In the years around 1960, a rapid process of deindustrialization profoundly changed New York City. At the same time, massive highway construction, urban housing renewal, and the growth of the financial sector altered the city's landscape. As the new...

"For Reasons of State" examines how our ability to function as a democracy is compromised by governmental secrecy. Looking at contemporary art, the book explores notions of institutional concealment through the work of such artists as the Bureau of I...

Throughout his life, Pablo Picasso had close friendships with writers and an abiding interest in the written word. This groundbreaking book, which draws on the collections of Yale University, traces the relationship that Picasso had with literature a...

Twenty-one-year-old Peter Heisterkamp began signing his colourful and playful abstract artworks "Palermo" in 1964, when peers noted his resemblance to the American gangster Frank "Blinky" Palermo. This handsome book, a historical and critical study o...

Although numerous books on the Cultural Revolution have been published, they do not analyze the profound shift in aesthetic values that occurred in China after the Communists took power. This fascinating book is the first to focus on artwork produced...

The art of portraiture reached a pinnacle of expressive achievement in early twentieth-century Paris. Liberated by the advent of photography, artists were able to reimagine the nature of human portrayal, producing kinds of portraits – Fauve, Cubist,...

From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation some ten years later, British artist Francis Bacon during one crucial decade created many of the most central and memorable ima...

This is the first publication to explore the role of mirrors, spinning, and "neurotic" architecture – a feeling of psychological breakdown – in the work of one of America's most important contemporary artists, Paul McCarthy (b. 1945). The book is pub...

NeoHooDoo', a phrase coined by the poet Ishmael Reed in 1970, celebrates the practice of rituals, folklore, and spirituality in the Americas beyond the scope of Christianity and organized religion. The endurance of these centuries-old traditions of m...

This compelling book looks at the work of three influential women artists and at the import of feminism in their practices. Painters Lee Lozano (1930-1999), Sylvia Plimack Mangold (b. 1938), and Joan Semmel (b. 1932) are each intensely private and, t...