William Seitz was a creative witness to one of the most exciting artistic upheavals of our time. His analysis of American Abstract Expressionism is the unique testament of one who was there at the Cedar Bar and at The Club in the early 1950s, sharing the milieu of the painters about whom he writes-Gorky, de Kooning, Hofmann, Motherwell, Rothko, and Tobey. Seitz was finely tuned to their idiosyncratic development, able to document at first hand the influences entering their discourse, whether Suzuki or Empson, Klee or the French existentialists. Beyond this, the uncertainty and verbal confusion of the time, Seitz takes the reader directly to the works of art, probing not what the artists were saying, but what they were painting.

A painter himself, he could explore the passions and methods of Abstract Expressionism with the insight and technical precision of one who had labored in the studio. Seitz maintains a profound respect for the mysterious power of the individual talent, for the artist as an intellectual, and for painting as a form of knowledge. His work, confined to the "underground" of microfilm after it was completed in 1955, stands alone in conveying the anxiety, exhilaration, and richness of a movement racing ahead while its criteria were still being formed. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 paintings, many in full color, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America is a book that Motherwell describes in his foreword as "unsurpassed...in the literature of Abstract Expressionism, but also sui generis in the scholarship of Modernism."

The earthly empire of Byzantium dominated the political and religious history of Europe for over a thousand years. The Byzantines regarded their earthly empire as a reflection of God's empire in heaven, and this ideology was manifested in their politics, religion, and art. In this introduction to the history of Byzantium, from the fourth to the fourteenth century, Rowena Loverance draws on the British Museum's rich collections of spectacular Byzantine silver, ivories, jewelry, and icons, as well as pieces from the empire's Persian and Germanic neighbors. This revised edition, featuring a new introduction, is updated to include the most recent finds and interpretations.

A distinguished art historian examines a radical change in style that occurred around 1600, a change that turned the whole course of Italian painting—and, through its influence, the painting of other European countries as well—from the Mannerism of the late sixteenth century to the grand achievements of the Baroque. The principal authors of the change were three artists of North Italian origin: Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, and Ludovico Carracci. S. J. Freedberg defines the particular qualities of each artist’s work and traces the intellectual, visual, and technical evolution of their style.

Edward Lear, while probably best known as the author of The Owl and the Pussycat and the famous Nonsense Books, was by profession a draughtsman and painter. For over fifty years after 1836, from the age of twenty-four, he spent much of his life traveling or in residence abroad, producing thousands of sketches and drawings, some of which he later elaborated or used as studies for paintings. He is now belatedly becoming recognized as one of the best topographical draughtsmen of his day.

Philip Hofer has long been an admirer and collector of the works of Edward Lear. He here presents a selection of Lear's landscape drawings chosen from his own collection and from the more than four thousand in the Harvard collection, which is the most extensive in the world. Hofer, whose constant concern has been in large part responsible for the excellence of this collection, introduces the plates with a biographical sketch of Lear, an extensive treatment of his development as a landscape draughtsman, and an appraisal of his work. He then reviews the growing appreciation of Lear's drawings and the present status of Lear collections both here and abroad, and adds a brief selected bibliography.

Camille considers marginalia--in the cathedral, the court, the monastery--in direct and complex relation to the whole work. Ranging through the culture of the Middle Ages, he finds in the margins a distorted yet apt reflection of medieval conventions. It is here that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for parodying, modernizing, and questioning cultural authority without ever undermining it.

Coins are the one form of art to which every American is exposed, yet of art forms in the United States, coins have been the least respected and understood. This delightful volume, containing well over 400 illustrations, provides the first comprehensive aesthetic appreciation of the American series. Although frequently disparaged by the public, the series is unrivaled in aesthetic richness among modern coinages. It includes such masterpieces as the primitively beautiful coins of the struggling young republic, dignified Neoclassic designs which dominated the nineteenth century, and magnificent gold and silver commemorative medals designed by the leading sculptors of the early twentieth century.

The author traces the development of American coins through the 1960s, discussing their artistic merits, analyzing the influences of the popular arts upon their design, and tracing the inspirations of particular compositions and styles in the other arts, both European and American.