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100 books match the query 'Monographs' and 8 start with g

cover of George Sherwood: Wind, Waves, and Light

George Sherwood

Wind, Waves, and Light

George Sherwood

The Artist Book Foundation, 2024

Intricate and innovative, George Sherwood's kinetic sculptures invite us to observe, experience, contemplate and engage more fully in the natural world around us.

American sculptor George Sherwood, with degrees in both art and engineering, explores aesthetic systems of space and time, as well as the dynamic interplay of objects in motion. Sherwood’s kinetic sculptures invite us to observe, experience, contemplate and engage more fully in the natural world around us. His works are often made of stainless steel, a reflective material that serves to integrate the works into the unique and often transient light of their environments. The choreography of each piece is governed by a set of basic movements, facilitated by an arrangement of aerodynamic surfaces connected by rotational points.

The Artist Book Foundation is pleased to present George Sherwood: Wind, Waves, and Light, the first monograph on this award-winning artist’s lustrous, subtly transformative works. Featuring 100 sculptures from Sherwood’s early whimsical explorations to his monumental commissions that have graced private and public gardens, city sites, and exhibition spaces around the world, readers will witness how changing winds, shades of light, times of day, precipitation, and the seasons’ changing colors alter the sculptures, animate their surroundings, and ignite the imagination.

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cover of Gerard de Lairesse and his Painted Heavens: Iconography, Style and Technique in the Art of Ceiling Painting

Gerard de Lairesse and his Painted Heavens

Iconography, Style and Technique in the Art of Ceiling Painting

Margriet van Eikema Hommes

Amsterdam University Press, 2026

In 1672, when the Dutch Republic was under simultaneous attack by four foreign armies, Gerard de Lairesse created a magnificent three-part ceiling painting for one of the main protagonists of this Disaster Year—the powerful former burgomaster of Amsterdam, Andries de Graeff. Technical examination has revealed that Lairesse repeatedly altered his composition and in no fewer than four successive stages, he changed, removed or added figures and objects.
In this book, Margriet van Eikema Hommes, in search of an explanation for this ceiling painting’s intriguing origins, investigates its meaning and purpose. The painter and his patron prove to have been jointly responsible for the iconography, which they repeatedly updated to reflect military and political events in the Disaster Year and the dramatic twists of fate in De Graeff’s own life.
This beautifully illustrated book not only situates the work within its cultural and historical context but also offers an in-depth examination of Lairesse’s painting technique and the way he meticulously designed his ceiling pieces in close dialogue with the architecture of the room.
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cover of Gerard de Lairesse and his Painted Heavens: Iconography, Style and Technique in the Art of Ceiling Painting

Gerard de Lairesse and his Painted Heavens

Iconography, Style and Technique in the Art of Ceiling Painting

Lynne Richards

Amsterdam University Press, 2027

In 1672, when the Dutch Republic was under simultaneous attack by four foreign armies, Gerard de Lairesse created a magnificent three-part ceiling painting for one of the main protagonists of this Disaster Year—the powerful former burgomaster of Amsterdam, Andries de Graeff. Technical examination has revealed that Lairesse repeatedly altered his composition and in no fewer than four successive stages, he changed, removed or added figures and objects.
In this book, Margriet van Eikema Hommes, in search of an explanation for this ceiling painting’s intriguing origins, investigates its meaning and purpose. The painter and his patron prove to have been jointly responsible for the iconography, which they repeatedly updated to reflect military and political events in the Disaster Year and the dramatic twists of fate in De Graeff’s own life.
This beautifully illustrated book not only situates the work within its cultural and historical context but also offers an in-depth examination of Lairesse’s painting technique and the way he meticulously designed his ceiling pieces in close dialogue with the architecture of the room.
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cover of Giacomo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye

Giacomo Ceruti

A Compassionate Eye

Davide Gasparotto

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023

A thoughtful look at representations of people experiencing poverty in early modern Europe.
 
The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low-income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar).
 
Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.
 
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from July 18 to October 29, 2023.
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cover of Glassworks: The Art of Frederick Birkhill

Glassworks

The Art of Frederick Birkhill

Frederick Birkhill

The Artist Book Foundation, 2020

Glass as an art form has an ancient tradition; the archaeological record suggests that artisans in Egypt and Mesopotamia were fabricating glass vessels and ornaments during the fourth millennium BCE. Its durable nature, range of colors, malleability, and most of all, its optical transparency are qualities that have made glass a premiere art medium. Over a lifetime, Frederick Birkhill (1951–2023) has explored the unique qualities of glass and the numerous techniques and intricacies of working with it. The result of these decades of study is a body of work that is extraordinary in scope, technical expertise, and sheer virtuosity. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to present a new monograph honoring this gifted artist: Glassworks: The Art of Frederick Birkhill.

