Piano and scheduled to open in May 2009. This expansion to The Art Institute of Chicago, already one of the largest museums in the country, wil...