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The intertwining story of a noted anti-Nazi artist and the former rabbi who revived his reputation.

During World War II, the Polish-Jewish immigrant Arthur Szyk became America’s leading anti-Nazi artist. His art was so effective that Adolf Hitler reportedly put a bounty on his head while the US military declared him a “citizen-soldier” of the free world. Szyk steadfastly fought for the rescue of European Jewry during the Holocaust, creating artworks like De Profundis, which imagines Jesus sharing the suffering of countless lifeless Jews. His civil rights art challenged segregation and his illuminated Declaration of Independence resides in the Library of Congress. Szyk’s masterwork, an illustrated Passover Haggadah, is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful books ever produced by human hands.

Once world-famous, Arthur Szyk was all but forgotten after his death in 1951. Reviving the Artist Who Fought Hitler recounts Irvin Ungar's decades-long journey to restore Szyk to public consciousness, and become the principal collector, dealer, scholar, and promoter of Szyk’s art in the United States, Europe, and Israel. Richly illustrated and full of forgotten history, this memoir is an inspiring story of artistic passion and an invitation to commune with a heroic advocate for all humanity.

For many, the name Richard Segalman conjures up a vision of light-infused paintings of women gathered on a beach, gazing out the window of a New York City brownstone, or dressed in vcostumes from another era. But just as Edgar Degas, approaching his 60th year, surprised gallery goers with an exhibition not of ballerinas or race horses, but of highly atmospheric monotype landscapes, so too does Segalman surprise us with this exceptional collection of monotypes he began to produce in 1993, at nearly 60. "I reached a sort of plateau and needed a new direction," says the artist. "I came across a monotype... took a course... made one and I was hooked."

The significance of Segalman's shift into this medium is most powerfully conveyed through his arresting black-and-white prints that range from anonymous crowds on Coney Island beaches or New York City streets to a solitary figure in private contemplation. This monochromatic focus makes perfect sense: Segalman's first gallery appearance in New York—a sold-out show that gave him the courage to embrace the life of an artist—consisted entirely of black-and-white charcoal drawings, several stunning examples of which open this book.

Author Susan F. Castle's essay about the artist and his muses—the people, places, and things for which Richard Segalman has an abiding love—illuminates the exceptional work collected for this monograph. She combines excerpts from interviews with the artist and the three master printmakers with whom he has worked in Woodstock and Brooklyn, New York, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition, Anthony Kirk's insightful introudction provides an essential historical perspective on the artist and his printmaking process.

The first comprehensive study of the artist Robert Heinecken and his critical views on the culture of mass media

This is the first book-length study dedicated to the artist Robert Heinecken, whose innovative photographic practices sought to interrogate how mass media imagery facilitated the construction of individual and collective identities. Appropriating, rephotographing, and layering pictures culled from newspapers, advertisements, pornography, and television, Heinecken recombined and transformed the ubiquitous images of mass culture to encourage viewers to critically reflect on their sense of self. 

From the 1960s through the late 1990s, Heinecken’s controversial art continually challenged inherited ideas around consumerism, the facticity of reportage, and visual culture’s relationship to gender and identity politics. Embodying the evolution of contemporary art toward increasingly hybrid and conceptual approaches, his oeuvre includes examples of painting, sculpture, photomontage, performance, installation, time-based media, and artist’s books, all of which collectively exploit photography’s reproducibility to subvert society’s dominant ideologies and stereotypical modes of representation.

Author Matthew Biro presents an exhaustive look at Heinecken’s life and art, locating him within a lineage that encompasses the activities of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes and the postmodern strategies of the Pictures Generation artists. Assessing his career within the specific political and historical contexts from which he gleaned his material, and illustrated throughout with vibrant full-color reproductions of his art, this in-depth examination demonstrates Robert Heinecken’s significance as a key figure of twentieth-century art and an incisive commentator on modern life in America. 

A comprehensive look at a memorable period in the celebrated painter and printmaker's life and career, Robert Kipniss: Paintings and Poetry, 1950–1964 is the result of his many arduous months revisiting his more-than-half-a-century-ago writings and peoms that were stashed away and essentially forgotten. "Some of the poems are straightforward, some are infused with surreal irony, and some are angry," says Kipniss in his candid and honest preface. Thoughtful and articulate from conception to completion, his never-before-published poems are choreographed with his early paintings in this monograph's contemplation of these influential and foundational fourteen years. "When I stopped writing [in 1961] my vision was no longer divided between word-thinking and picture-thinking: these approaches had merged and in expressing myself I was more whole," reflects Kipniss in his retrospective musings.

This written and visual account of previously unpublished poems and critically acclaimed early paintings includes two astute and illustrative essays that further engage the reader in the evolution of the artist's prolific oeuvre. His prints, drawings, and paintings are remarkable for their eloquence and refinement, earning him international recognition for his expansive landscapes and small town vistas, as well as quiet interors and intimate still lifes.

Readers of this seminal volume are all the richer for catching a glimpse of an intensely personal segment of this accomplished artist's private history. In an unambiguous assessment, Kipniss elaborates, "The most significant insight that arose in this undertaking...came when I began to collate reproductions of my paintings of the 1950s. I could clearly see that my work in the two mediums were from very differing parts of my psyche, and that while they were both in themselves completely engaged, they were not in any way together."

Rod Penner infuses his photorealistic paintings of the American southwest with a cinematic quality in the first major monograph on this contemporary realist artist.

The abandoned and forgotten landscapes of rural southwestern towns are the favored subjects of Rod Penner's paintings. His deft use of contrasts in his images—despondency and hope, isolation and nostalgia—evokes memories of The Last Picture Show and elicits complex responses from viewers. "I'm interested in the look of things and the quality of being there," he says. "A moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass."

Penner's works are based on his photographs, digital video stills, and his experience of the rural landscapes of Texas and New Mexico. He depicts desolate, often deserted locations, the character of old houses and abandoned buildings, weather, and unique geography. His chosen scenes are infused with a cinematic quality that is the result of the exquisite light that he captures with his meticulous process. "The finished paintings should evoke contrasting responses of melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity," he says.

Penner's hyperrealistic technique meticulously records both the iconic imagery and the beauty in the ashes of these once-prosperous streets and nighborhoods that still endure. The incredible poignant scenes evoke a universalism, a collective experience seen through the lens of Americana. "You won't find any hidden or overt socio-political meaning in my work and at the same time I hope that by utilizing what I find in the American landscape I'm able to connect to viewers on a deeper psychological level."