The French Impressionist Pierre-Augustin Renoir created an immense sun-dappled world of beautiful women, attentive men, joyful babies, verdant foliage, and perfectly formed fruits and flowers. This enticing volume recaptures his world and views is from present-day social and aesthetic perspectives. It is illustrated with 140 full-page colorplates spanning Renoir's entire career. The colorplates are copiously supplemented by black-and-white documentary...

The circus is a dazzling world filled with acrobats and harlequins, tumblers and riders, monsters and celestial creatures. Now this engaging book sets that world in a new light, examining how painters, sculptors, and photographers from the eighteenth century to the present have used the circus as a springboard for their imaginative expression and have envisioned the clown as a metaphor for the modern artist. The book presents more than 175 works by...

"The Old Kingdom (about 2650 2150 B.C.E.) was the first golden age of Egyptian culture, a period that determined the form and character of Egyptian art for centuries to come. This volume, published to accompany a landmark exhibition organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Reunion des Musees Nationaux in Paris, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, brings together 115 Old Kingdom masterworks from museum collections throughout...

Annotation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso have long been seen as the twin giants of modern art, as polar opposites but also as complementary figures. Between them they are the originators of many of the most significant innovations of 20th-century painting and sculpture, but their relationship has rarely been explored in all of its closeness and complexity. In spite of their initial rivalry, the two masters eventually acknowledged one another as...