Femmes, Lust Unearthed, Matisse & Mondrian

Femmes

Femmes provides a comprehensive review of erotic photography over the last century. It is a celebration of the female nude; featuring female couples in images that have been selected to highlight the erotic charge when two women are photographed together, between the women themselves, between models and photographer, and between the photograph and the viewer.
Erotic photography is now at the forefront of fashion, and Femmes focuses on one of the most exciting and perennially popular subjects, bringing together a collection of the most significant work in this field.
This photographic celebration is wonderfully illustrated with 190 outstanding color, duotone, and black-and-white photographs, including those by Michael Childers, Bob Carlos Clarke, Wolfgang Eichler, Nan Goldin, James & James, Pierre et Gilles, Housk Randall, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Trevor Watson. Femmes: Masterpieces of Erotic Photography by Michelle Olley
ISBN: 1560253665

Lust Unearthed

On the heels of his bestselling and award-winning book Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall, Thomas Waugh offers more historic and erotically charged drawings, depicting aspects of gay male sexuality that were once hidden from public view.
The more than 200, never-before-published images in Lust Unearthed are from the private collection of Ambrose DuBek, a Hollywood costume and set designer (his work included George Cukor's 1939 film The Women) who died in 2002 at the age of 87, and whose estate included a wealth of erotic materials, including books, periodicals, prints, and films. DuBek was a passionate advocate and patron of the arts who felt that life and the body were to be celebrated; he had no patience for other people's attempts to make him feel guilty for his attractions and desires, nor any qualms about the different worlds in which he operated. The images from DuBek's collection published here are remarkably frank and explicit depictions of gay men "in action" created by numerous artists both famous and unknown, and produced during a time when even nude images of men were illegal, and thus rare. Lust Unearthed brings these images out of the boxes in which they were carefully kept and into the light of present-day, where expressions of gay male sexuality can be validated and indeed, celebrated.
Waugh's text is a remarkable history lesson that illuminates a once-furtive underground culture. Gay porn for the thinking man, Lust Unearthed will beguile and arouse.
Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics From the DuBek Collection by Thomas Waugh
ISBN: 1551521652

Playboy Photographs

Playboy celebrates its 50th anniversary with this lavish collection of the very best of the magazine's photography. More than 250 full-color photographs, chosen from the ten million images preserved in the Playboy archive, chronicle five decades of brilliant, life-affirming art. Playboy: 50 Years revisits the girl next door, the sex symbols, and the gods and goddesses who shaped our culture. It visually tracks the changing politics, fashions, and mores through the frenzied peak of the sexual revolution and beyond - from the almost nostalgic eroticism of the 50s bachelor, a martini his secret of seduction, to the highly charged images of modern sexuality. Celebrity models such as Raquel Welch and Cindy Crawford, along with interview subjects such as Muhammad Ali and Salvador Dali, and infamous bunnies such as Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson reveal all. Portfolios devoted to the bachelor pad, the perfect cocktail, fashion, and sports cars celebrate Playboy as the ultimate wish book. From the history-making red velvet shot of Marilyn Monroe, "posed with nothing on except the radio," to the highly charged images of such masters as Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton, this book is a breath-taking photographic tour de force. The definitive gift of the season, Playboy: 50 Years is also the only book being published in the fall to coincide with the launch of the magazine's 50th anniversary.
Playboy: 50 Years: The Photographs by Jim Peterson
ISBN: 0811839788

Turner: In The Tate Collection by David Blayney Brown

J.M.W. Turner is one of the greatest artists the world has ever known. His output was prolific and astonishingly varied. Focusing on 125 paintings and drawings from the Tate, which owns the world's largest collection of Turner's work, this lavishly illustrated book provides a fresh and lively survey of his genius. Familiar masterpieces are reproduced along with less well-known prints and sheets from sketchbooks; subject matter ranges from landscapes and natural subjects to ancient and modern history; marine subjects; literary illustration; and images of contemporary life.
In his essay, David Blayney Brown reveals the paradoxes and contrasts that abound in Turner's life and work: as a painter he looked both backward and forward, bridging the gap between the 18th century and modernism, compelled constantly to reexamine and reinvent his own art, with astonishing success.
Turner:In The Tate Collection by David Blayney Brown
Tate, 2002, ISBN: 0810962535

Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings

Just before World War II, Piet Mondrian fled from Paris to London and later to New York, where he lived until his death in 1944. Upon his arrival in Manhattan, the artist began reworking seventeen of the paintings he brought with him, many of which had already been finished and exhibited. He changed lines and added blocks and bars of color to give them what he called more boogie-woogie. By inscribing these so-called transatlantic works with a double date, for example "38 / 42," Mondrian emphasized the exceptional history of the series.
In this groundbreaking book, Harry Cooper, an authority on Piet Mondrian's art, and Ron Spronk, an expert on the technical examination of paintings, investigate the artist's unusual working method during this period. Their collaboration offers an intimate look into the studio of a great modern artist and establishes a new model for the integration of art history, theory, and technical analysis.
The book begins with two essays by Cooper that discuss the critical reception of Mondrian's work, the place of the transatlantic paintings in the evolution of his art, and the particular significance of their dates and titles. Spronk's essay presents technical discoveries based on the authors' original research, reproducing and interpreting many new X-radiographs, photomicrographs, and photographs taken under ultraviolet and infrared light.
The catalogue features such major paintings as Place de la Concorde (1938-43) from the Dallas Museum of Art and No. 12 (1936-42) from the National Gallery of Canada. Each work is discussed in a comprehensive entry accompanied by a dazzling array of illustrations that take the reader under the surface of the painting to reveal ts genesis. This unique approach sheds light on a masterful group of paintings and suggests new avenues for consideration of Mondrian's work as a whole.

Piet Mondrian
Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings by Harry Cooper and Ron Spronk
Yale University Press, 2001

Matisse: The Unknown

Henri Matisse is one of the masters of twentieth-century art and a household word to millions of people who find joy and meaning in his light-filled, colorful images - yet, despite all the books devoted to his work, the man himself has remained a mystery. Now, in the hands of the superb biographer Hilary Spurling, the unknown Matisse becomes visible at last. Matisse was born into a family of shopkeepers in 1869, in a gloomy textile town in the north of France. His environment was brightened only by the sumptuous fabrics produced by the local weavers - magnificent brocades and silks that offered Matisse his first vision of light and color, and which later became a familiar motif in his paintings. He did not find his artistic vocation until after leaving school, when he struggled for years with his father, who wanted him to take over the family seed-store. Escaping to Paris, where he was scorned by the French art establishment, Matisse lived for fifteen years in great poverty - an ordeal he shared with other young artists and with Camille Joblaud, the mother of his daughter, Marguerite.
But Matisse never gave up. Painting by painting, he struggled toward the revelation that beckoned to him, learning about color, light, and form from such mentors as Signac, Pissarro, and the Australian painter John Peter Russell, who ruled his own art colony on an island off the coast of Brittany. In 1898, after a dramatic parting from Joblaud, Matisse met and married Amélie Parayre, who became his staunchest ally. She and their two sons, Jean and Pierre, formed with Marguerite his indispensable intimate circle.
From the first day of his wedding trip to Ajaccio in Corsica, Matisse realized that he had found his spiritual home: the south, with its heat, color, and clear light. For years he worked unceasingly toward the style by which we know him now. But in 1902, just as he was on the point of achieving his goals as a painter, he suddenly left Paris with his family for the hometown he detested, and returned to the somber, muted palette he had so recently discarded.
Why did this happen? Art historians have called this regression Matisse's "dark period," but none have ever guessed the reason for it. What Hilary Spurling has uncovered is nothing less than the involvement of Matisse's in-laws, the Parayres, in a monumental scandal which threatened to topple the banking system and government of France. The authorities, reeling from the divisive Dreyfus case, smoothed over the so-called Humbert Affair, and did it so well that the story of this twenty-year scam - and the humiliation and ruin its climax brought down on the unsuspecting Matisse and his family - have been erased from memory until now.
It took many months for Matisse to come to terms with this disgrace, and nearly as long to return to the bold course he had been pursuing before the interruption. What lay ahead were the summers in St-Tropez and Collioure; the outpouring of "Fauve" paintings; Matisse's experiments with sculpture; and the beginnings of acceptance by dealers and collectors, which, by 1908, put his life on a more secure footing.
Hilary Spurling's discovery of the Humbert Affair and its effects on Matisse's health and work is an extraordinary revelation, but it is only one aspect of her achievement. She enters into Matisse's struggle for expression and his tenacious progress from his northern origins to the life-giving light of the Mediterranean with rare sensitivity. She brings to her task an astonishing breadth of knowledge about his family, about fin-de-siècle Paris, the conventional Salon painters who shut their doors on him, his artistic comrades, his early patrons, and his incipient rivalry with Pablo Picasso.
In Hilary Spurling, Matisse has found a biographer with a detective's ability to unearth crucial facts, the narrative power of a novelist, and profound empathy for her subject.

Pablo Picasso
The Unknown Matisse : A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908 by Hilary Spurling
Knopf, 1998, ISBN: 0679434283