From his time in England at Burleighfield House, the studio of stained-glass artist Patrick Reyntiens, to his unprecedented visit to Lauscha, the village in the former East Germany famous for both its art and scientific glass production, and his subsequent career as an explorer, teacher, and master of the glass arts, Birkhill has devoted himself to furthering the appreciation of the medium and sharing his vast experience with colleagues, collectors, and students.

Complementing the scholarly contributions by authors with significant backgrounds in the glass arts, the book features in its extensive plate section the lavish photography of Henry Leutwyler, which offers readers an opportunity to examine the complex details and artistic mastery of Birkhill's oeuvre. In addition, the monograph offers a glossary of glass-art terms, a detailed chronology of the artist's life, his extensive exhibition history, and a list of the numerous awards he has received. For those who are passionate about the glass arts, this monograph is a feast for the eyes.

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cover of Grant Castner: The Lost Archive

Grant Castner

The Lost Archive

Nicholas P. Ciotola

Rutgers University Press, 2026

In July 2019, staff of the New Jersey State Museum visited a cramped and dusty storage locker in Hunterdon County. Inside was a treasure trove of more than one thousand glass plate negatives. Each negative preserved an image of New Jersey at the turn of the 20th century. They once belonged to a Trenton resident who had used the plates as tools for his chosen art form. His name was Grant Castner. His art was photography.
 
Castner’s glass plate negatives are a visual record of New Jersey’s social and cultural history. His many human subjects are rich and poor, young and old, Black and white. They are at work, at play, at home, and in the community. Castner also documented social change brought about by electricity, engineering, education, industry, and transportation. He captured the excitement of public amusements such as parades and fairs. He recorded the aftermath of floods, fires and other disasters. Castner also had a fondness for the outdoors. He used his camera to reflect on the beauty and tranquility that he found in the natural landscapes of New Jersey.
 
This book presents the collective work of Grant Castner, an amateur artist whose place in New Jersey history was, until now, completely unknown. His photographic negatives forever preserve pinpoint moments in the past. They are time machines to another era. Let this long lost archive transport you on a visual journey into a New Jersey of days gone by.
 
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cover of Grant Wood’s Secrets

Grant Wood’s Secrets

Sue Taylor

University of Delaware Press, 2011

Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong oedipal guilt into his art. Presenting Wood’s abortive autobiography “Return from Bohemia” for the first time ever, Sue Taylor integrates the artist’s own recollections into interpretations of his art. As Wood dressed in overalls and boasted about his beloved Midwest, he consciously engaged in regionalist strategies, performing a farmer masquerade of sorts. In doing so, he also posed as conventionally masculine, hiding his homosexuality from his rural community. Thus, he came to experience himself as a double man. This book conveys the very real threats under which Wood lived and pays tribute to his resourceful responses, which were often duplicitous and have baffled art historians who typically take them at face value.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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cover of Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men

Gustave Caillebotte

Painting Men

Scott Allan

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2024

This richly illustrated volume paints a complex portrait of Caillebotte, masculinity, and identity in late nineteenth-century France.

More than any other French Impressionist, painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894) observed and depicted the many men in his life, including his brothers and friends, employees, and the workers and bourgeois in his Parisian neighborhood. Male subjects feature prominently in some of his best-known works, such as The Floor Scrapers, Man at His Bath, Young Man at His Window, Boating Party, and Paris Street, Rainy Day. The originality of his paintings of men is fully explored for the first time in this catalogue, published to accompany a major international exhibition co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Musée d’Orsay, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alongside paintings, drawings, and photographs, as well as an appendix featuring maps and new biographical research that sheds light on Caillebotte’s social network, this volume includes historically grounded thematic essays by curators and leading scholars. By exploring the complex and varied facets of Caillebotte’s identity—as son, brother, soldier, bachelor, amateur, sportsman, and so on—these essays pose questions of identity, leaving space for ambiguous and fluid expressions of gender and masculinity—for both Caillebotte and the larger late nineteenth-century French world.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Musée d’Orsay from October 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025, J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from March 25 to May 25, 2025, and The Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.
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